In River out of Eden : A Darwinian View of Life Richard Dawkins wrote: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, Read More…
Month: July 2010
NY Times slaps ID foes PZ Myers and other ScienceBlog authors
The stench of non-science coming out of ScienceBlogs.com has gotten so bad that it has drawn the attention of the New York Times! See: Unnatural Science. It would appear that the opponents of ID must resort to means other than science to challenge the hypothesis of Intelligent Design. Rather than appeals to evidence, the foes Read More…
Tadpole shrimp – unchanged since the Triassic?
There is an interesting news story in the Guardian about the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis that has managed to exist unchanged since the Triassic. Its life cycle involves a short breeding season with eggs laid in the mud. These eggs can survive for long periods as the mud dries out periodically. Guardian – World’s most ancient Read More…
Preserved mammalian hair from the Early Cretaceous
Over the years, samples of amber recovered from numerous sites around the world have been found to contain petrified insects, plants and a variety of other exotic inclusions. Invariably, we get an insight into a past world where the flora and fauna look very modern. A recent discovery has identified mammalian hair in amber, whose Read More…
The common sense law of physics
I was discussing the second law argument with a scientist friend the other day, and mentioned that the second law is sometimes called the “common sense law of physics”. This morning he wrote: Yesterday I spoke with my wife about these questions. She immediately grasped that chaos results on the long term when she would Read More…
Traipsing into Theology
In a recent PNAS paper John Avise argued that evolution emancipates “religion from the shackles of theodicy” by getting any god off the hook as the source of seemingly cruel design defects in the human genome. Giving a god credit for the good designs, so the story goes, makes that god responsible for the bad Read More…
William Dembski’s Advice for Young Intelligent Design Scientists
Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews mathematician and philosopher William Dembski on a break from teaching at Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design. Listen in as Dr. Dembski shares his advice for young scientists interested in ID and the hope he has for the future of Read More…
Why Kissing the Wall is the Worst Possible Heuristic for Biological Discovery
And would be the worst, whether one is an ID proponent or not. Many UD readers know the Australian molecular biologist John Mattick as a leader in thinking about functional roles for so-called ‘junk DNA.’ Mattick has earned the implacable ire of ID critics such as Larry Moran and T. Ryan Gregory, although not because Read More…
The Web Weavers
Imagine if you called a car salesman, explained the type of car you wanted to buy, and he exclaimed he has exactly what you are looking for. Furthermore, the car is almost new, has only a few miles, and yet is priced at a mere ten thousand dollars! You and a friend hurry over to Read More…
Blind Guides
Biology textbook authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos are leaders in the life sciences. They are accomplished researchers and professors from leading universities—they are also blind guides. In their otherwise well written and highly produced textbook The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008), Johnson and Losos badly misrepresent science and make fallacious arguments when Read More…
Back to School: Do You Know What Your Child is Learning?
Another school year is set to begin at high schools and colleges where the next round of biology students will be filled with evolutionary misinformation. At the center of this propaganda campaign are the many biology textbooks used to indoctrinate young minds with old dogma. These textbooks contain the latest evolutionary newspeak, but the underlying Read More…
Evolutionary Thought in Action: The Subtlety of Metaphysics
In my previous post I gave a typical example of evolutionary thinking and asked readers to identify the usual metaphysics that is interwoven. Here is the example: Read more
Marilynne Robinson Takes on Darwinism
Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s 20 most brilliant Christian professors, has a new book in which she takes on Darwinism: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. This book is based on Robinson’s Terry Lectures at Yale (see here). David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see Read More…
Evolutionary Thought in Action
Evolutionists claim evolution is a fact as much as gravity is a fact. As with gravity, we may not yet understand the details of evolution, but evolution in one way or another is an undeniable fact. Well is it? One evolutionist is certain and wrote this to me: Read more
Is Craig Venter’s Synthetic Cell Really Life?
Bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, Ph.D., has an interesting take on the recently announced synthetic cell created by a team of researchers led by J. Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Instititute (JVCI). In a recent article in The Scientist entitled Is the “Synthetic Cell” about Life?, Kaebnick writes: …the technical accomplishment is not quite what Read More…