I would like to encourage ID supporters that can attend a conference in Boston’s North Shore this summer to attend the following conference being offered by Biologos: BioLogos-Gordon College Conference 2010: “A Dialog on Creation” The BioLogos Foundation will offer summer courses in science-and-religion starting in the summer of 2010. These courses provide short 1–3 week overviews of the key ideas in developing a sophisticated and mature understanding of life’s origins in an explicitly Christian context. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of science-and-religion who will lead discussions of these core concepts. The BioLogos-Gordon workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore questions at the intersection of science & faith. In this inaugural BioLogos workshop, Read More ›

(Note: These are the key books, not science or media news. The Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments are here, the Top Ten Darwin and Design Media News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments on the latter are here. Also, to get the links, you must go here.) My comments follow. 2. Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record (DVD). The final film in Illustra Media’s long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, Darwin’s Dilemma, was released in September 2009 and quickly made headlines when it was barred from public viewing by the California Science Center. The documentary examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian Read More ›

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a polymath of no mean skill. Mathematicians bemoan the fact that he spent his later years doing physics, and physicists wish he had started earlier. One of his contributions was the derivation and proofs for the bell-shaped curve known as a “Gaussian” or “normal” distribution. It is the result of a random process in which small steps are taken in any direction. So universal is the “Gaussian” in all areas of life that it is taken to be prima facie evidence of a random process. Only in recent years have people addressed situations that can deviate from a Gaussian. For example, one of the criteria that produce a Gaussian, is that the probability of a Read More ›

I normally don’t write reviews of slanderous articles, but Pennock’s article piqued my curiosity by claiming that ID-founder, Phillip Johnson, is a Post-Modern Fundamentalist Creationist. Since most Fundamentalists would deny any relation to PoMo, and most Presbyterians would deny being Fundamentalists, I had to read the article, and once I began to read the article, I had to post a response. So here goes. Pennock starts out with the worst name-calling he can think of, calling Johnson “illegitimate” and a “bastard” child of his two worst nemeses: fundamentalism and post-modernism. Then on page 4 he whines that Johnson is name-calling when he says Darwinism is a creation-myth. Somehow I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a cool-headed, Read More ›

Some say that journals should be more open to controversial subjects, while their peers disagree. If these two groups were to start a peer reviewed journal consisting of what ought to comprise the peer review process, it would never get off the ground, due entirely to peer disagreement. In this case it is two people and their respective advisory boards that disagree. The journal Medical Hypotheses has an editor named Bruce G. Charlton, who consults, on occasion, an editorial advisory board as to what should be published in the journal and what shouldn’t. His point of view is that he is a chooser, not a changer, as to what journal entries are to be published. He doesn’t re-write the song after it’s been recorded, he only decided whether it should be played on the air. This isn’t satisfactory to Elsevier, who has asked Charlton to either resign immediately or implement a series of changes, including a traditional peer-review system, according to this article at The Scientist.com.

In addition to instituting a peer-review system, an external advisory board assembled by Elsevier also recommends that articles on controversial subjects, such as any that support racism, not be considered for publication.

The journal’s editor-in-chief Bruce Charlton told The Scientist that such changes are “vehemently opposed” by the editorial advisory board, as well as at least 150 scientists who have published in the journal.

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It would not be easy to overestimate the impact of evolution. It is probably the most influential idea in the history of modern science. In addition to science, Darwin’s legacy persists in medicine, education, media, law, public policy and of course religion. All of this highlights the enormous responsibility shouldered by life scientists. Their scientific opinion makes a difference far outside their daily circles. They can shed light or allow ignorance to fester in a wide range of fields. Unfortunately too many misrepresent science, or more often simply look the other way while the science is twisted. The result is increasing levels of ignorance. Consider this message I received:  Read more

The mollusc, known as the scaly-foot gastropod, has been known for about a decade. It was discovered living in the deep sea near the Kairei Indian hydrothermal vent field on the Central Indian Ridge. The natural environment for the animal is harsh. There are extremes of temperatures, high pressures and high acidity levels that can easily damage shells of calcium carbonate. Brachyuran crabs live in the vicinity and these “are known to compress gastropod mollusc shells between their chela” with loads of up to 60N. “To understand how the valiant gastropod holds up to these trials, Christine Ortiz of MIT and her colleagues used nanoscale experiments and computer simulations to dig in to the shell’s structure. Many other species’ shells Read More ›

