April 2009

Sternberg needs to write a book debunking junk DNA. Shoddy Engineering or Intelligent Design? Case of the Mouse’s Eye By Richard Sternberg www.evolutionnews.org/2009/04/shoddy_engineering_or_intellig We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better Read More ›

This from the SPECTATOR. Melanie Phillips is also quite the favorite at RichardDawkins.net. ——————————————————————————————— Creating an Insult to Intelligence By Melanie Phillips Wednesday, 29th April 2009 www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips…insult-to-intelligence Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good Read More ›

I received this email from a colleague in London who used to have an office in the place where the Shard London Bridge (a massive skyscraper) is being built. His insight about design detection requiring a trained eye is good. His insight about Darwinists having purposely (by design?) trained their eyes not to see design is great. Indeed, if you can’t see design in biology … Hi Bill … Look at this http://www.shardlondonbridge.com. This will become the tallest building in the whole of Europe. It is being built in the place of a semi-tall building I was working in not more than 3 months ago. I have since moved close by to another office because of the building work. I Read More ›

Here is, I am told, a new ID blog in Portuguese . Paulo writes: I have been reading some Intelligent Design blogs, like Uncommon Descent, Telic Thoughts, etc, for a long time. I thought that portuguese speakers should have access to opinions and information about alternatives views to Darwinism too. So, in 2007, I created a blog named Design Inteligente . It is in portuguese. Sometimes I translate others views from english, sometimes I post my own views. Recently I have talked about the misinformation on portuguese TV about Darwinism, sometimes creationism is referred as a danger to science, and Intelligent Design is presented as a form of creationism or it is simply ignored. Well, good luck, Paulo. One problem Read More ›

Over at Strange Herring, Anthony Sacramone gives us an hilarious send up of the latest evolutionary idiocy: I knew it! Researchers, looking into obesity, discovered that fatty foods not only send feelings of fullness to the brain but they also trigger a process that consolidates long term memories. It believed that this is an evolutionary tool that enabled our distant ancestors to remember where rich sources of food were located. Now they hope to develop drugs which mimic the effect of fat rich foods in order to boost memory in those suffering from brain disorders or who need to cement facts in their brain. I believe every word of this. BECAUSE IT’S SCIENCE. And if science says a bacon doublecheeseburger Read More ›

In Clever Critters: 8 Best Non-Human Tool Users, by Brandon Keim (Wired Science, January 16, 2009), we are introduced to best known examples of animal tool use.
The article begins with the requisite Darwin worship, of course:

Much more likely remains to be found: until Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks, scientists had been reluctant to credit animals with such sophisticated behavior — perhaps because, as Charles Darwin noted, “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
Darwin himself was quite intrigued by animal tool use, suggesting that it allowed them to overcome biological shortcomings. In On the Origin of Species, he noted that elephants snap off tree branches to swat away flies; in honor of Darwin’s interest, elephants are the first on our list of animal tool use.

So that compares with, say, the Canadarm on the Space Shuttle?

Well, the sad reality is better recorded here: “African elephants face extinction by 2020, conservationists warn”.

If I die tonight, the most urgent thing I want to say is this: Putting animals on the same plane as humans not only disses humans but dooms animals. Read More ›

“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

This is a phrase a software engineer will use to jokingly confess his software has a defect.

When Sharon Moalem wrote the NY Times Bestseller, Survival of the Sickest: Why We Need Disease, he probably did not intend to make a joking confession of flaws in Darwin’s theory, but he succeed in doing so.

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I had meant to post this sooner, but had too much on my plate: YouTube Source

In a very thoughtful essay that deserves its own post, vjtorley writes:

As someone with a background in philosophy, I’d like to make a few brief comments on the issues raised [in the Materialist Poofery” post]:

Regarding reduction, emergence and supervenience: these philosophical terms have multiple definitions in the literature.

