Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Genome mapper Francis Collins, picked to head NIH, touted as evangelical. Is that fair to either side?

Collins, well known as the genome mapper who sat with President Clinton and others on the White House lawn in 2000, is the new head of National Institutes of Health.

As others have noted, he may be as well known for his recent book, The Language of God, part personal testimony and part explanation of how there need be no conflict between faith and science.

Some are skeptical. David Klinghoffer writes,

Do you ever notice how religious believers are always cited by the media as “devout” precisely when they are equivocating on basic Judeo-Christian moral and theological tenets? Dr. Francis Collins has some startling ideas on abortion. Startling, that is, from an Evangelical Christian who is Obama’s choice to head up the National Institutes of Health. He’s a favorite church speaker with Evangelical audiences, especially on how Darwinism poses no threat to their faith.

Klinghoffer offers some examples of his concerns:

– From an interview here at Beliefnet:

Q: [S]ometimes when parents learn that their child has Down Syndrome, they terminate the pregnancy. What is your opinion of that sort of scenario?

A: I’m troubled that the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena. That is not the reason I went into this field.

The reason I went into this field was to figure out how to treat illnesses, rather than try to stop such individuals from even being born. But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies. And we have decided as a society that that choice needs to be defended.

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Coffee’s here!!: The Wikipedians – “a bunch of egocentric introverts”?

Perish the thought. People who say such things had better roll their own party sandwiches, right?

Yet Asher Moses for The Age (July 8, 2009) advises,

a study by Israeli psychology researchers found “the prosocial behaviour apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives … which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness”.

The study, published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behaviour, gave personality tests to 69 active members of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit and 70 non-Wikipedians, finding the former “feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do offline”.

The researchers’ findings that Wikipedians were introverted, disagreeable and closed to new ideas is at odds with the notion that Wikipedia was built around community and knowledge sharing.

Feather, please. I can’t be expected to do my pro-gravity trick without the familiar prop.

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Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress

This should be interesting: Book Description In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. More…

Evolutionary psychology: Why it is finally on the way out, with last year’s magazines

Sharon Begley's critical look at evolutionary psychology in a recent edition of Newsweek is a must-read for anyone interested in the field. She is hardly the first, but the first to have so wide a non-professional audience for a rational, science-based evaluation of the topic. Many of us have regaled ourselves over the years with the distinct pop-culture sound - more lark than lab, more salon than science. Read More ›

A 30-year old letter to the editor of the Purdue Exponent

I was a visiting assistant professor (math/CS) at Purdue University in 1978-79, when I responded to a letter in the Purdue student newspaper (the Exponent), which compared those who doubt Darwin to “flat earthers”, as follows: “Last year I surveyed the literature on evolution in the biology library of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and found Olan Hyndman’s The Origin of Life and the Evolution of Living Things in which he calls the neo-Darwinian theory of random mutation and natural selection `the most irrational and illogical explanation of natural phenomenon extant’ and proposes an alternative theory; Rene Dubos’ The Torch of Life in which he says `[The neo-Darwinian theory’s] real strength is that however implausible it may appear to its opponents Read More ›

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?

The guy had successfully hidden his identity for about five years, while posting all kinds of sexually charged abuse to the Internet about many people, including me. But now we know.

But Wendy Sullivan, the Girl on the Right, has officially found out who the mysterious Canadian Cynic is. Here is stuff he has said about me. He is Robert PJ Day. Small business owner. Computer genius. Well-read book nerd. Anti-creationist debater

A Linux genius, apparently. [Foul language warning re his posts and any reports on them. ]

Here is part of what Sullivan said, once she traced him:

Outing bloggers isn’t usually my thing. I don’t see a point to it. But when you repeatedly abuse and demean people because they do not march in lockstep with you, I’m sorry but you deserve it. I am not a cunt, Robert. Nor a douchebag. Neither is Kathy Shaidle, Kate, Connie Fournier, Sandy Crux, Suzanne Fortin or anyone else on the web you don’t like.

I am not above strong language and hyperbole, Robert, but I am not beneath you. You are not special. I do not dispute that you are extremely smart and well-versed in your subjects of choice. But referring to to those you feel superior to as “cunts”, “wankers”, “douchebags”, “assholes” and more doesn’t make you sound brilliant at all. It makes you sound sad and lonely. It also makes you seem very cowardly, because I know you would never call me a cunt to my face. You would never wander into downtown Toronto and meet with half the people you have insulted – on a one-to-one or at a party – and insult them the way you do behind your chosen alias.

Perhaps not. The thing I know from covering the intelligent design controversy is that a number of people like Cynic give themselves the right to pour obscene contempt and abuse at the public. Obviously, those people are frightened of something.