You have probably heard about the multiverse–the idea that the universe is really a large number of universes. The multiverse helps to explain why our particular universe seems so special. Our universe seems to be a finely tuned machine and the evolution of life would require low probability events. Is our universe special? The multiverse helps to deflect such thinking. If there is a large number of universes, then perhaps each has a different set of natural laws. And perhaps intelligent life can only be supported by a very particular set of laws. So the only life forms that would exist to observe their universe would be those that live in special universes. Presto, we’re not special and fine tuning Read More ›

The heroics of the cell’s DNA repair system are well known, but new research is adding yet another incredible facet to the story. Experimentalists tagged DNA repair proteins with nanocrystals that light up. They then observed how they interact with DNA molecules. As reported:  Read more

Rick Sternberg, PhD PhD is one of the finest and most courageous evolutionary biologists on the planet. He recently has come to the defense of Stephen Meyer by Asking Darrel Falk to Pick a Number

Rick points out a peculiar claim by Darrel Falk which can be falsified:

almost certainly much, if not most, of the DNA plays no role, and in many cases can be harmful

Darrel Falk
Professor of Biology

Sternberg counters with an implicit wager after first providing some insights:

I have long questioned the assumption that most genomic DNA sequences are “nonsensical” or “junk.” And given the data that have emerged over the past seven or so years, a functionalist view of genome has robust empirical support. It is for this reason that I think many of the arguments presented by the Biologos Foundation are “wrong on many counts,” to borrow a phrase from Darrel Falk.

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(Note re posting to Uncommon Descent Contest 21: There was a problem posting entry comments when the contest was announced Saturday, so this contest has been reposted: Go here to enter. All previous entries will be judged, so no need to repost. Go here to view contest.) 3. Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design by Bradley Monton. In the breakthrough book of the year, an atheist professor of the philosophy of physics at a secular university has written a book to defend intelligent design. As Professor Monton would admit, it’s a partial defense, as he does not find ID arguments overwhelmingly convincing, but he also does not find them trivial, and he believes they should be allowed Read More ›

(Note: There was a problem posting entry comments to the original post, so I am reposting this – I think, very interesting – question to give others a chance. I have posted a link from the previous post to this one for purposes of entry. All previous entries will be judged, so no need to repost. If you have trouble posting, contact us at oleary@sympatico.ca ) Here’s an interesting article in New Scientist by Bob Holmes on a new approach to how animals become separate species (“Accidental origins: Where species come from”, March 10, 2010): Everywhere you look in nature, you can see evidence of natural selection at work in the adaptation of species to their environment. Surprisingly though, natural Read More ›

In part 1 of this series, I discussed one application of ID concepts to the biological sciences. In this post, I’m going to move my focus into two areas where I apply Intelligent Design to my own field of software engineering.
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As discussed here, even the so-called third eye, which merely provides light sensitivity to its owner such as the iguana, involves incredibly complex biochemistry. Whereas evolutionists have always envisioned a neat ladder-like pathway of increasing functionality in vision systems, even rudimentary vision such as the third eye reveals stunning complexity. This notion of increasing functionality and complexity was advanced by Darwin who, after admitting that the evolution of the eye seemed absurd in the highest possible degree, decided that unless a critic can falsify his evolutionary thought experiment it must be a perfectly reasonable idea:  Read more

(Note: There was a problem posting entry comments here, so this contest has been reposted: Go here to enter. All previous entries will be judged, so no need to repost.) Here’s an interesting article in New Scientist by Bob Holmes on a new approach to how animals become separate species (“Accidental origins: Where species come from”, March 10, 2010): Everywhere you look in nature, you can see evidence of natural selection at work in the adaptation of species to their environment. Surprisingly though, natural selection may have little role to play in one of the key steps of evolution – the origin of new species. Instead it would appear that speciation is merely an accident of fate. So, at least, Read More ›