Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

A New Plant Defense: Switch the Flowering Time

A new amazing strategy has been discovered to add to the list of defenses plants use against herbivores. It has long been known, for instance, that plants detect the secretions from caterpillars and respond with toxins and chemicals that slow the caterpillars’ digestion. Now a new defensive strategy has been discovered: the altering of the flowering time. This has been observed in a tobacco plant which produces new morning-opening flowers when attacked by larvae of the hawkmoth pollinator.  Read more

Dr. Dembski and Dr. Meyer Given Top Scientific Accomplishments for ID in 2009

Dr. Dembski and Dr. Meyer have made the top of the list of ID science breakthroughs for 2009: On this episode of ID the Future Casey Luskin interviews Dennis Wagner, executive director of the Access Research Network discussing ARN’s top 5 Darwin and Design science stories for 2009. Listen in to learn how the work of Stephen Meyer and William Dembski topped the list of ID science accomplishments for 2009. Meyer and Dembski Breakthroughs Top ID Science Stories fo… Intelligent Design The Future

Evolution is a Fact, Just Like Gravity is a Fact! UhOh!

In this week’s New Scientist, there is an article about gravity that deals with a string theorist’s reformulation of gravity as an entropic force. This reformulation describes gravity as an emergent property of space, time and matter, and NOT as a physical force itself. Here’s a quote from the actual article: Of course, Einstein’s geometric description of gravity is beatiful, and in a certain way compelling. Geometry appeals to the visual part of our minds, and is amazingly powerful in summarizing many aspects of a physical problem. Presumably this explains why we, as a community, have been so reluctant to give up the geometric formulation of gravity as being fundamental. But it is inevitable we do so. If gravity is Read More ›

Uncommon Descent Contest 19: Spot the mistakes in bafflegab – winner declared

This contest seemed to have attracted a lot of discussion, with 148 entries, so I spent all yesterday getting through the entries.

The contest’s  basis was a fawning review by David B. Hart, of Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth. We are informed – on the mag’s cover – that Dawkins “gets a gold star” for his book of that name (January 2010 Number 199).

Well, Darwinism is certainly one of the greater shows on Earth, and Dawkins is worthy a life membership in an illusionists’ association.

The winner this time is Paul Giem at 111 (minor correction offered at 112 ), for

To come back to the point of this post, we were asked to critique the comment,

The best argument against ID theory, when all is said and done, is that it rests on a premise – irreducible complexity” – that may seem compelling at the purely intuitive level but that can never logically be demonstrated. At the end of the day, it is – as Francis Collins rightly remarks – an argument from personal incredulity. While it is true that very suggestive metaphysical arguments can be drawn from the reality of form, the intelligibility of the universe, consciousness, the laws of physics, or (most importantly) ontological contingency, the mere biological complexity of this or that organism can never amount to an irrefutable proof of anything other than the incalculable complexity of that organism’s phylogenic antecedents.

My reply:

There are several problems with this paragraph. For example, there is the idea that ID rests on the premise of irreducible complexity. In fact, the origin of life is a far stronger foundation for ID (see Signature in the Cell), and the Privileged Planet hypothesis does not need irreducible complexity.

Another problem is the difficulty with the last sentence. If the “biological complexity” of an organism is “an irrefutable proof” of the “incalculable complexity” of its progeniters, and their progenitors had it, and so forth, did the incalculable complexity come from an originally “Incalculably complex” organism which arose spontaneously, or was the “irrefutable proof” somehow violated somewhere, or multiple times? Or does the concession constitute a proof of ID, in spite of the author’s protestations?

But the part of the argument that stands out as the worst is the assertion that irreducible complexity “may seem compelling at the purely intuitive level but that can never logically be demonstrated.” At this point I feel like I’m watching a movie, where the villain has been tracked down by the detectives who have put the clues together, and suddenly switches from pretending innocence to saying, “You can’t prove a thing!” He has now lost the audience (including any remaining doubt in the detectives). All that remains is the power play and the legal maneuvering. We now know the truth of his villainy to a moral certainty.

Science has never been about proof, and those who expect to attack ID because it can’t be proved have committed a category error. The fact that they have to resort to this kind of argument suggests a fundamental weakness in their position.

