2010

I have just been re-reading R. G. Collingwoods “Essay on Metaphysics”, and am now more that ever convinced that Collingwood’s perspective is incredibly important to the ID debate. Collingwood was a mid-20th Century British Philosopher who was WaynFlete Professor of Metaphysical Sciences at Oxford University, and who worked himself to death. He published many works – all of them in style that is incredibly easy to read, but very challenging to the reader. Unlike many philosophers he was very interested in the natural sciences, and documented the course of Western science in his “Idea of Nature”. Yet, in his last days he warned that natural science, as now conceived in the West, will ultimately destroy Western Civilization. And this would Read More ›

Bit late with the coffee wagon, I admit. Other issues to deal with. We are told in the queen of the “National Enquirer” science press that Neanderthals are not the only ‘apes’ humans bred with. Every father on this list wants his daughter to date and later marry a Neanderthal, right? Oh, wait, This just in: Most fathers don’t even want their daughters to date, let alone marry, a guy who plays the guitar in the subway for a living, let alone …like, there was a time when one of a father’s jobs was to check out suitors for his daughters’ hands. Girls can be unduly influenced by romantic issues, but good fathers tend to ask boring stuff like “What Read More ›

In my previous post, I suggested that we can learn from panspermia how to avoid the Origin-of-life (OOL) problem–by spreading it out. In the case of materialists from Epicurus to Hoyle, this was accomplished by making time eternal. If you have eternity to do something, they argue, why even the most improbable will necessarily occur. One can also make a spatial version of this argument by saying if the universe is infinite, then somewhere the improbable will necessarily occur. Sounds good, but… Does this argument work? Not the way they intend it to. For one thing, most cosmologists believe the universe to have begun in a Big Bang, which severely restricts the amount of time available for any improbable object. Read More ›

A previous blog drew attention to Glial (or Muller) cells that conduct light from the surface of the eye’s retina to the photoreceptor cells. These cells provide a low-scattering passage for light from the retinal surface to the photoreceptor cells, thus acting as optical fibres. Their function was reported to “mediate the image transfer through the vertebrate retina with minimal distortion and low loss”. New research in this area has increased knowledge of their functionality after constructing a light-guiding model of the retina outside the fovea. As a result, the “retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images”. For more, go here.

John Avise commences his paper with a quotation from Michael Behe affirming that research into the molecular workings of the cell leads unambiguously to the conclusion: “design!” To counter this, Avise presents the human genome as clear evidence for non-sentient design. He thinks that conventional evolutionary mechanisms are perfectly capable of explaining complexity, declaring: “it is not my intent here to repeat the voluminous evidence for how natural selection in conjunction with other nonsentient evolutionary forces can yield complex adaptations”. Instead, he suggests that the decision as to whether the design is intelligent or non-sentient can be made by looking at the imperfections and flaws evident in the cell’s molecular systems. “Both a Creator God and natural selection are powerful Read More ›

Evolutionists are always pointing out that evolution is a lousy process. Our aching backs, useless wisdom teeth, and backward wiring in our retinas are, they say, consequences of evolution’s ineptitude. It is hardly the sort of thing that a designer would want to copy. Would you want to fly on an aircraft if its design was inspired by such a haphazard process? Of course not. And who can argue with the evolutionist’s logic. If life is the result of the random interplay of the laws of thermodynamics, motion, electromagnetism, gravity and so forth, then we would hardly expect anything that works very well, if at all. But if all this is true, then what about nature’s dazzling designs? If evolution Read More ›

In a previous blog, I mentioned the fact that meteoritic amino acids are undoubtedly a signature of extraterrestrial life and not abiotic, because they are all chiral. However, they are all L-amino (none are D-amino), which is unexpected from the hypothesis of independent spontaneous generation for each event, which should randomly select between L- and D-. There are three possibilities: (1) we hit the lottery with a one-in-a-million chance of never having seen a common D-amino; (2a) there’s a “Darwin-of-the-gaps” materialist explanation for the prevalence of L-amino life; (2b) another “Darwin-of-the-gaps” materialist explanation for abiotic formation of L-amino life; (3) all these meteorites are actually infected from the same source of life. Now (1) offends my mathematical sense as it Read More ›

