2009

According to a Theos report, highlighted in the UK’s Telegraph, “More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, the findings suggest.” Rather amusingly, Richard Dawkins thinks it acceptable to insult half the population expressing “dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is “pig-ignorant” about science” ‘Pig Ignorant’ over Darwin . Adam Rutherford follows Dawkins into use of insulting language to describe his fellow human beings. Rutherford’s response  – “Another day, another creationism survey. Godly thinktank Theos have conjured yet another set of figures that reveal just how dim Britain Read More ›

Judge Jones, whose distinction prior to the Dover case was running the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, now has multiple honorary doctorates for rendering his decision, which he cribbed from the ACLU’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Ben Stein, who is an acclaimed actor, author, and economist, on the other hand, has just been denied an honorary doctorate at the University of Vermont: “This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore Read More ›

1] ID is “not science” On the contrary, as Dr William Dembski, a leading Intelligent Design researcher, has aptly defined: “Intelligent Design is . . . . a scientific investigation into how patterns exhibited by finite arrangements of matter can signify intelligence.” In turn, science at its best is an unfettered (but ethically and intellectually responsible) progressive search for the truth about our world; based on empirical evidence and reasoned analysis. If instead one assumes or asserts the prior constraint that scientific explanations must be “naturalistic” or even — as Lewontin openly said – “materialistic,” that mistakenly imposes materialistic conclusions before the facts can speak. This blatantly begs the question, but such a blunder is now all too common; even Read More ›

When critics of ID try to define it out of existence by calling it religion or pseudoscience, it’s worth remembering that to this day scientists and philosophers have yet to settle on what is science and what isn’t. Critics who try to use such “demarcation” arguments against ID invariably end up excluding not only ID but also other things that they would like to count as science. Steve Meyer has written cogently on this very point. These articles by him have been out for a while, but they are well worth reviewing periodically: www.discovery.org/a/2834 www.discovery.org/a/3524 www.discovery.org/a/1696

… it’s because we didn’t take advantage of the incredible resources available to us:

Anthony Sacramone on how NDE works. BTW, Strange Herring is one of my daily stops. Fun and wise, a rare combination.

In November 2008 I recruited three of UD’s most insightful and prolific commenters – StephenB, GPuccio and Kairosfocus – to craft a revised “Frequently Asked Questions” section for our homepage. I am very pleased to announce that after three months of intense effort by these gentlemen, the new FAQ – which is entitled “Frequently Raised But Weak Arguments Against Intelligent Design – is nearing completion. Watch for the final product to appear on this page soon. Here is an even more exciting part for our readers. We at UD are going to subject our FAQ to the crucible of public scrutiny and comment. You, dear reader, are going to have a chance to comment on, and suggest improvements to, every Read More ›

This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine. 

Desmond and Moore always wade very deep in the archives but also with an eye to what might attract today’s reader about their subject. Not surprisingly, then, this is a book that documents the link between Darwin’s more general doctrine of common descent and his belief that all humans descend from a common ancestor and hence are members of the same species. A lot of stress is placed on Darwin’s revulsion at the brutality of slavery that he saw while voyaging on the Beagle, and the fact that it was common among the natural historians of his day to believe in several species of ‘man’. The reader can easily get the impression that this was some kind of triumph of evidence over prejudice. However, this impression would be very misleading. Read More ›

More details of DNA repair have been revealed.
See: Human DNA repair process recorded in action (Video)

(PhysOrg.com) — A key phase in the repair process of damaged human DNA has been observed and visually recorded by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis. The recordings provide new information about the role played by a protein known as Rad51, which is linked to breast cancer, in this complex and critical process.
. . . In 2006, the researchers recorded a portion of the bacterial DNA repair process, a system considerably less complex than its human counterpart.. . .

This filament composed of a fluorescently-labeled DNA molecule and the repair protein Rad51 grows progressively brighter and longer as more and more Rad51 molecules assemble onto the DNA.

Human DNA is under constant assault from harmful agents such as ultraviolet sunlight, tobacco smoke and a myriad of chemicals, both natural and man-made. Because damage can lead to cancer, cell death and mutations, an army of proteins and enzymes are mobilized into action whenever it occurs. Read More ›

A Book Review of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008).

There are many interesting features of this book, authored by academic Marxists (or at least people who used to be Marxists) and published by a historically Marxist press. The argument is presented as a critical intellectual history, which, while clearly written from a committed ‘materialist’ standpoint, is quite nuanced. But from the standpoint of ID defenders, the book’s most interesting feature is that the authors gladly embrace ID’s demonised image of its opponents. So those who remain sceptical of ID rhetoric that connects Epicurus, Darwin, Marx and Freud as part of a vast ‘materialist’ conspiracy should be silenced by what transpires in these pages: Yes, such scary two-dimensional materialists do really seem to exist – and they write books like this.

Read More ›

Here’s an amazingly silly editorial from the Financial Times of London, January 16, 2009 (yes, that pink newspaper), warning against people who question Darwin worship:

Many scientists and liberal politicians regard the rising creationist tide as a side-show that they can safely ignore. They are wrong, for several reasons. Wide areas of research, from biology to cosmology, would suffer directly if it became politically difficult for governments to fund fields that depend on such a basic a part of science as evolution. The cost would be economic as well as intellectual.

But Darwin is also worth defending because attacks on evolution symbolise a wider and more varied assault on policies based on evidence rather than prejudice. Some of this assault comes from the same religious forces as creationism – think, for example, of those ranged against embryonic stem cell research. Sheer ignorance plays a role too and so do the mass media.

As a matter of fact, human embryonic stem cell research did not turn out to be as necessary as its proponents claimed, and there are lots of good reasons for questioning the ridiculous hagiography of Darwin.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

The video below is U.S. Senator James Inhofe describing the letter he received from former NASA supervisor and senior atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon:

For the EPW press release on this

Lecture by Kirk Durston,  Biophysics PhD candidate, University of Guelph https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWi9TMwPthE Click here to read the Szostak paper referred to in the video.  HT to UD subscriber bornagain77 for the video and the link to the paper.

Since I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace research and development, and since one of my specialities is guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) software development for precision-guided airdrop systems, I thought the following might be of interest to UD readers. As I listened to the following explanation of how missile guidance systems work, I thought to myself, “(Self) This is perfect Darwinian logic!” Enjoy!

PLoS Biology has an article out today entitled: “Hotspots of Biased Nucleotide Substitutions in Human Genes”. I’ve mentioned this ‘biased’ substitution pattern before. What the authors see, they tell us, is a definite W->S substitution pattern in human genes (Weak to Strong = A:T->C:G) against an overall pattern of S->W; for the entire human genome. This is part of their summary: Our findings are consistent with a model of recombination-driven biased gene conversion. This leads to the provocative hypothesis that many of the genetic changes leading to human-specific characters may have been prompted by fixation of deleterious mutations. What the authors report is a non-random shifting within genes, and the introduction of “deleterious” mutations. Neither of these is consistent with Read More ›