Illustra Media, which has produced such videos as UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF LIFE and THE PRIVILEGED PLANET, has these videos available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/IllustraMedia

The Evolutionary Informatics Lab website has just undergone a major renovation, thanks mainly to our very own Atom and to Winston Ewert.

Eighteenth century English natural theology reached a pinnacle in the work of William Paley who was decidedly optimistic about the world. Not only did creation prove design, it was also a very pleasant place. Here is how the Anglican described an English garden:  Read more

UPDATE: Oops, Barry, my bad. It was a long work day and I overlooked your post. Here’s my essay on VJ’s point #7. vjtorley asks this extremely important question here. VJ’s point #7: The question in dispute relates to multiple disciplines, in several of which you have a limited degree of expertise, whereas the expert you are listening to has a great deal of expertise in just ONE of these disciplines. This is the problem with declarations of certitude on the part of Darwinists. Once it was discovered in the 20th century that living systems are not essentially based on chemical reactions and stochastic processes, but upon information and information-processing systems, the proponents of chance-and-necessity biology left their area of Read More ›

ID seeks to reliably distinguish complex specified information from noise. Now Princeton Jason Fleischer and co-author Dmitry Dylov have discovered that there is residual information in “noise” that can be recovered using non-linear optical techniques by “stochastic resonance” with energy from added noise. See:

Turning noise into vision

“Normally, noise is considered a bad thing,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. “But sometimes noise and signal can interact, and the energy from the noise can be used to amplify the signal. For weak signals, such as distant or dark images, actually adding noise can improve their quality.” Read More ›

Headline: “Missing Link Revealed?” I have seen variants of this headline at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. It seems that journalists never seem to tire of trotting out the latest find as the “missing link” despite the fact that, presumably, the dozens of prior headlines were wrong. Why is that?

IN A RECENT THREAD VJTORLEY WRITES:

Here’s a question for everyone: when is it rational NOT to believe an expert? That’s a difficult one. The following is a (by no means exhaustive) list of “warning signs” which indicate that what an expert says may be open to legitimate doubt: Read More ›

One of the reasons evolutionists are convinced their theory is true is because of the way the species compare to each other. The patterns we find amongst the species, say the evolutionists, prove Darwin’s idea beyond a shadow of a doubt. Such arguments pervade the evolution genre—from textbooks to popular literature—but what exactly do they mean? To understand this we must understand the evolutionary mind. These arguments have circuitous histories and baked-in assumptions that are now long forgotten. But they are worth remembering. Here is one example.  Read more

 A friend draws my attention to this lovely little item:

He asks, what about this ?

What you CAN see with small, easily observed creatures like Lenski’s E. coli is evolution in action – new features evolving through random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of what you wish to state about the malaria plasmodia, the best example of evolution in action is the Lenski experiments because he retains the entire record of every genetic event that leads to every change. Now, Lenski’s E. coli changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?”

I replied:

So the claim is, “changed shape, changed size, changed metabolism and changed food source. How much more MACRO do you expect an organism to evolve?”

Hmmmm. Kittens do this all the time. Read More ›

The Discovery Institute is having their annual Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design in Seattle Washington this summer from July 9 – 17th, 2010:

The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute announces an extraordinary opportunity for college students in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to participate in an intensive nine-day seminar that will prepare them to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID).

Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences is designed for college-level juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the natural sciences or the philosophy of science.

Intelligent Design in the Social Sciences and Humanities is designed for college-level juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the social sciences (including law) or the humanities (including theology).

Read More ›

Formation of “irreducibly complex systems” via purported scaffolding has been an ongoing debate amongst evolution and intelligent design theorists. Now a natural scaffolding has been discovered – and it may itself be part of another “irreducibly complex system”.

Sharma et al., discovered that natural fat works as a biological scaffold for “cells to grow and mature”. Then fascinatingly, “when the cells have matured into the desired tissue, they secrete another substance that breaks down and destroys the scaffold.”