Nor is the appeal to the supposed fallacy of “personal incredulity” helpful. What is the opposite? “Personal credulity?” If the contest is between faith and skepticism, it would seem that the proper scientific attitude would be skepticism.

There are other mistakes, but this belief that ID must be wrong until it can “logically be demonstrated” is obtained is the worst. If that’s the “best argument against ID theory”, then ID has it made.

Yes, science is about evidence, not “irrefutable proof”. The latter is the domain of pure mathematics. (Why we cannot square a circle or meaningfully divide by zero.) But statistics and information theory are about the balance of evidence, and if the evidence does not support the idea that Darwinism creates much information, then it is not a good theory.

A free copy of Expelled goes to Giem, on condition of providing me with a working postal address, at oleary@sympatico.ca

I also appreciated Jerry’s thoughtfulness in 137 through 139.

Further comments:

Just about everything Hart said about intelligent design theory, as quoted by Giem above, is wrong, and that is not an easy feat.

It is hard to know where to begin, with stuff like this. For one thing, what is wrong with “purely intuitive level” and “personal incredulity”? If a landlady thinks that her drunken boarder will not pay his rent come Friday, though he swears on his grandmother’s grave that he will, that is a purely intuitive level of personal incredulity.  She cannot predict the future because she is not God Almighty. But she is probably right anyway in her assessment and should act on it.

And the rest is just pure bafflegab. For more on “bafflegab”, see below.

Anyway, what a shame that a once-respected publication like First Things would publish such nonsense. But it was a good basis for a contest.

Someone wondered about the term bafflegab, thinking I had invented it. For the record, Read More ›

IPCC Publishes Anecdotal Speculations as Climate “Science”

Remember that Intergovernmental Panal on Climate Change report that all the glaciers in the Himalayas were going to melt by the mid 2030’s?  Turns out it was complete bunk.  Is it time to start adding scare quotes around the “science” part of “climate science”? Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science Read More ›

Frank Turek Apologetics Simulcast Tonight on the “Youth Exodus”

Tonight my friend Frank Turek will be interviewing me as well as other Christian apologists (such as William Lane Craig and Josh McDowell). Below are the details.

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This Tuesday, January 19th I’ll be hosting a live radio and internet simulcast event called Church Dropout:  Overcoming the Youth Exodus.  The producers tell me that this program will draw an audience of over 200,000 to hear and see evidence for Christianity. The program is intended to help reverse the trend that 75% of Christian youth leave the church after high school.   

My guests will be some of the top Christian apologists in the world:  

We’ll start the evening with the man who is currently the best debater on our side, Dr. William Lane Craig (http://www.ReasonableFaith.org).  Bill does scores of college events every year, and he provides great resources on his website. You need to hear Bill’s evidence for the existence of God– irrefutable! 

We’ll then turn to one of the founding fathers of the Intelligent Design movement– Dr. Bill Dembski (http://www.designinference.com).  Bill has two PhD’s, but he’ll show us very simply how life points to an intelligent designer, and how most of the so-called “evidence” for macroevolution is based on materialistic and counter-factual philosophical assumptions.   Read More ›

Intelligent design in practice

Although Nature titled this piece “Tackling Unintelligent Design” they betray their own bias and fail to appreciate the irony in their claims.

According to R. John Ellis from the University of Warwick “Rubisco, the key enzyme in photosynthesis, is a relic of a bygone age.”

Researchers now plan to genetically manipulate the enzyme to make a designer enzyme fit for the modern world.

Although Rubisco is the most important enyzme on the planet, it is also one of the most inefficient. It evolved when the atmosphere was different and failed to adapt to the modern atmosphere. Attempts to improve the properties of this key enzyme of plants and cyanobacteria have failed because it proved impossible to reconstitute Rubisco in vitro. Liu et al. (Nature 463, 197–202 (2010) Vol 463 14 January 2010 doi:10.1038/nature08651) have overcome this problem with a cyanobacterial Rubisco by using two different chaperone proteins, which guide the folding and assembly of the enzyme. Read More ›

