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Winston Ewert — With pro-ID grad students like this, Darwinian profs don’t stand a chance

Graduate Student Challenges Avida in Scientific Paper   Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Winston Ewert, a graduate student in computer science at Baylor University who recently co-authored a paper titled, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Ewert shares how reading Richard Dawkins led him to his current research in evolutionary computation and his criticisms of the Avida Simulation. Listen in as Ewert explains the scientific research behind his paper, and find out why intelligent design is attracting the interest of graduate students. For more on intelligent design research, visit The Evolutionary Informatics Lab and Biologic Institute.  

Believe in Richard. He can change your life!

“People will write to me and say “You’ve changed my life” and that’s a wonderfully warm feeling and it’s really quite common.” This gem comes near the end of this ABC PM extended interview during Richard Dawkins’ latest visit to Australia. Also the following;    “What’s not interesting is the battle between science on the one hand and supernaturalism on the other” “something obviously ridiculous like flat-earthers and slightly less obviously ridiculous like anti-evolutionists. It’s only less slightly obviously ridiculous by the way.”“The sort of powerful illusion of design that all living creatures have but some seem to express more vividly. The almost irresistible urge to think gosh, somebody must have designed that and the beauty of discovering actually no, they Read More ›

Flowering Plants: An Abominable Mystery

Charles Darwin called it an “abominable mystery,” but a new study has solved the question of how flowering plants evolved. The answer: While busy implementing a new hydraulic system in plants, evolution accidently stumbled on improved photosynthesis as well. You see it just so happens that the two are linked. Improve one, and serendipitously the other improves as well. That’s fortunate. As ScienceDaily explains:  Read more

Sean Carroll on Why DNA Proves Evolution

In his book The Making of the Fittest, Sean Carroll writes “the degree of similarity in DNA is an index of the [evolutionary] relatedness of species.” [98] This can only make sense if we first assume evolution is true. But Carroll’s book is a defense of evolution, intended to demonstrate that the theory is true without first assuming it is true. He seeks to prove evolution is true, but he begins with evolutionary reasoning and interpretations. That is circular reasoning. Unfortunately such circular reasoning is a common motif in the evolution genre.  Read more

Moral judgments – by-product or by design?

Two research psychologists have contributed an Opinion paper based on the empirical finding “that individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not”. The data used was obtained from an online web questionnaire which is open to any volunteer participants (including myself). Findings are reported elsewhere and in their Opinion paper the authors provide only a summary: “These studies, carried out using the web-based Moral Sense Test (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/), recruit thousands of male and female subjects, with educational levels that range from elementary school to graduate degrees, with political affiliations that range from liberal to conservative, and religious backgrounds that range from devout to atheist. In each of these studies, Read More ›

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Formulas and Forms

In modern mathematics fractals are complex objects generated from simple formulas. Some have found also in biology forms that seem to have fractal shapes. Before the astonishing geometric shapes of fractals one might argue something like this: as the complexity of the fractal geometries arises from simple formulas, analogously the fractal biological complexity could come from simplicity and as a consequence intelligent design is not necessary to explain it. Read More ›

Defying Max Planck

A century ago physics faced a problem. Its two-hundred year foundation of Newtonian thought was showing signs of weakness. In the seventeenth century Newton had overthrown the physics of another great thinker, Aristotle, but now Newton’s time had come. The quantum revolution was coming, but as with most revolutionists there would be tumult.  Read more

Al Gore comes out of hiding

Part of Al Gore’s credibility problem is his blatant conflict of interest, having profitted enormously from pushing AGW. Fortunately, ID proponents can’t say that we’ve lined our coffers pursuing ID. Sure, Barbara Forrest, Eugenie Scott, and Ken Miller constantly proclaim the contrary — from their well-heeled positions, funded largely by public moneys. In any case, this just in regarding our former vice president: A Blizzard Of Lies From Al Gore Posted 03/01/2010 06:41 PM ET Climate Fraud: Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening Read More ›

Wisdom from your local zoo: Introducing the “Evolutionary Agony Aunt”

When Britain’s Guardian newspaper first introduced its “evolutionary agony aunt”, this writer thought – a spoof for sure. But where evolutionary psychology is concerned, it can be genuinely hard to tell. No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly, “A mere 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we are proud to introduce our very own Evolutionary Agony Aunt” in the person of Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and star of comedy Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, described as a combination of Charles Darwin and Charlie Chaplin. We were told that her column will shine the “cold light” of evolutionary psychology on readers’ problems, in sharp contrast to the glossy magazines. Carole Read More ›

Applied Intelligent Design, Part 1

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
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Coffee!! Just because I don’t feel like going back to work just yet …

Apparently, according to an article in Current Biology,

Polyandry [a girl gets married to a bunch of guys at once] can regulate the frequency of a sex-ratio-distorting meiotic driver This can prevent extinction in populations and potentially species Reduced extinction risk may help explain why polyandry is so widespread in nature

I hold no brief for fruit flies, whose behaviour the authors purport to explain, but in humans, polyandry is almost always a result of extreme hardship.

I am told that, in former times, polyandry sometimes happened in the Far North in Canada. Due to famine, girl babies mysteriously found their way through a hole in the pack ice.

Whodathunkit? … and 15 years later …

Most human cultures think marriage should be Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

But very, very few human cultures have EVER thought that marriage should be Adam, Louie, Luigi, Sig, Syed, and … (organ music) Here comes the bride, here comes the bride!! … one little Eve for all of them.

Try selling that in the locker room … so long as you do not share a health insurer with me.

Most guys still want their own Eve, in the end.

Anyway, here’s the official stuff: Read More ›

The Minimal Cell

As Francis Bacon pointed out so long ago, a key strategy in scientific research is to narrow the problem. Remove unknowns, freeze variables and pare back extraneous components. Often the best way to learn how nature works is to focus in and isolate one aspect of the problem. Once that aspect is understood, then freeze it and move on to the next. So when it comes to figuring out how the living cell works, one strategy is to begin with the simplest of cells to be found in nature. Enter Mycoplasma pneumoniae—a bacteria that causes a type of pneumonia.  Read more