The phrase “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” sounds innocent enough. Who could be against such an agreement? But in fact it appears to be a pretext for a massive invasion of privacy, motivated in part by the entertainment industry seeking to maintain copyrights. But once unleashed, such an assault on freedom will know no bounds. What if Big Brother finds on your laptop that you think ID supports certain traditional moral views, and what if any articulation of such views comes to be regarded as a hate crime?

IPFW religious forum explores the nature of science Staff reports Tuesday, 10 November 2009 08:33 www.fwdailynews.com The Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) University Religious Forum will host “Understanding the Nature of Science: Why Intelligent Design is Considered a Pseudo-Science” with Jeff Nowak, Ph.D., Thursday, Nov. 19, from noon to 1:15 p.m. in IPFW Walb Student Union, Room G21. The presentation is free and open to the public. A simple lunch is served; donations are accepted. Reservations are not necessary. The series is sponsored by IPFW Campus Ministry. Nowak is an associate professor of science education at IPFW and director of Northeast Indiana Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (NISTEM) Education Resource Center. He will discuss why people believe the theory Read More ›

Here is a video of Robert Wright’s lecture on the evolution of compassion. I’ve written on this recently at UD here.

My point in the other blog was to note that if compassion has an evolutionary explanation for its existence, then so does not being compassionate, and so does every other aspect of our entire humanity by being the product of the same process. This leaves one with no more ultimate standard to use to judge whether we should or shouldn’t be compassionate, for whatever we try to use for the standard is itself subject to the trial. And of course this includes all thoughts, not just ones we call compassion and being in-compassionate. The explanation of our thinking resulting from evolution necessitates that all thoughts, even contradictory ones, have the same grounds in evolution. And this brings us to the difficulty: On this premise, there could be no escape from evolution to find a more solid ground on which to make judgments about any other thoughts that are, themselves, also the result of evolution. Evolutionary Psychologists like Robert Wright, very contradictorily, contends that evolution has given us false beliefs, not seeing that the judgment he is using also comes from the same process as the one he claims produced the false belief. If evolution gives us false beliefs, what grounds have we to trust it in any other regard? This excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s essay The Abolition of Man may help to clarify the matter; and let’s say that our evolved capacities of thought (including compassion) are called Instincts for the sake of argument:

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Getting Over Our Love for Darwin
By William A. Dembski
Posted Tuesday, November 03, 2009

http://www.texanonline.net/default.asp?action=article&aid=6474&issue

Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” in 1859. There he presented the classic formulation of his theory of evolution. Lady Ashley, reacting to the theory at the time, remarked, “Let’s hope that it’s not true; but if it is true, let’s hope that it doesn’t become widely known.” Lady Ashley’s second hope has failed: Darwin’s theory is everywhere and has now become textbook orthodoxy. This year, universities around the globe are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as well as the 200th anniversary of his birth.

But what about Lady Ashley’s hope that Darwin’s theory is false? Darwin presented a bleak picture of ourselves: we are mere modified apes; we are the “winners” in a brutal competitive evolutionary process, most of whose players are “losers,” wiped off the evolutionary scene before they could leave a legacy; the traditional Christian view that we are made in God’s image is simply a story we tell to convince ourselves that we’re special. 

Intelligent design supporters like me view Darwin’s theory as untrue and even as laughable: The theory purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms.

Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  Read More ›

Thoughtful atheists admit that Darwinism cannot account for the human mind.  In a recent edition of The Philosophers Magazine atheist Raymond Tallis writes:  Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a Read More ›

Review Of The Ninth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7; Imprint: Harper One

My review of Michael Flannery’s edition of Darwin’s co-theorist Wallaces’s World of Life  in Touchstone has been published. Having followed the intelligent design controversy for a decade, I have noticed a recent key change. This year, being the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, should have continued Charles Darwin’s century and a half of triumph. Yet his followers’ accolades are greeted with increasing incredulity, among both serious scientists and the general public. For example, serious scientists and thinkers convened last year at Altenberg, Austria, to consider alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and a recent Zogby poll showed that most people still don’t believe it, after countless years and dollars spent to convince them. Darwinism Read More ›

From New Scientist (and make of that what you wish)

A judge’s decision to reduce a killer’s sentence because he has genetic mutations linked to violence raises a thorny question – can your genes ever absolve you of responsibility for a particular act?

