Month: February 2009

Southern Methodist University is doing its share to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial. Look here and note especially the offering in late September: http://smu.edu/smunews/darwin/events.asp

ID often seems to be a perspective that is associated with science, philosophy, academics, and people who deal in ideas for a living. For its supporters it can sometimes feel like a lonely road, and for its opponents it can appear as an irritating, but minority view. But is it possible that ID is breaking Read More…

‘He Who Can Learn Things that are Difficult, and Not Easy for Man to Know, is Wise:’ An Address to the Students in MIT 10-250, Caltech 201 E. Bridge, and Similar Lecture Halls: Minds that are the Greatest Natural Resource in the World Edward H. Sisson papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1328666 January 15, 2009 Abstract: How human beings came Read More…

Christopher Booker, writing in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, highlights some of the abuse he received for questioning the validity of Darwin’s theory in an earlier article. Christopher Booker – Why do people think Darwinism is a perfect creation 14/02/09. He writes; “As an old hand at tangling with Darwinists, I was well aware that a Read More…

A criticism which neo-Darwinists have frequently made of Intelligent Design is that it is not a “scientific” theory. ID, they say, explains the bacterial flagellum by saying “God [sic] made it”. However, they complain, it doesn’t say when God made it, how God made it, what material substrate God was acting on when he made Read More…

Given enough time, inanimate matter — through the laws of chemistry and physics, and with enough random trials, filtered by natural selection which throws out stuff that doesn’t work — will self-organize into highly sophisticated information-processing machinery that produces the human mind. How could this ultimate truth not be obvious, except to those who have Read More…

A cartoon in an American paper, the New York Post, has brought fresh attention to the race problems in some sections of society. The cartoon shows a chimpanzee shot dead by police with a caption apparently referring to the new American President Obama – (edit: although later denied that Obama was the target).  Note from Read More…

Given enough time…

This Google Ocean image is 620 miles off the west coast of Africa near the Canary Islands. It is over 15,000 feet deep and the feature of interest is about 90 miles on a side or 8000 square miles. In another thread ID critics complain there is no rigorous definition or mathematical formula by which Read More…

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Or course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime Read More…

The Cambrian Explosion, what a commotion, for long-established theories on how things should occur. Sudden emergence, animal insurgence, novel parts and body plans, no ancestry we’re sure. Five fifty million years ago, a faunal troupe did truly show, what all the fossil experts know, “Biology’s Big Bang”. No intermediates came before, a true explosion to Read More…

Eugene V. Koonin, “Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics,” Nucleic Acids Research 2009, 1-24. The overall pattern of life’s history, he argues, may be a Forest, not a single Tree of Life [TOL]: Evolutionary genomics effectively demolished the straightforward concept of the TOL by revealing the dynamic, reticulated character of evolution where HGT, genome Read More…