What would your mother say, Robert, if she knew that you referred to a woman older than she probably is as a douchebag? ( I assume that your mother is still with us. If not, I apologize, one orphan to the next. ) Is that how she raised you?

He had decided to raise the abuse level last night for me, presumably in response to being outed. The Centre for Inquiry is sponsoring it. Did those people really sit there and listen? Read More ›

Salvo! Great new articles and summaries online

Issue 9 of Salvo (Summer 2009) has come out, with many fine articles. The feature article is on the explosion of kids watching Internet porn.*

A number of interesting features on topics related to the intelligent design controversy:

Gimme that Spacetime Religion: Seeking Salvation in Science by Regis Nicoll, about the effort to transform Darwinism into a religion with all the trappings – except actual guilt for sin.

Wesley J. Smith, describing himself as a “Human Exceptionalist” talks about the effect that the growing practice of equating humans with animals and plants has on bioethics, pointing out, “If they really wanted to be reductionist, they could also say that because carrots are made out of carbon molecules, there is no distinction between carrots and humans either. You can’t get far enough ahead of these guys in terms of satire.”

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Author Glenn Schromm has questions for ID theorists

Glenn sent me this post, and I thought some of the commenters might want to tackle his questions. I can’t just now. On deadline:

Denyse,

I am writing you because I could not find a place for feedback or “Contact us” on the Uncommon Descent website.

https://uncommondescent.com/id-defined/

Under “ID Defined” I have two concerns.

One is that the definition says “best explained by an intelligent cause”. Shouldn’t this read “an intelligent cause or intelligent causes”? By presenting the word “cause” in the singular, we are taking the focus off the intelligent design we can observe, and we are speculating that all observable intelligent design has a single cause, such as a creator God. ID as a scientific theory should not assume that a single cause is responsible for every “certain feature” addressed in the definition. Also, even if you are saying that each given feature has an intelligent cause, that also seems to be too limiting of the possibility that a single feature could have more than one single intelligent cause.

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Russian Roulette and Pascal’s Wager

According to Allen McNeil the Gallup poll results for American scientists are: Young-Earth Creationist = 5% Guided Evolution = 40% “Naturalistic” Evolution = 55% For members of the National Academy of Sciences*, the results are: Young-Earth Creationist = 3% Guided Evolution = 14% “Naturalistic” Evolution = 83% *data from the Cornell Evolution Project, http://www.cornellevolutionproject.org So here’s how I read it.  One in six of the most accomplished living scientists believe in a living God responsible for the creation of mankind. Pascal compares the risks of belief and disbelief: 1) If I disbelieve in God and I’m wrong, I lose everything. 2) If I disbelieve in God and I’m right, I gain nothing. 3) If I believe in God and I’m Read More ›

Not Even Wrong

The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once criticized a scientific paper as so bad that it was “not even wrong.” It was so sloppy and ill conceived, thought Pauli, that to call it merely wrong would be to give it too much credit–it wasn’t even wrong. Today such a condemnation applies well to the theory of evolution which relies on religious convictions to prop up bad science. It seems that every argument for evolution wilts under scrutiny. Here is a classic example. Continue reading here.

“The Front-Loading Fiction”

Here’s a neat article on front-loading: The Front-loading Fiction Posted by Rob on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 5:49:41 PM SOURCE: The Procrustean — A Blog of Townhall.com In responding to an email about “front-loading” as a Deistic solution to the universe that does not require an interventionist (theist) God, I replied that I have some philosophical problems with the phrase “front-loading”. It is a concession to Deism that doesn’t have to be made. Trying to describe a “front-loaded algorithm” highlights the problem with the philosophical solution. Historically, the argument for front-loading came from Laplacian determinism based on a Newtonian or mechanical universe–if one could control all the initial conditions, then the outcome was predetermined. First quantum mechanics, and then chaos-theory Read More ›

Beginnings Of A Personal Conviction

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of  Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperCollins

In August of 2004, philosopher Stephen Meyer published an article in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington.  The article raised media interest and outrage because it was the first to “advance the theory of intelligent design” in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.  The editor Richard Sternberg lost his position as a result of the ensuing debacle.

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Ockham’s Razor is a Modern Myth

I realize this is slightly off-topic, but it is related to the spirit of Uncommon Descent. It turns out that Ockham’s Razor is nothing more than a modern myth, and this was proven by William Thornburn in a brilliant and devastating paper he published in Mind 27 (1918), pp345-353. Ockham’s Razor states that “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, which is often translated as “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”. In other words, do not invent more things to fit the facts than are needed. William of Ockham (c. 1288 – c. 1348) himself was a medieval logician, known as the “Singular and Invincible Doctor” (many medieval logicians had street names like this). He was very famous in his own Read More ›