More on ID at Justin Brierley’s UNBELIEVABLE

I did two phone debates at Justin Brierley’s UK radio-program UNBELIEVABLE. Below is an email describing both debates as well as some programs of related interest. The debate with Lewis Wolpert was previously noted here at UD. The other debate with former Christian Norm Hansen focused on God’s goodness and my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY. ====================== Hello, you may be interested in three recent shows of my radio show “Unbelievable?” that touch on the issue of Intelligent Design.   All the shows are available at the show archive at www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable though I include permanent direct links below   Also please note that in light of its UK release on DVD, I shall be hosting a Premier Radio screening of Read More ›

Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System–Video

In my 2001 Mathematical Intelligencer article, in which I was allowed to reply to critics of my 2000 article, I wrote: Mathematicians are trained to value simplicity. When we have a simple, clear proof of a theorem, and a long, complicated counterargument…we accept the simple proof, even before we find the errors in the complicated argument. That is why I prefer not to extend here the long-standing debate over the first point [about irreducible complexity, basically] but to dwell further on the much simpler and clearer second point of my article, which is that the increase in order observed on Earth violates the laws of probability and the second law of thermodynamics in a spectatular fashion. Then I went on Read More ›

Evolution’s Kobayashi Maru Scenario

By mandating methodological naturalism evolutionists place themselves into a no-win scenario. Like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk who reprogrammed the computer in order to defeat the Kobayashi Maru scenario training exercise, evolutionists can only cheat their way out of their methodological naturalism mandate. If they give a straight answer they undermine their own claims about evolution. The problem here is not methodological naturalism itself, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do science. The problem is that, in the hands of evolutionists, it becomes dogma rather than guidance. And the problem is not merely a philosophical fine point–in mandating methodological naturalism evolutionists reveal the absurdity of their ideas and simultaneously do substantial harm to science.  Read more

Top ten ID science stories of the year

Well, here are three of the top ten winner stories, and I have inserted some comments, with further stories to follow if you click on the link: 1. Authors William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II use computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information. This paper is in many ways a validation of Dembski’s core No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without intelligence, which argued that some intelligent input is required to produce novel complex and specified information. [About time someone said the obvious. Darwinism does not work, Never has, never will. Kept alive by a taxpayer-funded, court-supported Darwin industry that is nearly a century old. A shame Read More ›

Uncommon Descent Contest 20: Why should human evolution be taught in school?

I just came across this fact in the journal Nature: Little is known about human evolution other than basic outline. Note: This contest has been judged. Go here for announcement. So, contrary to widely heard huffing, there are huge gaps in our understanding of early humans. In Nature’s 2020 Visions (7 January 2010) Scroll down to Leslie C. Aiello, and we learn Most of the recent effort in hominin palaeontology has been focused on Africa and Europe. But the announcement in 2004 of the small hominin Homo floresiensis in Indonesia was a warning that we are naive to assume we know more than the basic outline of human evolutionary history. If H. floresiensis is indeed a surviving remnant of early Read More ›

California Lawmaker demands answers over museum censorship

Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.

Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›

Burying the view that Neanderthals were half-wits

“It seems we have all been guilty of defaming Neanderthal man” declared a recent Editorial in The Guardian. This comment was triggered by a report documenting evidence for the use of pigments and decorative shells by Neanderthals. This is claimed to have occurred many years before any direct contact with modern humans, thereby undermining any thought that the artefacts did not really represent Neanderthal culture. Personal adornment, using a variety of colours, implies an aesthetic sense and an appreciation of symbolism. Since Neanderthals have often been presented as lacking these “modern” traits, the new research demands a reappraisal. For an overview of the finds plus reaction, go here. Here’s the take-home message: We have had a long-sustained exposure to the Read More ›

National Academy of Sciences Bestows Its Biggest Honor on [drum roll please] … Eugenie Scott!!!

I’m heartened to see our tax dollars working to such good effect: Date: Jan.11, 2010 Contacts: Maureen O’Leary, Director of Public Information Luwam Yeibio, Media Relations Assistant Office of News and Public Information 202-334-2138; e-mail FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Eugenie C. Scott to Receive Public Welfare Medal, Academy’s Most Prestigious Award WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences Council has selected Eugenie C. Scott to receive its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. Established in 1914, the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good. The Council chose Scott for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Scott, a physical Read More ›