Wesley J. Smith has written an interesting article about assisted suicide at The Weekly Standard called “Abandoning the Most Vulnerable.” The article is about the true story of Myrna Lebov who committed suicide at the age of 52 in her Manhattan apartment with the aid of her husband George Delury. According to Smith, Lebov had been suffering with progressive multiple sclerosis. The fallout:

Delury became an instant celebrity. He was acclaimed as a dedicated husband willing to risk jail to help his beloved wife achieve her desired end. The assisted-suicide movement set up a defense fund and renewed calls for legalization. Delury made numerous television appearances and was invited to speak to a convention of the American Psychiatric Association. He signed a deal for a book, later published under the title But What If She Wants to Die? Delury soon copped a plea to attempted manslaughter and served a few months in jail.

However, the story is more sordid than Delury’s public persona revealed. It turns out that he kept a diary, in which he explained what a burden Lebov was to him, and how he encouraged her to die only to free himself from the responsibility of caring for her. Excerpts:

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Anika Smith has noted at Evolution News and Views that Richard Dawkins, author of the recently published book The Greatest Show On Earth, refuses to debate Stephen C. Meyer, author of the recent book The Signature in the Cell.

Dr. Meyer challenged Dawkins to a debate when he saw that their speaking tours would cross paths this fall in Seattle and New York. Dawkins declined through his publicists, saying he does not debate “creationists.”

“Dawkins’ response is disingenuous,” said Meyer. “Creationists believe the earth is 10,000 years old and use the Bible as the basis for their views on the origins of life. I don’t think the earth is 10,000 years old and my case for intelligent design is based on scientific evidence.”

According to Discovery Institute, where Dr. Meyer directs the Center for Science & Culture, the debate challenge is a standing invitation for any time and place that is mutually agreeable to both participants.

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In his article on human evolution Graeme Finlay states that duplicated DNA segments prove evolution. Finlay’s proof is straightforward. These duplications of DNA segments arise randomly and yet identical duplications are found in cousin species, such as humans and chimpanzees. Finlay uses as his example opsin genes which produce proteins that are light sensitive. Different opsin genes produce proteins that are sensitive to different colors of light. The proteins are found in the hundreds of millions of photocells in our retina and they allow us to sense the different colors of light that we see. By combining the signals from these different photocells, our brain can assemble a full color image.   Read more

Jeff Shallit charges Jonathan Wells with incompetence for claiming that duplicating a gene does not increase the available genetic information. To justify this charge, Shallit notes that a symbol string X has strictly less Kolmogorov information than the symbol string XX. Shallit, as a computational number theorist, seems stuck on a single definition of information. Fine, Kolmogorov’s theory implies that duplication leads to a (slight) increase in information. But there are lots and lots of other definitions of information out there. There’s Fisher information. There’s Shannon information. There’s Jack Szostak’s functional information. Information, when quantified, typically takes the form of a complexity measure. Seth Lloyd has catalogued numerous different types of complexity measures used by mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Here Read More ›

I was just listening to Rush Limbaugh (I trust this radio preference of mine will make it quickly into my Wikipedia entry but that my work with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab will continue to be ignored there; by the way, I also enjoy reading Camille Paglia). In any case, Rush read portions of an article at The American Thinker by fellow mathematician Ron Lipsman, who has given up his senior deanship at the big University of Maryland campus so that he can speak his mind more fully. He remains on as a professor there. The article speaks at many levels to the opposition that ID faces from the cultural elite. Here’s a sample: …The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters Read More ›

YouTube URL

On this episode of ID the Future, Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman asks David Berlinski how to address the problem of dissent in science. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions is now available in paperback from Basic Books. Visit the website at www.devilsdelusion.com for more information and continuing updates from Dr. Berlinski.   Click here to listen.

As you read this, ask yourself whether this sounds like another reflexively held scientific position (hint, it begins with “D” and ends in “arwinism”): Flawed climate data Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming Ross McKitrick, Financial Post … I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its Read More ›

Review Of The Seventh Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

Were one to design the encoded DNA “blueprint” of life, would not one incorporate ways to preserve that “blueprint”? The Nobel prize in medicine has just been awarded for discovery of features that look amazingly like design to preserve chromosomes. See:

3 Americans win medicine Nobel for chromosome research

Three U.S. researchers were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on how chromosomes are protected against degradation, the Nobel Foundation reported Monday. Read More ›

Its been fascinating to read the discussion started by Barry Arrington that seems to expose some critical holes in the moral thinking of materialism. The discussion seems to range from justifying the existence of pornography to denigrating religious organizations that proselytize as they offer help and assistance to those in need. And, as Barry pointed out, the discussion is 41 posts in (actually as of now 53 posts), and still no materialist has condemned the views of the poster called Seversky on moral grounds. Perhaps having to decide between helping women in poverty by buying pornography or by funding a religious charity is too morally complex a choice for clarity for a materialist, so I want to offer an alternative. Read More ›

In this Newsweek blog article, author Rita Carter informs us,

Oh, totally. I think we are our brains. When we change the brain, we change the person. The more you look at brains . . . it becomes unavoidable that essentially everything you are is determined by the way that organ is working. And people who, for example, have a serious accident where a bit of their brain is knocked out, there is no doubt that a bit of them goes with it. Of course, [on the other hand] it does allow one to change and to learn. And yet there is still a very instinctive sense that we are more than our brains—and I can kind of sympathize with that because it’s common to us all, but I do think that if you really look at neuroscience you are forced to admit that all we are is this particular pattern of electrical activity in an organ, really.

Uh, no. Even a materialist atheist will normally concede that we have bodies too.

Speaking for myself, essentially everything I am is not “determined by the way that organ is working.” I have a number of other organs to think of, and many of their malfunctions are not “this particular pattern of electrical activity in an organ.”

Indeed, there are times I wish I could be the brain in a vat this author describes, just to shut off the bodily feedback I can’t do anything about. But it has never happened and never will.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality, which supports The Spiritual Brain: Read More ›

This opportunity is dedicated to Darwinists/evolutionists or any ID denier who sincerely desire to become convinced IDer but failed the target until today. It is a great opportunity that unfortunately Darwin could not get at his times (you will understand why at the end). Read More ›

See update at the end of this post. In the comment section to the last post Bill Dembski alluded to an NSF staffer who attempted to justify surfing porn at work.  The staffer’s justification:  he was only trying to help provide a living to poor overseas women. Denyse O’Leary suggested that if this loser had really wanted to help poor women overseas he could have made a donation to any of the various religious orders that actually help poor women overseas instead of participating in ensnaring them in sexual slavery. Dembski responded by posing tongue-in-cheek the following question: Denyse, You raise an interesting question for Richard Dawkins: If we had to choose one or the other, helping “poor overseas women” by Read More ›