Could the formation of this natural biological scaffold AND its subsequent removal form an irreducibly complex system? E.g. is such scaffolding essential or necessary to achieve a minimum growth rate? Could the secretion removing the scaffolding also be essential to trim function rather than being “bloated”? I expect this fat scaffolding/removal system will be found to be another irreducibly complex system which very efficiently reuses its materials.

See: Body fat may help us heal Read More ›

How do bacteria respond to environmental challenges and signals so quickly and effectively? In addition to genetic modifications there are a series of non genetic, or epigenetic, modifications. Genetic modifications change the sequence of nucleotides that, for instance, comprise a protein-coding gene. In that case the resulting protein is modified to better handle the environmental challenge. Epigenetics, on the other hand, involves various other types of modifications. For instance, the three-dimensional structures of proteins may be dramatically altered, or tiny chemical signals—methyl groups—may be added to certain proteins or DNA sequences. As with genetic modifications, many of the epigenetic modifications are heritable, so the adjustments are passed on to later generations.  Read more

We often hear the following, in many iterations and variations, from Darwinists:

Evolution is a fact.
Evolution is as well-established as the law of gravity.
Overwhelming scientific evidence proves that evolution is true.

“Evolution” is an ill-defined term. It can mean:

1) Change over time.
2) Common ancestry.
3) Random genetic errors filtered by natural selection as the purely materialistic mechanism that explains all of life’s complexity, information content, and information-processing machinery, not to mention human consciousness and its demonstrable creative intelligence.

Change over time is obvious and undeniable. Common ancestry seems reasonable to me, although universal common ancestry appears to be in big trouble with mounting evidence that Darwin’s unidirectional “tree of life” never existed. It might have been something more akin to a hologram than a tree, as far as I can tell.

What Darwinists really want us to accept — without question, dissent, annoying logical/evidential challenges, or apostasy — is definition 3), so let me make a modest proposal to substitute it for “evolution,” and reveal the Darwinian bait-and-switch scam.
Read More ›

With Congressmen like Hank Johnson guiding this country, our future is assured …

PART I: Experimental Foundations

The plans had been made, details finalized and all expenses paid.  I was to travel to the south coast of England to complete my training for the British Sub-Aqua Club Sports Diver certificate.  I boarded a train from London’s Waterloo station down to the quiet seaside resort of Bournemouth where I was received by relatives.  For the next two weeks I commuted to the nearby harbor town of Poole and headed out on a rigid hull inflatable boat with five other students to complete a series of required dives.  The testosterone-induced camaraderie soon brought us together into a close-knit group.  We were assigned our respective diving ‘buddies’- a practice that is almost a mandatory requirement of amateur sport diving.  We quickly picked up on the diving lingo and were Hi-fiving our way to the end of each day.     

All of our sorties out to sea went according to plan.  That is, until the final afternoon.  As we were heading back to the safety of the mooring station the weather took a turn for the worst.  Surging waves reduced visibility to little more than a few feet and with the quickly darkening skies we knew we were in trouble.  In desperation the pilot of the boat radioed for help.  Minutes later we were spotted by the coastal ‘cavalry guard’- a British Navy Sea King helicopter equipped with all the fittings that one might expect for a major rescue operation.  Fortunately the terrifying experience of being stranded out at sea ended without further incident.  We were escorted to the calmer waters of a local bay from which we headed home for a feast of fried fish served in greasy, vinegar-sodden newspaper (the quintessentially English supper). That same evening we all reconvened to mull over the events as they had unfolded.  We bonded socially knowing that, in the midst of our differences, there was at least one thread of commonality by which we could all relate to each other.  We were all now sports divers with a story to tell. 

A craving for social connection is a deeply-rooted aspect of the human psyche (1).  So much so that even at the cellular level there are key molecular markers associated with the subjective feeling of social isolation (loneliness).  Just three years ago a seminal study using a microarray based approach identified some of the genes that are differentially expressed in the immune cells of individuals who struggle with subjective social isolation (2).  The ‘transcriptional fingerprint of loneliness’ that came about as a result provided researchers with a window into how negative feelings over social experiences can adversely impact our health.  Most importantly a total of 209 transcripts, representing 144 genes, were found to be differentially expressed in the leukocytes of subjectively lonely individuals (2). Read More ›