September 2009

It is interesting to see how evolutionists respond to failures of their theory. For all their talk of following the evidence and adjusting to new data, evolutionists find all kinds of ways to resist learning from their failures. Consider one of the major failures of evolution, its view of the very nature of biological change. Twentieth century evolutionary theory held that biological change is a rather simple process that is blind to the needs of the organism. As Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin confidant T. H. Huxley, put it, mutations “occur without reference to their possible consequences or biological uses.”   Read more

Is this politically correct? Hmmm…

Karl Giberson has responded in a post at Beliefnet to Dr. Dembski’s previous post here at UD. The post that Dr. Dembski wrote was in response to another Beliefnet post written by Darrel Falk. What is left out of this triangle is that I had also posted a response to Darrel Falk’s post right after Dr. Dembski’s post. But Karl Giberson seems to have missed my post, because not only am I not mentioned in his reply, his reply has already been directly refuted by my post, and I would assume that Karl Giberson wouldn’t have written his post if only he had read mine. He wrote:

The key point here, that Dembski claims to miss, is that the gift of creativity that God bestowed on the creation is theologically analogous to the gift of freedom God bestowed on us. Both we and the creation have freedom…In exactly the same way, less the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine, God is “off the hook.” Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy its autonomy, such things occur. Likewise, unless God coercively micromanages human decision making, we will often abuse our freedom.

In my post I wrote:

Read More ›

I was raised an atheist, and was very devout as a kid. I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a scientist, “I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, and that all the laws of physics were fine-tuned to make life possible. Wouldn’t this require design and purpose?” Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Only mindless, uneducated religious fanatics ask that question. It was all an accident. Stop asking stupid questions.” But I wasn’t mindless, uneducated, or a religious fanatic. I was an atheist! A light went off, and I said, “Materialism doesn’t make sense. Design and purpose in the cosmos makes Read More ›

Author Dan Brown is interviewed at Parade, and comments on his loss of faith as a kid: I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, “I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and Earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?” Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Nice boys don’t ask that question.” A light went off, and I said, “The Bible doesn’t make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.” And Read More ›

Computers are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and those improvements have been mainly due to better hardware. Future improvements, however, may well rely increasingly on better architecture and software. One reason why this seems likely is that the human brain, with its very different architecture, dramatically out performs computers in performing various tasks (such as perceiving an object in a complex visual scene). If computers are to match the brain’s performance, they likely will need to exploit features of the brain’s design.   Read more

Stuart Kauffman, a big name in complexity theory, is leaving the University of Calgary for the University of Vermont . He used to be at the Santa Fe Institute.

I’m not clear on what he actually did at the University of Calgary, Canada, that attracted much attention but you can read more about him at Edge.

He wrote a book called Reinventing the Sacred, but he could have written it in Death Valley or Alaska. I am told it is the usual science-religion Templeton style book.

The press release informs me that Kauffman is ”one of the world’s most eminent scientists” and that the MacArthur foundation has officially labelled him a “genius,” stuff I could never have imagined from reading his first book, At Home in the Universe. But then I had no idea that Richard Dawkins (a guy who can’t even find his own computer code) is, by his own admission, “the most formidable intellect in public discourse” either.

Obviously, these people take the concept of humility much more seriously than most people I run into.

An interesting coincidence is that Kauffman shared the 2005 Trotter Prize at Texas A&M with our own Bill Dembski, often sighted here. Does that make Bill a genius too?

I hope not. Co-blogging with a genius, I might feel intimidated (something you sure don’t need in this business) or else start to give myself airs (“the most formidable intellect in raccoon riddance on Latimer Avenue in Toronto”). Hey, I want a more fashionable hairdresser already.

Details: Right now Read More ›

Clearing out the Inbox, I find this item, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’” A British film about Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer (Anita Singh,The Daily Telegraph, 11 Sep 2009). Utter rubbish. Most likely, the film – which led off the Toronto International Film Festival – was rejected because it is a bore. No one here cares about Charles and Emma Darwin. A tell-all about Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack and Michelle Obama, now …. This whole fake uproar* reminds me of a recent occasion when some pundit from the States claimed that Canadians have a growing fear of Read More ›

Here’s an intriguing article about origin of life researcher Lynn Margulis in the University of Wisconsin alumni news magazine, “Evolution Revolution” by Eric Goldscheider. We learn, among many other very interesting things,

Symbiogenesis theory flies in the face of an accepted scientific dogma called neo-Darwinism, which holds that adaptations occur exclusively through random mutation, and that as genes mutate in unpredictable ways, their gradual accumulation sometimes results in useful attributes that give the organisms an advantage that eventually translates into evolutionary change.

