In November 2008 I recruited three of UD’s most insightful and prolific commenters – StephenB, GPuccio and Kairosfocus – to craft a revised “Frequently Asked Questions” section for our homepage. I am very pleased to announce that after three months of intense effort by these gentlemen, the new FAQ – which is entitled “Frequently Raised Read More…
Month: January 2009
Saving Darwin’s Soul: Does His 21st Century Fate Rest on Fighting 19th Century Battles?
This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of Read More…
Human DNA repair process video – by chance?
More details of DNA repair have been revealed. See: Human DNA repair process recorded in action (Video) (PhysOrg.com) — A key phase in the repair process of damaged human DNA has been observed and visually recorded by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis. The recordings provide new information about the role Read More…
Just because Marxism has lost its sense of purpose, it doesn’t mean that ID must as well
A Book Review of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008). There are many interesting features of this book, authored by academic Marxists (or at least people who used to be Marxists) and published by a historically Marxist Read More…
Financial Times of London: If you must be wrong, why must you also be just plain stupid and out of date?
Here’s an amazingly silly editorial from the Financial Times of London, January 16, 2009 (yes, that pink newspaper), warning against people who question Darwin worship: Many scientists and liberal politicians regard the rising creationist tide as a side-show that they can safely ignore. They are wrong, for several reasons. Wide areas of research, from biology Read More…
Hansen’s former boss at NASA declares himself an AGW skeptic
The video below is U.S. Senator James Inhofe describing the letter he received from former NASA supervisor and senior atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon: embedded by Embedded Video For the EPW press release on this
Mathematically Defining Functional Information In Biology
Lecture by Kirk Durston, Biophysics PhD candidate, University of Guelph embedded by Embedded Video Click here to read the Szostak paper referred to in the video. HT to UD subscriber bornagain77 for the video and the link to the paper.
Missile Guidance Systems and Darwinian Logic
Since I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace research and development, and since one of my specialities is guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) software development for precision-guided airdrop systems, I thought the following might be of interest to UD readers. As I listened to the following explanation of how missile guidance systems Read More…
Is Evolution Biased?
PLoS Biology has an article out today entitled: “Hotspots of Biased Nucleotide Substitutions in Human Genes”. I’ve mentioned this ‘biased’ substitution pattern before. What the authors see, they tell us, is a definite W->S substitution pattern in human genes (Weak to Strong = A:T->C:G) against an overall pattern of S->W; for the entire human genome. Read More…
David Attenborough in the News
David Attenborough has a new series coming out for the Darwin celebrations on BBC 1 in the UK, and has been giving some interviews to the press. Today he claims that creationists have been sending hate mail to him for deny God. “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance” he complains. Attenborough Read More…
Controversy Brewing over the Darwin 2009 Project at the University of Oklahoma
This year, the University of Oklahoma is celebrating Darwin with the Darwin 2009 Project. It appears from the speaker list (at least for the names I am familiar with) that where this project touches on the mechanisms for evolution or the wider debate about its potential implications for other areas of life, this is going Read More…
Why do people so often only repent of Darwinism when they die?
I am really going to miss Richard John Neuhaus, who slipped away January 8 (1936-2008), quite unexpectedly, and is NOT an example of the problem I am commenting on here. I got my February First Things earlier this week, knowing it was the last installment I would ever read of his “The Public Square,” and Read More…
Texas Mandates Teaching “The Trade Secret of Paleontology”
Stephen J. Gould, perhaps the most famous paleontologist of the 20th century, wrote: The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches … in any local area, a species Read More…
Evolutionary psychology: So they really DON’T believe all that rot?
I’ve been trying for years, to get hold of some evidence that anyone at all who thinks Darwinian evolution plausible actually stops short of the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution – something so completely ridiculous that no one who takes it seriously can be considered a contributor to rational thought. Apparently, some do stop Read More…
“Darwin’s Original Sin” audio lecture now up
I have posted on my website an audio recording of the talk I gave this past Tuesday at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, kicking off their Darwin Year series. My talk was entitled ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge‘. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page Read More…