One place where I might suggest that people begin is Dr. Richard Cameron’s brilliant dissertation, Teleology In Aristotle And Contemporary Biology: An Account of The Nature Of Life – especially pages 254 to 279. I think Richard Cameron’s work will be congenial to contributors of all points of view, as he has something that will please nearly everyone here: he is both an avowed Aristotelian (and hence a believer in final causes) and a thoroughgoing Darwinist.
One point which Cameron makes is that belief in emergence is perfectly compatible with very strong varieties of reduction:

Again, however, emergentists need not fear and may positively endorse the search for this type of a reductive account of emergent novelties. They may affirm the existence of causal correlations between basal conditions and emergent properties strong enough to support the formulation of laws and theories that microcausally explain the emergence of emergent novelities. Nevertheless, there remains clear sense to the emergentist’s claim that having a well confirmed explanatory theory of how Xs give rise to Ys does not entail that Ys are ‘nothing over and above’ Xs. Ys may still constitute a genuine – and in a sense still to be defined an irreducible – addition to the ontology of the world conceived only in terms of the Xs (p. 269).

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A magazine I recommend to the kind readers of Uncommon Descent is Salvo.

Yes, I write for it, and here are some of my recent contributions that are available on line.

Livin’ on a Prayer

The “nothing but” approach to describing humans

The Truth Hurts:Following the Evidence to Career Oblivion

But many skilled writers serve Salvo, and it is worth your subscription dollar. It is one of the only theist-based magazines around with a serious commitment to science writing. In other words, you can get science writing free of materialist bias.

It’ll sound a bit different, but you’ll get used to that, and you will learn stuff that could be really valuable to you.

And, heck, you sure do learn some interesting things. Here’s a brief excerpt from Terrell Celmons’s Crosshairs department, about an individual, known to many readers here, PZ Meyers, a biology prof at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and – as Clemons tells it – “a virulent shock-blogger who despises religious believers.”

Most Recent Offense: Read More ›

Trillions are much in the news lately regarding the economy. Such large numbers also come up in the small probability arguments inherent in design inferences (small probabilities are reciprocals of large numbers). As a public service, I’m herewith presenting some visuals for dealing with large numbers: ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ———————————————————

Last evening I posted the following, and within a short period of time the Darwinbots descended upon it, challenging my expertise in two highly sophisticated areas of computational science, AI and FEA, fields in which I have the goods to demonstrate that I know what I am talking about. One commenter even asserted that the physics involved in an LS-DYNA simulation cannot be represented with mathematical precision. Yes they can. And it works.

At this point I decided that I have nothing further to offer. If some people cannot recognize that the information-processing systems encoded in biological systems defy naturalistic explanation and suggest a design inference, I cannot help them, and they are free to continue to pursue a phantom.

Farewell, and best wishes to all.

Gil
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From time to time we see materialists raising the “poof objection” against ID. The poof objection goes something like this: An ID theorist claims that a given organic system (the bacterial flagellum perhaps) is irreducibly complex or that it displays functional complex specified information. In a sneering and condescending tone the materialist dismisses the claim, saying something like “Your claim amounts to nothing more than ‘Poof! the designer did it.’” I have always thought the poof objection coming from a materialist is particularly ironic, because materialists have “poofery” built into their science at a very basic level. Of course, they don’t use the term “poof.” They use a functional synonym of poof – the word “emergent.” What do I mean? Read More ›

4. ID does not make scientifically fruitful predictions. This claim is simply false. To cite just one example, the non-functionality of “junk DNA” was predicted by Susumu Ohno (1972), Richard Dawkins (1976), Crick and Orgel (1980), Pagel and Johnstone (1992), and Ken Miller (1994), based on evolutionary presuppositions. In contrast, on teleological grounds, Michael Denton (1986, 1998), Michael Behe (1996), John West (1998), William Dembski (1998), Richard Hirsch (2000), and Jonathan Wells (2004) predicted that “junk DNA” would be found to be functional. The Intelligent Design predictions are being confirmed and the Darwinist predictions are being falsified. For instance, ENCODE’s June 2007 results show substantial functionality across the genome in such “junk DNA” regions, including pseudogenes. Thus, it is a Read More ›