Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

New UD FAQ Coming Soon!

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 But Weak Arguments Against Intelligent Design – is nearing completion. Watch for the final product to appear on this page soon. Here is an even more exciting part for our readers. We at UD are going to subject our FAQ to the crucible of public scrutiny and comment. You, dear reader, are going to have a chance to comment on, and suggest improvements to, every Read More ›

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 the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine. 

 

Desmond and Moore always wade very deep in the archives but also with an eye to what might attract today’s reader about their subject. Not surprisingly, then, this is a book that documents the link between Darwin’s more general doctrine of common descent and his belief that all humans descend from a common ancestor and hence are members of the same species. A lot of stress is placed on Darwin’s revulsion at the brutality of slavery that he saw while voyaging on the Beagle, and the fact that it was common among the natural historians of his day to believe in several species of ‘man’. The reader can easily get the impression that this was some kind of triumph of evidence over prejudice. However, this impression would be very misleading. 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 played by a protein known as Rad51, which is linked to breast cancer, in this complex and critical process.
. . . In 2006, the researchers recorded a portion of the bacterial DNA repair process, a system considerably less complex than its human counterpart.. . .

This filament composed of a fluorescently-labeled DNA molecule and the repair protein Rad51 grows progressively brighter and longer as more and more Rad51 molecules assemble onto the DNA.

Human DNA is under constant assault from harmful agents such as ultraviolet sunlight, tobacco smoke and a myriad of chemicals, both natural and man-made. Because damage can lead to cancer, cell death and mutations, an army of proteins and enzymes are mobilized into action whenever it occurs. 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 press. The argument is presented as a critical intellectual history, which, while clearly written from a committed ‘materialist’ standpoint, is quite nuanced. But from the standpoint of ID defenders, the book’s most interesting feature is that the authors gladly embrace ID’s demonised image of its opponents. So those who remain sceptical of ID rhetoric that connects Epicurus, Darwin, Marx and Freud as part of a vast ‘materialist’ conspiracy should be silenced by what transpires in these pages: Yes, such scary two-dimensional materialists do really seem to exist – and they write books like this.

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 to cosmology, would suffer directly if it became politically difficult for governments to fund fields that depend on such a basic a part of science as evolution. The cost would be economic as well as intellectual.

But Darwin is also worth defending because attacks on evolution symbolise a wider and more varied assault on policies based on evidence rather than prejudice. Some of this assault comes from the same religious forces as creationism – think, for example, of those ranged against embryonic stem cell research. Sheer ignorance plays a role too and so do the mass media.

As a matter of fact, human embryonic stem cell research did not turn out to be as necessary as its proponents claimed, and there are lots of good reasons for questioning the ridiculous hagiography of Darwin.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

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 work, I thought to myself, “(Self) This is perfect Darwinian logic!” Enjoy!

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. This is part of their summary: Our findings are consistent with a model of recombination-driven biased gene conversion. This leads to the provocative hypothesis that many of the genetic changes leading to human-specific characters may have been prompted by fixation of deleterious mutations. What the authors report is a non-random shifting within genes, and the introduction of “deleterious” mutations. Neither of these is consistent with 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 reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God 

There is no excuse for Christians to send hate mail to anyone, not least because Attenborough can milk it for all its worth and avoid drawing attention to the real hate campaign against those who reject the orthodox Darwin dogma – such as has been exposed in the Expelled film. Even those who suggest that children’s beliefs should be respected in the classroom find themselves on the sharp end of the Darwinists’ Doctor Martins, such as Michael Reiss who was booted out of his position from the Royal Society for this reason. 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 to be entirely one-sided.

I know from some friends of mine that there is an undercurrent of opposition brewing from OU supporters, alumni, and other Oklahoma residents. Below is the letter I am writing to OU’s President Boren, and I hope that some of you will do the same. Please don’t copy my letter directly – write your own – but feel free to be inspired 🙂

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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 especially of my favourite portion, “While We’re At It,” of which I am transcribing a bit for you below, a bit that is relevant to the intelligent design debate.

I first became aware of Neuhaus when he was a Lutheran pastor (he subsequently became a Catholic priest), because he was one of the first people ever to write against the “population bomb” hoax, in 1971 – when that very hoax was hot stuff in what we today call the legacy media.

Essentially, as Pamela Winnick has also pointed out, there was no population bomb. The rise of national government – which meant, among other things, the prohibition of local warfare, together with the worldwide spread of modern agriculture and medical techniques – simply meant that more people than ever before in history happen to be alive at the same time. This is an inevitable consequence of reducing child and young adult mortality. But inevitably then, birth rates begin to taper off. As Neuhaus recognized, there was unmistakable evidence that birth rates were already tapering off, even while editorialists were freaking out about the supposed “bomb.”

Anyway, without more ado, here are some of Neuhaus’s comments on Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s devoted German disciple: 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 does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed. Lest I be accused of quote mining you can find Gould discussing it in more detail in Gould’s book The Richness of Life, pages 263 and 264, found in its entirety on Google Books. So what did Texas mandate? The following is to be included in 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 short. And nice to know, for sanity’s sake.

In “On Second Thought … Scientists are supposed to change their minds when evidence undercuts their views. Dream on” (January 3, 2009), Newsweek’s Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, spills the beans (as if we hadn’t seen them spilled all over the floor a long time ago – but never mind):

The most fascinating backpedaling is by scientists who have long pushed
evolutionary psychology. This field holds that we all carry genes that led to reproductive success in the Stone Age, and that as a result men are genetically driven to be promiscuous and women to be coy, that men have a biological disposition to rape and to kill mates who cheat on them, and that every human behavior is “adaptive”—that is, helpful to reproduction. But as Harvard biologist Marc Hauser now concedes, evidence is “sorely missing” that language, morals and many other human behaviors exist because they help us mate and reproduce. And Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych’s most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field “may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over” 50,000 years ago, Pinker says. How has the view that reproduction is all, and that humans are just cavemen with better haircuts, hung on so long? “Even in science,” says neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, “a seductive story will sometimes … outpace the data.” And withstand it, too.

Well, it’s reassuring that some people are beginning to rethink this idiocy. As I have often pointed out, it’s all part of what we know that ain’t so. To the extent that anyone takes it seriously, it can do serious harm.

Look, let me be clear about this: There is stuff in brain science that really is so.

A blood clot could indeed kill or paralyse you. You could develop a tumour that is difficult to excise. Alzheimer is a late life illness you can fight off only by the most stringent measures, and even then you may lose the battle. But that is what’s true, and no one can deny it.

The evolutionary pyschologists’s “cave men with better haircuts” is just a time-waster in a world where serious neuroscience issues must be addressed.

Hat tip: Brains on Purpose.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog that supports The Spiritual Brain: 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 you should find it. It’s only about 45 minutes long, and it captures many of the points that I have been raising more discursively since I started blogging here. I should say that the first 4 minutes or so is introductory stuff, including a reference to Obama’s inauguration.