I know both Robert Wright and George Johnson. I invited Wright to the NATURE OF NATURE conference at Baylor back in 2000, where he debated Michael Shermer. And I met Johnson at a Templeton event in Santa Fe back in 1999. Go here for their Bloggingheads discussion, which really amounts to a confessional in which Wright is the penitent and Johnson the confessor. Wright can’t fall enough over himself for giving ID too much place at his Bloggingheads forum. Discourse in our culture has become truly pathetic. Johnson, when he’s not intoning “yeah” and “umh,” comes across as a condescending prig. He dismisses Michael Behe’s views on design because they “conveniently dovetail with his religious belief.” These atheists and agnostics Read More ›

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Jonathan Weiner will be giving the second lecture of the Darwin Celebratory Lectures on the topic of variation. Weiner’s award winning book, The Beak of the Finch, documents the adaptive variations observed in the finches on the Galapagos islands. Such adaptive change is both rapid and intelligent. For instance, the beaks of the finches adapted to changes brought about by drought years. It is another piece of evidence that species have incredible adaptive abilities, not that reptiles changed into birds.   Read more

Animal minds are a big topic now.

Always fascinating for me, but I was all the more intrigued when a local panhandler sold me the “homeless” Outreach paper on the street – always a source of news that should be approached with caution – and guess what?

The lead article informs me that “Wolves are more logical than dogs.”

My first reaction was, “Try telling that to the police van driver whose back door features the notice ‘Police Dog’.”

Would the notice “Police Wolf” convince anyone that the creature in back of the van was more “logical”?

I have seen Mounted Police (= Mountie) dogs at work. I was impressed by their ability to disable a human by a simple method: One dog blocks his way forward and – on either side – two dogs grab his jacket wrists. If their captive gets really cold, they lie down on him to keep him warm until officers arrive. But, of course, the dogs have been trained to do all this. If they had flunked, they would not be on the force.

So, nonetheless, wolves are more logical than dogs? That means that wolves are more logical than the people who train working dogs. Well, that could be right, could be wrong. Best look into it.

The story got started at LiveScience: “Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test” by staff writer Clara Moskowitz, (03 September 2009 02:11 pm ET). Well, it turns out,

The differences reflect an emphasis on different learning styles, scientists say.

“I wouldn’t say one species is smarter,” said Adam Miklosi of Eötvös University in Hungary, co-author of a paper describing the results in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Science. “If you assume an animal has to survive without human presence, then wolves are smarter. But if you are thinking that dogs have to survive in a human environment where it’s very important to follow the communications of humans, then in this aspect, dogs are smarter.”

The article is replete with stuff about how this is supposed to help us understand human evolution. Not the key questions, no.

The skinny: You want a dog? Excellent dogs wait at animal shelters. I am glad if they do not know they are near the euthanasia room.

Don’t get a wolf. Get an animal that is completely happy with human society.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

The following two books are complete and will be out early next year: … The first is coming out with InterVarsity, the second with Baker. They’ll serve as a nice counterblast to the theistic evolutionism promoted by Denis Alexander, Karl Giberson, Francis Collins, and others. P.S. Barbara Forrest in her book against ID complains that I publish too many books. Deal with it Barbara — they sell well and they get read, especially in the Christian community. In any case, Barbara, please make sure to cite these two in your next edition.

Interesting slide show at Discover Magazine titled “Intelligent Design’s 8 Biggest Fails,” the guiding intelligence behind it being Ken Miller (go here). I receive a mention next to one of the slides — apparently the emergence of nylonase is supposed to provide empirical disconfirmation of my theoretical work on specified complexity (Miller has been taking this line for years). For my response about nylonase, which the critics never cite, go here. As you look at these slides, ask yourself for all of the systems in question just how Darwinian evolution explains them. Why wasn’t this slide show called “Darwinian Evolution’s 8 Biggest Successes”?

Researchers at Brigham Young University shaped DNA strands into the letters BYU, reported Live Science.  Let’s have a little fun with this clever achievement (an indisputable case of intelligent design) with some thought experiments that make use of ID reasoning. Suppose instead of forming the DNA into letter shapes, they used a code with the existing bases arranged in triplets: AAA = A, AAC = B, AAG = C, AAT =  D, and so forth.  Cracking the code would reveal the letters BYU. Suppose they spelled out “Brigham Young University” in full using this code and signed their names with it.  Now they’re not only approaching the Universal Probability Bound, they are tightening the independently verifiable specification. Suppose instead they Read More ›

Over at the First Things blog Stephen M. Barr and I have the following exchange regarding a story about the latest evolutionary psychology explanation (Why Women Hate Snakes):  Barry Arrington:   Who doesn’t love evolutionary psychology? We can make up stories all day long explaining any phenomenon we like, and then we can explain its inverse with equal élan, without even the remotest chance of our story being falsified. But is it science? Stephen M. Barr:  Dear Barry, Is evolutionary psychology all bad? A lot of it is just common sense. Consider a simple example: Why do men have more upper body strength and more aggressive tendencies? Is it possibly related somehow to the fact that women who were pregnant or caring Read More ›

NATURE|Vol 461|17 September 2009 Despite the long odds against success, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has come a long way. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a research discipline that celebrates the 50th anniversary of its inaugural publication this week (see page 345), has always sat at the edge of mainstream astronomy. This is partly because, no matter how scientifically rigorous its practitioners try to be, SETI can’t escape an association with UFO believers and other such crackpots. But it is also because SETI is arguably not a falsifiable experiment. Read more…

Norman Borlaug, an American hero, died this past Saturday at the age of 95. The Wall Street Journal has an article giving some light on his illustrious and incredible life: Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II. In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s efforts combined with Read More ›

I mean, really, whodathunkit? I haven’t got the book Greatest Show on Earth yet – Bantam’s publicist could always get in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca, if she wants to send me a copy.

