A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at New York University and submitted to a not too widely followed academic journal called Social Text as part of a series on Science wars. The article was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,( Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996), and was, according to Greenberg, Read More ›

Discovery has produced a nice promo video for my book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. The video is of course not designed to make a serious argument for ID, but just to pique the viewer’s interest enough to consider buying the book, and that is of course my reason for posting it here. If you want to discuss the point made in the video, I hope you will first read the Postscript to my 1985 Springer-Verlag book (now Chapter 4 in the new book), where the point is made in more detail, or my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article which is now Chapter 3. Actually, the similarities between the development of software and the development of life Read More ›

The Understanding Evolution for Teachers website makes the usual claim that evolution is a fact, but because that is undefendable it is first careful to redefine evolution.  Read more

In a recent post on Biologos, Kathryn Applegate concluded her criticism of Michael Behe. Interesting, though, was this statement: Many scientists agree with Behe that evolution may have been guided in some mysterious way by a Mind. This is very interesting, precisely because the core of ID is whether or not the origins of life (including evolution) have been guided by a mind (or a designer, or an agent, depending on your terminology). It is interesting that Biologos and the Intelligent Design movement converge at this point, precisely because it is really the only point of ID that matters. Applegate has several criticisms of Behe and his methods. I don’t care to get into whether or not they are legitimate Read More ›

As long as it’s NOT about their love for evolution. It is common to hear that the Nazis utterly lacked morality. Of course, that satisfies deep anger. But is it true? University of California professor Richard Weikart’s recent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), offers an illuminating answer: No. Hitler’s Ethic (a companion to his From Darwin to Hitler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) demonstrates that the Nazis indeed had an ethic. It flowed directly and painstakingly from evolutionary theory, as understood in Germany at the time. I wish I had said this stuff. Come to think of it, I at least reported it here. Subscribe to Salvo, one of the few pubs worth reading these Read More ›

Conspiracies to suppress, manipulate and distort information undoubtedly occur. Society needs to be vigilant to guard against deception. An increasing number of alleged conspiracies are being covered by the media, all reflecting in some way on the integrity of politicians, or business leaders or the scientific enterprise. Conspiracy theorists are skilled in appealing to emotion, phrasing allegations in a provocative way, and promoting their own reconstructions of events so as to capture the imagination of the public. Ted Goertzel’s essay on this theme sounded some alarm bells when it provided four recent examples: “Conspiracy theorists – some of them scientifically trained – have claimed that the HIV virus is not the cause of AIDS, that global warming is a manipulative Read More ›

Our knowledge of the fossil record has changed immensely since 1859, when Darwin felt obliged to explain why his hypothesis of gradualism was not confirmed by the study of fossil successions. His argument was, as is well known, that the fossil record exhibits extreme imperfection. The abrupt appearance of macrofossils at the base of the Cambrian was recognized and Darwin deduced that the evolutionary origins of those animals must have extended well back into the Precambrian. “One-and-a-half centuries of subsequent research have revealed a vast microscopic fossil record of unicellular protists and bacteria extending, some would argue, as far back as there are sedimentary rocks from which they could be recovered. But although fossils of millimetre- to metre-scale multicellular organisms Read More ›

Evolution was claimed to be an undeniable fact in the nineteenth century so today new proofs hardly seem necessary. But science continues to offer them up, say evolutionists, as we probe the depths of biology. These days a common source of such proofs is the genomic data which exploded onto the scene in recent decades. But are the new data really undeniable confirmations of Enlightenment speculation or are the new data merely interpreted according to the same old metaphysics?   Read more

Finally someone has stated the obvious: Evolution does not play a crucial role in life science research. Of course evolution, like the flat earth theory, does make some helpful predictions. But one need not have one eye on the evolution text in order to rightly do life science research, as Steven Shapin explains:  Read more

A Review Of The Case Against A Darwinian Origin Of Protein Folds By Douglas Axe, Bio-Complexity, Issue 1, pp. 1-12

Proteins adopt a higher order structure (eg: alpha helices and beta sheets) that define their functional domains.  Years ago Michael Denton and Craig Marshall reviewed this higher structural order in proteins and proposed that protein folding patterns could be classified into a finite number of discrete families whose construction might be constrained by a set of underlying natural laws (1).  In his latest critique Biologic Institute molecular biologist Douglas Axe has raised the ever-pertinent question of whether Darwinian evolution can adequately explain the origins of protein structure folds given the vast search space of possible protein sequence combinations that exist for moderately large proteins, say 300 amino acids in length.  To begin Axe introduces his readers to the sampling problem.  That is, given the postulated maximum number of distinct physical events that could have occurred since the universe began (10¹⁵⁰) we cannot surmise that evolution has had enough time to find the 10³⁹⁰ possible amino-acid combinations of a 300 amino acid long protein. Read More ›