Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins Dodges Debates, Refuses to Defend Evolution as The Greatest Show On Earth Seattle – Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading public spokesman for Darwinian evolution and an advocate of the “new atheism,” has refused to debate Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a prominent advocate of intelligent design and the author of the acclaimed Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. “Richard Dawkins claims that the appearance of design in biology is an illusion and claims to have refuted the case for intelligent design,” says Dr. Meyer who received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in England. “But Dawkins assiduously avoids addressing the Read More ›

The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays has just been published from the always interesting and highly engaging David Berlinski. You can find it on Amazon here. Also, Dr. Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion has just been released in paperback.

Here I was recently treated to an interesting display of Darwinist logic. A commenter demanded that I provide proof that in a single-payer health system like Canada’s, older people are being abandoned to die. Another suggested I just shut up about it. Sorry. Go here for how bad it can get. It’s a matter of simple logic, really. Sarah Palin’s death panels are alive and well in Canada because we have a single government payer health system. I don’t care what you think of Palin. But this much I know is true: If the government is the only entity permitted to open a new bed in a hospital, this is what happens: You have a 55 year-old high school math teacher Read More ›

 Chromosomes have yet another level of complexity and are even better designed than previously thought.   Erez Lieberman-Aiden et al 

By probing the three-dimensional architecture of whole genomes, the authors constructed spatial proximity maps of the human genome that confirm the presence of chromosome territories and the spatial proximity of small, gene-rich chromosomes. They identified an additional level of genome organization that is characterized by the spatial segregation of open and closed chromatin to form two genome-wide compartments. At the megabase scale, the chromatin conformation is consistent with a fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus.

Imagine a fine hair 2 meters long. Imagine balling it up in such a way that it can fit on the head of pin — and be unraveled and knot-free, at a moment’s notice. A similar engineering feat is at work inside each cell in our body. The genome is over two meters long and must be carefully packed into the confines of a space (called the “nucleus”) several times narrower than a human hair.

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By Paul Hudson Climate correspondent, BBC News This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on? Read more…

This is UD’s 4,000th post.  Congrats and a hardy well done and thank you to all of our posters!

There is a new book coming out in November Should Christians Embrace Evolution? published by IVP edited by Norman C Nevin From Amazon.co.uk From Amazon.com I picked this link up from Pandas Thumb it may be a bit out of date – about Norman Nevin “Professor Norman Nevin: Norman C. Nevin is Professor of Medical Genetics, Queen’s University of Belfast and Head of the Northern Regional Genetics Service. He has held the positions of secretary, vice-president and president of the UK Clinical Genetics Society as well as serving on various national and international committees notably the Human Genetics Advisory Commission. He is a member of the European Concerted Action for congenital abnormalities. Professor Nevin was a founder member of the Read More ›

For the original online McWhorter-Behe discussion, go here. Thanks to one of my research assistants for making the transcript. Here’s the video in lower res as it appeared online after Bloggingheads removed it:

MCWHORTER: Well, Michael Behe I am so glad to meet you, and umm thank you for agreeing to do this. This is one of the rare times when I have actually initiated a bloggingheads pairing, and it’s because I just read your book The Edge of Evolution from 2007, and I found it absolutely shattering. I mean this is a very important book. And yet I sense from, umm, the reputation or the reception of your book from 10+ years ago Darwin’s Black Box that it may be hard to get a lot of people to understand why the book is so important. So I just wanted to go back and forth with you for a little while to get a sense of what your intent with this book was and ask you a few questions and just allow this book to have the wide airing that it deserves. So umm thank you.

BEHE: Yeah sure, sounds great to me. It’s nice to be with you, I’ve never been on a bloggingheads before, so uh, it should be fun.

MCWHORTER: Yeah it’s umm, I umm, I want to start with this, umm, and this is what motivates me. Darwin is great; I’ve always been really interested in evolution. Usually on bloggingheads I talk about race issues. But, however, actually, in my actual daily life I’m interested much more in certain other things, such as I’m a massive dinosaur fan and things like that, and evolution has always fascinated me but I’ve always seen a certain kink in the whole natural selection argument. And I’ve always asked people this basic question, it’s about skunks. Read More ›

OSLO (AP) — President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his nascent initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and replace unilateral American action with international diplomacy and cooperation. Nobel observers were shocked by the unexpected choice so early in the Obama presidency, which began less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama woke up to the news a little before 6 a.m. EDT. The White House had no immediate comment on the announcement, which took the administration by surprise. The Norwegian Nobel Committee lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama’s calls for Read More ›

Our friend and colleague Atom tha Immortal has finished up the WEASEL GUI at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go here for the GUI). It implements every conceivable interpretation of Dawkins’s WEASEL program as outlined in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Thanks Atom for all your hard work!

For decades China’s “one child” policy has been the centerpiece of its population control efforts.  Millions of young girls have been killed in their mothers’ wombs as an indirect consequence of this policy for a very simple reason:  If parents can only have one child, the majority prefer that child to be a boy.  Therefore, when many parents find out their unborn child is a girl they have her killed.  China has sown the wind.  Now it is time to reap the whirlwind.  This story is about the large and growing gender gap in China.  The Chinese have killed a large slice of an entire generation of women, and as a result in a few years 30 million men are Read More ›

Editor’s note:  I post frequently on the ethical implications of materialism.  There is a reason for that.  I have dealt personally with the deadly consequences of the materialist worldview taken to its logical end .  Below is a post that first appeared on these pages on November 9, 2007: In a recent post Denyse O’Leary linked to a news story coverning Pekka Eric Auvinen, the Finnish student who killed eight in a shooting spree at his school.  Apparently Auvinen was an ardent Darwinist who considered himself to be an instrument of natural selection.  He wrote:  “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgaces of human race and failures of natural selection.” One of O’Leary’s interlocutors more Read More ›

This book retails for $79.95 and Amazon sells it for $57.78. But the best price online to purchase it is at the Human Events Book Service (go here), where you can get it for $34.95. I highly recommend Weikart’s latest. Darwinists continually try to deny or change the subject that Darwin’s theory deeply influenced the Nazis. Accordingly, what the Nazis did is supposed to constitute a profanation of tried-and-true pure Darwinism. But the flow of ideas from one to the other is clear. To be sure, Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for Nazism, but it certainly was a necessary one.

Here are the facts concerning the Roman Polanski case:  Polanski gave a Quaalude to a 13 year-old child; instructed her to get naked and enter a Jacuzzi; refused to take her home when she asked; performed oral sex on her as she asked him to stop; raped her (no, not the “statutory” kind, the “forcible” kind); and sodomized her.  In a plea bargain Polanski pled to unlawful sex with a minor. As is common knowledge, Polanski has his defenders because he has made some terrific movies.  For example, critic Tom Shales says:  “There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old Read More ›