What’s interesting to me is that Randy “Flock of Dodos” Olson, referring to Dawkins’s constant free insults, says

Dawkins provides a transcript of his interview with the president of Concerned Women for America which reads like a Monty Python skit as the woman, a bullheaded creationist, simply answers all of Dawkins’s sophisticated argumentation by saying she’s not convinced – like a cartoon character standing in front of a hail of bullets taunting, “You missed me.”

It’s a shame Dawkins couldn’t take a few tips from his atheist colleague Jerry Coyne. Coyne’s powerful and popular book [Why Evolution Is True] was, to quote Booklist, “far more presentational than disputatious”. That is a desperately needed attribute these days in making the convincing – and persuasive – case for evolution.

In short, Olson is virtually admitting that, in his view, Dawkins did not make a very effective case, but he does quite the fancy dance around admitting it.

Dawkins refuses to debate educated people who doubt his theories, like Michael Behe. People like Olson and institutions like New Scientist help him get away with this because they need to believe so badly that if they suspect he laid an egg, they could not admit it to themselves, never mind to others.

Anyway, Olson’s suggestion won’t work. Read More ›

Monash University issued a press release yesterday about its contributors to a recent PNAS paper that claimed to refute irreducible complexity (IC). The release declared victory for Darwin, stating that “Our work … shows that Darwin’s theory of evolution beautifully explains how molecular machines came to be.”  PhysOrg dutifully echoed this announcement without contest. Casual readers may not know about the comeback arguments posted by Michael Behe on Evolution News and Uncommon Descent, by Casey Luskin on Evolution News and by Cornelius Hunter on Darwin’s God, because the evolutionists refused to hear them or allow them inside their sphere of influence.  For example, PNAS refused to publish Behe’s response.   The Darwin Party basically barred the doors and windows and announced Read More ›

Why People Believe What They Do
Scientific American April 10, 2009

On Scientific American’s Science Talk, Steve Mirsky interviews cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley detailing some surprising data on understanding of vs belief in evolution. Particularly amazing is Steve’s positing: “So it may be justifiable to say, “Here’s what we understand about evolution as a science. We don’t care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it.””

. . .Lombrozo: Sure. So I think one of the most surprising findings has to do with the relationship between understanding the basics of evolutionary theory and accepting it as our best account of the origins of human life. So most people, I think, [or] in particular scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it’s because they don’t understand it very well; they don’t really understand what the theory is telling us. But in fact, if you look at the data from psychology and education, what you find is either no correlation between accepting evolution and understanding it or very, very small correlation between those two factors, and I think that’s surprising to a lot of people and in particular to educators and scientists. Read More ›

Here.

A new study has come out that tracks ‘tracks’; i.e., reptile ‘tracks’. It seems that the transition from a straddled to an upright position of reptilian limbs took place almost immediately. So scientists say that have studied fossilized tracks prior to, and immediately after, the end-of-the Permian mass extinction. [BTW, let’s remember that the Darwinian objection to an absence of intermediate forms is the imperfection of the fossil record, with the difficulty of ‘soft-tissue’ fossilizing as a partial reason. But here we’re talking fossil footracks, which would seem even harder to form, and yet they’re found!] Professor Mike Benton offers this: “As it is, the new footprint evidence suggests a more dramatic pattern of replacement, where the sprawling animals that Read More ›

1. I see where Ladd Allen, producer of the Privileged Planet DVD that caused such a ruckus when it was shown at the Smithsonian in 2005, has now come out with Darwin’s Dilemma.

Darwin’s Dilemma presumably references the sudden Cambrian explosion of complex, multicellular life forms, including vertebrates, the creatures most likely to have intelligence, about half a billion years ago. Note how they talk around the problem here. Darwinists have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how this could happen purely by natural selection acting on random mutation. Darwin started the thing off by suggesting that the explanation was that the fossil record was poor. Well, the fossil record is way better now, and it supports him even less. Not what you expected to hear in the Year of Darwin, eh?

Behind the Scenes With Darwin’s Dilemma: An Interview With Producer Lad Allen

On this episode of ID the Future Anika Smith interviews Illustra Media producer Lad Allen on the new film out next week, Darwin’s Dilemma. As the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, Darwin’s Dilemma represents a capstone for Allen, who traversed the globe to present the story of Darwin’s journey to his theory of evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, the nagging problem for Darwin in the fossil record that has become a crisis for evolution today.

Listen in as Lad Allen shares with us what it’s like to shoot on location in four continents and work with scientists like Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Meyer.

Go here to listen.

(Note: The Smithsonian always had a huge problem with the Cambrian explosion because it never supported Darwinism, and their key scientist on the case in the days it first came to public notice attempted to hide the results.) Read More ›