Here is actor Ed Begley Jr. being interviewed by Stuart Varney on Fox News: Ed Begley Jr. remarks “I don’t think geologists should write papers about being an actor or newscaster…nor should uh…Don’t get your information from me folks or any newscaster, get it from people with PhD after their name.” So, if geologists cannot Read More…
Month: November 2009
What is Intelligence?
In a previous UD discussion I started about incompleteness I made the following affirmation: intelligence and life are not computable. A commenter kindly asked me to provide justifications for my claim. Since at UD usually I try to separate different topics in different discussions, to be more focused and reader-friendly as possible, so here is Read More…
William Dembski’s Interview on New Book “The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World”
William Dembski was interviewed recently by the Evangelical Philosophical Society, which can be read at their blog, about his new book The End of Christianity, Finding a Good God in an Evil World. This book is the long anticipated refutation of the “new atheists” position, such as that of the Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens Read More…
The Climate Audit Paradigm
One of the interesting aspects of Climategate is that the website Climate Audit (www.climateaudit.org) has become a lot more prominent. For instance, here is a excerpt from an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. “This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as Read More…
Reflections on the Manhattan Declaration and intelligent design
Recently, Bill Dembski noted the Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience, aimed at Christians who take their faith seriously. It points out that the direction of public policy (= what Top People want) in the United States is in stark contrast to the beliefs of most of the people. It has been signed by many key leaders. Read More…
A Non Genetic Protein Translation Mechanism Adds More Complexity to Cellular Adaptation
Biology’s sophisticated adaptation machine has now been discovered to be even more sophisticated. In recent years the types of adaptation often claimed to be examples of evolution in action have been found to be driven by complex mechanisms that respond to environmental pressures. It was yet another falsification of evolutionary expectations. Organisms responded far more Read More…
Climategate: Money laundering?
I make no accusation, I am simply asking a question passed on to me by a reader. The reader copied this divulged e-mail on to me. Also, it is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier and the sum for one occasion transfer Read More…
Speciation: Or maybe not?
At Wired Science, we are informed “Birth of New Species Witnessed by Scientists” (November 16, 2009): On one of the Galapagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two. In many ways, the split followed predictable patterns, requiring a Read More…
Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with brief comments
1. The Positive Case for Intelligent Design Listen here. What exactly is the positive argument for intelligent design? This episode of ID the Future is taken from a recent lecture on intelligent design given by Casey Luskin. Because of the way the media misrepresents the issue, even those who may be predisposed to support ID don’t Read More…
Climategate: And finally, the source codes!
[Adapted from a close colleague’s email:] This article by Marc Sheppard contains a technical discussion of details of some of the source codes uncovered by the recent hack of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit e-mail servers. These computer codes are the ones used to create the global climate forecasts predicting a warming Read More…
Shallit’s Chronic Foot-in-Mouth Disease
| | I knew Jeffrey Shallit as a reasonable computational number theorist at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. When it comes to ID, however, he simply can’t think straight. Repulsed by Thomas Nagel’s high praise of Stephen Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL (noted here at UD), Shallit calls Nagel a fool and then Read More…
IVP launch website to plug anti-evolution book
When I posted before to mention IVP’s new anti-Darwin book, I had no idea they’d launched a website: www.shouldchristiansembraceevolution.com It’s very comprehensive, and very impressive. IVP (UK) are obviously taking this particular publication very seriously.
Coffee! The “climategate” reporters only picked out the most damning e-mails? How unethical of them!
Googling “climategate + Dembski” (as a simple way to retrieve a file from our site that I wanted to link to), I came across this” comment at Open Parachute, which makes excuses for the ‘gates: Predictably only the most apparently damning emails have been quoted in the media. Sure, it is pretty predictable that the Read More…
Interview: Mathematician David Berlinski explains why famous mathematicians have doubted Darwin
Darwin and the Mathematicians”, here, is David Berlinsk’s final interview with Evolution News and Views. Berlinski, a Darwin skeptic of long standing, discusses the reasons famous mathematicians have doubted Darwin, along with entertaining anecdotes. In the first part of the 20th century, Darwin v. Dissent had not yet acquired its riveting incarnation as a melodrama Read More…
IC All The Way Down, The Grand Human Evolutionary Discontinuity, And Probabilistic Resources
The more we learn the more it appears that almost everything of any significance in living systems is irreducibly complex. Multiple systems must almost always be simultaneously modified to proceed to the next island of function. Every software engineer knows this, and living things are fundamentally based on software. Evolution in the fossil record is Read More…