2010

Tandem repeats are short stretches of DNA that are repeated head-to-tail. “At first sight,” explains evolutionist Marcelo Vinces, “it may seem unlikely that this stutter-DNA has any biological function.” This is an example of how evolutionary thinking harms science. Since life is an accident, biology must be straightforward. If we do not immediately perceive how something works, then evolutionists typically think it is non functional junk. Over and over this evolutionary expectation has turned out wrong. And now again with tandem repeats.  Read more

It seems that evolutionists are forever repeating their refrain that evolution is both theory and fact. And for good reason—evolution is commonly misunderstood. On the one hand, evolution is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of species. That is the theory part of evolution and it is open to substantial revision. A wide variety of explanations are possible and even the venerable natural selection can be discarded if need be. The only requirement, it seems, is that the explanation must be mechanistic. Aside from that, most any explanation, no matter how fantastic, is fair game.  Read more

Mathematician Granville Sewell on Common Design   On this episode of  Dr. Sewell’s new book, In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design, is published by Discovery Institute Press. Click here to listen.ID the Future, pro-ID mathematician Granville Sewell explains his views on common design and how the second law of thermodynamics challenges materialism. Listen in as Sewell and Luskin explore an expanse of important topics, such as the origin of human consciousness, scientism, education policy, and the problem of evil. www.idthefuture.com

Jeffrey Dahmer: “If it all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God? Can’t I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself.” [Biography, “Jeffrey Dahmer: The Monster Within,” A&E, 1996.] Naturalists like to stress that you don’t need God or religion to be good. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins even suggest that leaving God out of the equation actually allows one to be more moral because then our moral acts are authentic, motivated by deep conviction rather than by having a divine gun to our heads. Even so, Dahmer’s logic is compelling. We need some external reference point — God — to justify being good. And that justification is significant in its own right. Without it, we can still Read More ›

The article is open access, so you can choose to download it. Or choose not to download it. Or choose to click over to YouTube, or the Huffington Post, to see what’s doing there.

Whatever happens, “you” — meaning the person reading this right now — won’t be making a decision. Physics and chemistry will. These forces will inform you of their “decision,” so to speak, by the perceptual illusion, constructed in the infinite wisdom of natural selection, which gives you the misleading sense of having made a choice. Otherwise known as free will, which doesn’t exist.
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Dr. Behe’s “Misusing Protistan Examples to Propagage Mythes about Intelligent Design” is up at his UD blog.

One problem with evolution is its strong bias toward viewing everything in biology as a kludge. When a newly discovered structure is examined, evolutionists take one look and conclude it is leftover junk. After all, blind, unguided mutations and other processes just happened to produce everything we see. The evolutionist’s going in position is that biology is a fluke. We’re lucky anything works.  Read more

In this thread, I will suggest the identity of Intelligent Designer of life. The question of the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, but if a design is detected, it inspires the question, “who is the Designer?”

If the identity of the Intelligent Designer is outside of ID proper, is it outside the speculations of science? I think not. As Dawkins himself once remarked:

You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science.

Richard Dawkins
as reported in Dawkins on the Discovery Institute Payroll?

In that spirit, rather than offer a theological speculation, I will offer a speculation based on inference from scientific observation. And I will argue scientific observation suggests the Intelligent Designer is a Deity of some sort.

To begin, I point out this essay in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2005 by physicist Richard Conn Henry:

“The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is ‘this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.’”
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The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time, that the Universe is mental.
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According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
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The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual.

Richard Conn Henry
The Mental Universe: Nature Volume 436

Michael Ruse is not happy with Jerry Fodor’s new book (described here at UD). As Ruse begins his review in the Boston Globe: “What Darwin Got Wrong is an intensely irritating book….” . Here is the conclusion of Ruse’s review: The Darwinian does not want to say that the world is designed. That is what the Intelligent Design crew argues. The Darwinian is using a metaphor to understand the material nonthinking world. We treat that world as if it were an object of design, because doing so is tremendously valuable heuristically. And the use of metaphor is a commonplace in science. Why then do we have these arguments? The clue is given at the end, when the authors start to Read More ›

The disgraced former head of a U.N. backed climate research center admits 1.  No global warming in the last 15 years. 2.  It might have been warmer in medieval times than now.

I see where Evolution Weekend, brainchild of the Clergy Letter Project, has come and gone again: Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic – to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith. Finally, as with The Clergy Letters themselves, which have now been signed by more than 13,000 members of the clergy in the United States, Evolution Weekend makes it clear that those claiming that people must choose between religion Read More ›

The evolutionary expectation was that species adapt by unguided variation. Sometimes, it was thought, this blind process happens to stumble upon an improved design which has a reproductive advantage, and so becomes more prevalent in future generations. This evolutionary model could hardly be more wrong. We now have glimpsed the profound complexity of biology adaptation mechanisms. They are anything but a blind process and recent research adds yet more insight into this fascinating aspect of biology that contradicts evolution.  Read more

My grandfather was a prolific arrowhead collector.  He spent countless hours walking back and forth over the plains, hills and creek bottoms of Texas looking for “points,” as he called them, and by the time he passed away his collection ran into the hundreds.  When I was a young boy in the 60’s papa sometimes let me come along with him to look for points, but I did not have the patience required for this game.  Instead of emulating my grandfather’s painstaking and systematic search techniques, I mainly wondered around with my head in the clouds.  From time to time I would snatch up a random rock and run to show it to papa, yelling, “What about this one?”  My efforts invariably yielded the same response.  Papa would glance at the rock and hand it back to me while shaking his head and muttering “shah, shah, shah” under his breath.

What was the difference between my random rocks and the points my grandfather was looking for?  The rocks he rejected and the rocks he collected were all rocks, so what made the “points” special?  Just this.  In my grandfather’s judgment each rock he added to his collection was different from the thousands upon thousands of rocks he rejected because it bore complex marks that conformed to a specified pattern.  In short, like every other archeologist who has ever separated artifacts from natural objects, he made a design inference.  Read More ›

Ever tire of chasing down all those evolutionary fallacies? Dustin Penn and co workers have solved the problem by collecting them in one place: at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) website. Their goal is to improve public education and understanding of evolution. If that means revealing the various strawmen, mischaracterizations, twisting of science, and other logical fallacies, then they have greatly succeeded.  Read more