Look, we probably all have “aggression genes” (whatever that means). Like, if someone was threatening my mom or one of my neighbours, what do you think would happen?

Every so often I get shaken down in local stores for money for women’s shelters.

Here is what I always say: Read More ›

A friend recently wrote me to ask, about a recent  paper, “What Makes The Human Brain Unique”? I would have thought Einstein’s 1905 papers settled that. But what do I know? Maybe some porcupine in a tree somewhere is an exact equivalent of Einstein. Too bad Porkie never went to school and never published anything and reacted to all problems by standing up his quills. Einstein didn’t have quills, so he had to think, right? Oh wait. Einstein might have had quills, but he would use them only for penmanship. Not as a substitute for thinking. Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Here’s a little history that should interest UD readers concerning the modern ID movement. In my opinion, the following debate between Phil Johnson and Will Provine at Stanford in 1994 clearly defines all the issues — whether scientific, philosophical, theological, or otherwise — that are still with us today, only raised to the Nth power, where N is large. I recently revisited this debate, and was struck by how prescient Phil was. The entire debate is on Youtube in 11 segments, linked below, in order. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM-H6NxdCd4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghf3dXPAuhQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_fPERJ8KRw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfX0jdlFS5o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9W1Y_PmhSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzgiU_ML7Cc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwpmM8qA_8k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX2-QH6-R1o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRmhQsFBzQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ6fWL0j4aw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw95K3SUefU

Science 6 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5954, pp. 784 – 787 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_784  On the Origin of Religion          Elizabeth Culotta “How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science’s series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion’s effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin’s lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the Read More ›

Noted Brown University biologist and slayer of windmills, Kenneth Miller, came to Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday November 5. The room was packed with what seemed to be about 200 (mostly students and some faculty). Overall, Miller displayed the affable but subliminally arrogant attitude I’ve come to expect in some academics. Miller began by giving a long list of his publications interspersed along with some obligatory self-deprecating humor, the apparent take-home message being “look at what a smart and prolific boy I am.” He then launched into Kitzmiller v. Dover and said (whether out of genuine misinformation or outright disingenuousness I cannot say) that the Discovery Institute “put them [the school board] up to it.” After giving a wholly inaccurate definition of ID as the idea that “design in the form of outside intelligent intervention is required to account for the origin of living things,” he launched into the bulk of his lecture most of which simply gave examples of common descent as “proof” of Darwinian evolution.  I must say that I was surprised by the degree to which Miller absolutely savaged ID. It’s not that he simply disagrees with ID, the substance of his message was that ID is a creationist group (no one was mentioned by name) with the Discovery Institute as its front organization working (in his words) “against scientific rationality.” The thrust of his ID comments were wholly denigrating and dismissive.  Miller later admitted that evolution was the product of “design in nature” in search of “adaptive spaces.” His discussion of design was frankly bizarre; at times he almost sounded like a Gaia proponent—I couldn’t figure out if by design he meant just some sort of unfolding or self-direction or if “design” was somehow synonymous with natural selection. The entire presentation in this regard was quite fuzzy.  There was a lot of conflation of concepts—my personal favorite being his conflation of evolution, genetics, and Gregor Mendel. Anyone listening to Miller on this would have thought that Mendel was simply carrying Darwin’s ideas forward; he did not, of course, point out that Darwin’s adherence to pangenesis and the notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics was quite different from that of Mendel. The rest was pretty predictable.

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People increasingly ask me about Francis Collins’s opposition of ID and what to make of it. The short answer is, “Though a Christian, Collins is a thorough-going Darwinist, implacably opposes ID, asserts that it has been discredited scientifically, yet gives little evidence of understanding ID’s main arguments and refuses to engage proponents of ID in public discourse.” For the longer answer, see the following replies to Collins by ID proponents: Biography of Collins: http://www.discovery.org/a/10491 Jonathan Wells, “Darwin of the Gaps: A Review of The Language of God by Francis S. Collins” http://www.discovery.org/a/4529 Jonathan Witt, “Random Acts of Design and Francis Collins” http://www.discovery.org/a/3795 [originally at:] http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=19-08-032-f   David Klinghoffer, “Facing Darwin and the Deity” http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/012/542pbkmy.asp Denyse O’Leary, multi-part review http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2006/11/book-review-language-of-god-and.html   Read More ›