Fransciso Ayala says intelligent design is an “atrocity” and “disastrous for religion” because it makes God directly responsible for all of the evil in the world.  Ayala apparently believes he can get God “off the hook” for all of the evil in the world by setting him up as a remote deity – along the lines of the wind-up-the-clock deity believed in by, say, a seventeenth century deist – who, while He may have set the initial conditions in the universe, has not tended to it since and therefore cannot be blamed if the evolutionary train has gone off the rails in his absence.  Rubbish.  Ayala is pushing bad theology to support his bad science.  Read More ›

I can’t let this one go without posting the reference to the paper generating all the fuss. Retinal glial cells enhance human vision acuity.   A. M. Labin and E. N. Ribak Physics Department, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel “We construct a light-guiding model of the retina outside the fovea, in which an array of glial (Muller) cells permeates the depth of retina down to the photoreceptors. The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images. The results provide evidence for a natural optical waveguide array, which preserves almost perfectly images obtained through a narrow pupil. Light guiding within the retinal volume is an effective and biologically convenient way to improve Read More ›

In the steady-stream of “not junk after all” findings it was inevitable that our backward retina would be discovered to work quite well, thank you. But if you think it is another icon of evolution that has been shattered, think again. Evolutionary explanations of vision go back to Darwin, and they haven’t changed much in spite of our much improved understanding of how vision actually works. And now new findings that the inverted design of our retina isn’t as bad as it looks, while interesting, are not much more than a yawner for evolutionists.  Read more

Here’s an enjoyable piece of testimony from May 6th, 2010 by Lord Christopher Monckton before Congress. For the pdf of his testimony, go here. His point about science not being a matter of consensus is well taken and was stated even more eloquently by Michael Crichton in his 2003 Caltech Michelin lecture (go here). Also important is the point Monckton made about science functioning as a monopsony (one buyer for many sellers; in monopoly there’s one seller for many buyers). The buyer, according to him, is the public, but properly speaking it’s the government funding agencies that take our tax dollars. As effectively the only funder, it can dictate the type of product made, in this case, climate research that supports anthropogenic Read More ›

After arguing Ad nauseam (examples here, here, here and here) that the evil and dysteleology in nature prove evolution and then denying that he ever did such a thing, evolutionist Jerry Coyne is now sharing more of his theological wisdom. After telling us what god would and wouldn’t do, he now adds that the best conclusion is for atheism or Aristotelianism:  Read more

Is there anyone out there who still thinks evolution is merely a scientific theory? If so they can read Douglas Futuyma’s review of Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True, where Futuyma highlights a few of Coyne’s theological proclamations, to add to the many Futuyma himself has made in past years. Of course, all of this theology sits squarely within the evolution genre.  Read more

When you have made a bad call, hold on to it with all your might.  From NEW SCIENTIST. The eye was evolution’s great invention  06 May 2010  “Creationists have used the eye to make the “argument from design”. Evolutionary biologists say that the “inside out” vertebrate retina – leaves us with a blind spot – one of evolution’s “greatest mistakes”. Creationists have argue that the backwards retina has no problems providing excellent vision – and its structure enhances vision. A study by (non-creationist) neurophysicists in Israel has found just that. Müller cells, which support and nourish the neurons overlying the retina’s light-sensitive layer, also collect, filter and refocus light, before delivering it to the light sensors to make images clearer. Read More ›

Evolutionist Denis Alexander approvingly recounts a story of a life scientist student who, upon learning about the intricacies and beauty of DNA packaging, concluded the scheme must have been designed. [62] But elsewhere Alexander finds that the Intelligent Design theory is guilty of designer-of-the-gaps reasoning [304ff].  Read more