2009

Thousands of DNA segments have been found to be nearly identical across a wide range of species including human, mouse, rat, dog, chicken and fish. Evolutionary theory expected no such high similarity for species that are supposed to have been evolving independently for hundreds of millions of years. The only explanation could be a super strong functional constraint requiring the very unusual similarities, but none was found. Now new research is adding a twist to the story.   Read more

So how did these nitric oxide-producing enzymes arise? By Darwinian processes? …Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress. “Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview. “We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.” He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said. Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs. He thinks a compound Read More ›

Last week’s review of Richard Dawkins’ new book in the Economist hit all the usual chords. Dawkins’ purpose is to demonstrate that evolution is a fact–as incontrovertible a fact as any in science, and the Economist is only too happy to propagate the absurdity. First, there are the usual silly evidential arguments that only work with the uninformed, of which there are apparently many. True, species appear abruptly in the fossil record but, explains the Economist, “That any traces at all remain from so long ago is astounding, and anyway it is not the completeness of the fossil record but its consistency that matters.” After all, there are no fossil rabbits in the ancient strata. That’s right, no rabbits before Read More ›

Every Friday, the BBC-TV’s flagship public affairs programme, Newsnight, broadcasts ‘Newsnight Review’, which covers the week’s worth of cultural events. This week’s was devoted to Things Darwin-ish. The panel consisted of Richard Dawkins, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (whose latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about an Ultra-Green cult that, amongst other things, turns the sociobiologist and biodiversity guru E.O. Wilson into a saint), the poet Ruth Padel (who happens to be a descendant of Darwin’s) and the writer on religious and cultural affairs, the Rev. Richard Coles (who was half of the 1980s synth-pop group, Communards). As I’m writing this, I realize just how ‘postmodern’ Britain must seem to people who don’t live in this country. To me, this line-up looks pretty normal.

I want simply to highlight some remarks that were made on this programme because it gives you a sense of how well-behaved cultured liberals understand Darwin’s significance.

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Review Of The Sixth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer Robert Deyes A sound approach to scientific investigation does not necessarily bring with it a mandatory requirement to be a ‘nose to the grindstone’ experimentalist. Indeed scientists can and often do take data that others have amassed and interpret it in light of their own understanding of the matter at hand. Therein lies a lesson that, as science historians will note, is backed by an impressive list of prominent cases. In fact Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and even Charles Darwin challenged the viewpoints of their day through their own theoretical interpretations of reality. For Darwin this meant for the most part collecting data from botanists, breeders, ecologists, Read More ›

The 2005 signal processing review by Berryman, Allison, Wilkinson, and Abbott provides a fascinating insight into how cells operate and how similar they are to human and computer processing! 🙂 Or did all this functionality this come about by “evolution”? 🙄 Consider:

Signal processing is the use of mathematical techniques to analyze any data signal. This data could be an image, a sound, or any other sequence of data, such a sequence of nucleotides. The sequences of interest could be protein coding regions, repeating elements that may be associated with various diseases (such as Huntington’s disease[7]) or regions rich in some set of complementary bases, such as A and T, which can give information on evolutionary history including lateral gene transfer in bacteria [8]. . . .
Signal processing is not just a human enterprise – even individual cells process signals in the form of mRNA, protein, and more general chemical levels (for example sugars in the environment) [16, 17, 18, 19]. As with conventional computers, cells can be genetically programmed to process signals [20, 21, 22]. Read More ›

Some readers may know that, here in Canada, I am a free speech journalist. That is, I think public discussion of any issue is distorted by the currently rampant Offended lobby.

My own view is simple: If you are selected to attend a university or smart enough to find and read a magazine or blog, then get used to the fact that you will encounter ideas you strongly dispute. Otherwise, I recommend a good trade school where you can learn how to earn a decent living – and the subject matter will not likely offend your beliefs. Read More ›

Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was one of the more powerful scientific mind of the 20th century. His works span from functional and numerical analysis to quantum mechanics, from set theory to game theory, as well as many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. He was a pioneer in computer science, the first real computers were developed according to a basic model that takes his name (“von Neumann architecture”). Read More ›

Jerry Coyne visited the University of Alabama last week to explain why evolution is true. Of course the “truth” of evolution comes from religious conviction. With religion one can say that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity. The claim makes no sense from a scientific perspective. It is not that evolutionists have made an error. They did not make a mistake in their calculations or misread a scientific observation. Their claim that evolution is as obvious as gravity is not really a mistake at all. It isn’t even wrong–it simply is not scientific. Evolution is as obvious as gravity just like astrology is as obvious as gravity. These people clearly are playing by a different set of Read More ›

In case you missed this blog (and now that The Brites are no longer in existence): http://satirizingscientism.blogspot.com

’bout time for this BhTV dust-up to exit, stage left. Before it does, however, a few observations:

1. Don’t worry, Bob, George, Sean, Carl, et al. — “respectability” is not transitive.

If it were, what Francis Bacon (1620) called “the kingdom of opinions” would be a lot more fluid than it is. Let’s suppose A knows B, and B knows C. And let’s define “respectability” as “no smart person I admire will ever think I’m crazy or a crackpot.” Read More ›

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 1: Evolution’s Glass Ceiling Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 2: Rebutting Methodological Materialism: Interview With Angus Menuge, Part Two Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 3: Agents Under Fire: Part One With Angus Menuge Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 4: Hitler’s Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 5: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 6: Back to school with real science

The “fact” of Darwinian evolution finally has some support, or so they say at ScienceDaily This is a significant study, but what did they actually find? Darwinian Evolution can break complex productive genetic networks  resulting in “morphological degeneration”. “change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes of living organisms  … shows  simultaneous molecular decay of the gene that is involved in enamel formation in mammals.” Mammals exist without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and  with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). “Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel,” Mark Springer of UC said. “We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in Read More ›

In my last post I commented on Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in which Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws.

 In this post I will use an exchange in the comment section of that post between ID proponent “StephenB” and Darwinist “Delurker” to illustrate the utter vacuity of Darwinist argumentation, or at least the vacuity of the arguments of this particular Darwinist.  It is not my purpose to pick on Delurker per se.  I am using his arguments, because they are quite representative of the type of arguments Darwinists make on this site. 

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