What tipped Margulis off that new traits could arise in another way was the fact that DNA, thought to reside only in the nucleus, was found in other bodies of the same cell. This realization led to research showing not only how crucial symbiotic relationships can be to the immediate survival of organisms, but also that one of the most significant sources of innovation — indeed, even the origins of new species — occurs when, over time, symbiotic partners fuse to create new organisms.

In other words, complexity at the cell level is not the result of lethal competition from lucky mutants, but rather interactive chemistry that begins as symbiotic relationships between gene sets that together accomplish things that would otherwise have been impossible.

That sounds more plausible to me, though it all but wrecked her career.

Margulis’s observation that constituent parts of the same cell had different genetic histories was largely written off as crank science in 1964 when she started submitting her paper on the topic to academic journals. No one wanted it. After more than a dozen rejections, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells” in 1967, and then something very interesting happened. Requests for reprints started pouring in, more than eight hundred in all. “Nothing like that had ever happened in the Boston University biology department,” Margulis says. Although she was a part-time adjunct professor there at the time, she won a prize for faculty publication of the year. Eventually, a full-time position that lasted twenty-two years followed.

But in spite of, or maybe because of, this modicum of recognition, the scientific establishment viewed her skeptically, if not with outright hostility. Her grant proposals weren’t funded. Margulis tells of being recruited for a distinguished professorship at Duke University, only to have it subverted at the last minute by a whispering campaign.

She ended up at the University of Massachusetts, so at least she had a job.

One thing that mars her theories, in my eye, is is statements like

“Man is the consummate egotist,” Margulis has written. “It may come as a blow to our collective ego, but we are not masters of life perched on the top rung of an evolutionary ladder.” Instead, she likes to say that “beneath our superficial differences, we are all of us walking communities of bacteria.”

. Aw c’mon! I’m always hearing from enviro-fruitcakes and anti-nuclear nutcakes who think humans will soon destroy the planet. So walking communities of bacteria will destroy the planet? I am sure not getting involved in the squabble. I can only communicate with creatures that have brains.

A question related to this interesting article will shortly be posted here as Contest Question 11 at Uncommon Descent.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog on theories about our universe: Read More ›

Excerpted from The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins 2009

“It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record because they have been taught that it is full of “gaps”. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all. The massive numbers we now do have document evolutionary history. Large numbers by any standards constitute beautiful “intermediates.” The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong.

We don’t need fossils. The case for evolution is watertight without them, so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. There is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species and their geographical distribution.

Read More ›

Press release issued 25 September 2009 From the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists annual meeting at the University of Bristol, UK Chinese scientists today reveal the discovery of five remarkable new feathered dinosaur fossils which are significantly older than any previously reported. The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, at last providing hard evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Read more…

Chuck Colson at Break Point discusses Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer… But here is your takeaway, and I’ll let Dr. Meyer do the talking: “Our uniform experience affirms that specified information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in Read More ›

As I have observed in these pages before, the United States Supreme Court has a very uneven record on the issue of eugenics.  Indeed, one of the justices we lawyers are taught in law school to revere without question, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an uber-Darwinist and philosophical materialist who also happened to be, not coincidentally, a great admirer of the American eugenics project of the 1920’s.  In the infamous case of Buck v. Bell the court considered a Virginia law authorizing the forced sterilization of mentally challenged people.  The state proposed to use the law to sterilize Carrie Buck on the ground that she was feeble minded and thus a genetic threat to society.  The court upheld the law, and Read More ›

For those still clinging to the risible notion that scientists are above petty self-interest there is this.  Note especially this response from a leading climate researcher to another researcher’s request for his raw data:  “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”  Science is not, as some would have it, an automatically self-correcting enterprise.  As with every other human intellectual endeavor, science has entrenched orthodoxies that seek to perpetuate themselves at all costs.  Note to non-US readers:  The title does not refer to German National Socialists.  It is an allusion to a famous Seinfeld episode.  See here. Update:   Berlinski is scintillating on the silly notion that unlike other Read More ›