Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Disappointed with Shermer

From EXPELLED Dr Caroline Crocker. “Recently I attended a lecture by Michael Shermer at the UCSD Biological Science Symposium (4/2/09). His title was, “Why Darwin Matters,” but his topic was mostly religion. He started by defining science as “looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena” and said that his purpose was to “debunk the junk and expose sloppy thinking.” We were all subjected to an evening of slapstick comedy, cheap laughs, and the demolition of straw men. His characterization of ID was that the theory says, 1) If something looks designed, 2) We can’t think how it was designed naturally, 3) Therefore we assert that it was designed supernaturally. (God of the gaps.) Okay everyone, laugh away at the stupid ID Read More ›

A friend’s note about Niko Tinbergen and the herring gull chicks – who was gulled, exactly?

Recently, in the “stuff we know that just ain’t so” files, I referenced Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize for supposed discoveries about herring gull chicks – a discovery that turned to ashes. A friend writes to say:

I remember going to Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize party in the Oxford University Zoology Department many years ago. I believe he shared the prize with a couple of other guys – and it was the Nobel for Medicine, of all things.

Of course Tinbergen and the his co-laureates were all animal behaviorists, and there was an undercurrent at the party that found the committee’s decision rather strange to say the least. Also, I seem to remember being told at the party that his brother had got the Nobel for economics. However, I could never really understand what Niko Tinbergen had done to get the prize. Read More ›

‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ BBC TV Programme

 On 31 March, I gave one of the keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group in Durham. This meant that I could not watch the first airing of ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ on BBC2.  I recommend that you watch this show over the next couple of days, while it’s still available on-line at the BBC website. It may be the most sophisticated treatment of this general topic on television, though as you’ll see from my comments below I found it profoundly unsatisfying. The person who scripted and presents the programme is Conor Cunningham, an academic theologian, about whom more below. Even those who disagree with his take on things – as I do – should welcome what he has done here. The challenge is to do better. Read More ›

Michael Behe, Eric Anderson, David Chiu, Kirk Durston mentioned favorably in ID-sympathetic Peer-Reviewed Article

Congratulations to Michael Behe, Eric Anderson, David Chiu, Kirk Durston (members of ISCID). They were mentioned in the peer reviewed journal International Journal of Molecular Sciences. References were made to Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, “Irreducible Comlexity Reduced” in ISCID’s PCID by Eric Anderson, and peer-reviewed works by David Chiu and Kirk Durston.

Here is the paper: The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity

Great paper!

The cause and evolution of complexity are frequently addressed in the literature [10, 134-141]. How complexity relates to life has attracted innumerable papers [6, 142-148]. Systems Biology emphasizes the growing genomic and epigenetic complexity [149-151]. Attempts to deal with Behe’s “irreducible complexity” [152] are appearing more often in scientific literature [153-157].

The much vaunted Avida community is indirectly criticized:

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Pretending That Darwinism is Sophisticated (and Difficult-to-Understand) Science in Order to Deflect Challenges (or, Mickey Mouse Pretends to be a Scientist)

Mickey MouseIn DonaldM’s post (‘Analyze and Evaluate’ Are the New Code Words for ‘Creationism’) discussion ensued about high school students and challenges to orthodox evolutionary theory.

One of the ploys of Darwinists is to pretend (and especially to try to fool young students into thinking) that evolutionary theory is like real science (mathematics, chemistry, physics, or electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, software, or other engineering disciplines) — when it is not. It’s Mickey Mouse stuff pretending to be hard science, and is not difficult to understand and therefore not difficult to challenge.
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Evolution and intelligent design in Hong Kong

Nature 458, 571 (2 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/458571b; Published online 1 April 2009 Jerome H. L. Hui1 Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Michael Smith Building, Manchester M13 9PT, UK Email: jerome.hui@manchester.ac.uk Your News story ‘Hong Kong evolution curriculum row’ (Nature 457, 1067; 2009) reports a call by faculty members at Hong Kong University for a sentence to be removed from new guidelines for secondary-school biology education. At present, these state: “In addition to Darwin’s theory, students are encouraged to explore other explanations for evolution and the origins of life, to help illustrate the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge”. Read more…