Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Year

2010

Review Of Signature In The Cell In Spanish

2010 sees the beginning of a new series in Spanish exploring key findings from contemporary science that support the intelligent design inference. The series Paseos Por La Naturaleza (A Walk Through Nature) aims to further strengthen the global influence that the Intelligent Design movement already enjoys and raise awareness of important academic resources that are today challenging orthodox Darwinism and revitalizing the call for a fresh perspective on scientific discourse. Second installment can be found at: Paseos Por La Naturaleza See also: Organización Internacional para el Avance Científico del Diseño Inteligente Un nuevo libro sobre el diseño inteligente: Un hito en la lucha contra el naturalismo científico, by Robert Deyes and Carolina Deyes (transl: New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Read More ›

book-in-the-beginning-lg
Book cover

In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design

Discovery now has a web site for my new book, here . I have posted a summary of the contents of each chapter here . Some of the essays have been previously published, for example, chapter 6, “My Failed Simulation,” was a 2008 on-line Human Events article, and chapter 7, now retitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday” also appeared in Human Events in 2008. Some of the ideas in the book I first posted here at UD, some ideas were inspired by postings of other authors here.

Will Evolution Weekend Sermons Discuss Alleged Murderer Amy Bishop?

Today is the closing day of “Evolution Weekend”. The weekend is promoted by The clergy letter project. This is a weekend dedicated to glorifying Darwinism in churches.

Curiously one of the scientists on call to help clergy and parishioners promote the glories of Darwinism was Amy Bishop, she is listed here:

Name: Amy Bishop, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor
Address: Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL 35899
Areas of Expertise: neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, evolution of the human brain
Email: ——-@uah.edu

Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.

They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead. Think I’m overstating the case against Darwinism? Consider what Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss argues in his book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer.

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Toppling The Stanchions Of Biological Determinacy

Synopsis Of Chapter Eleven, Signature In The Cell, by Stephen MeyerISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne Biological determinists will argue on the assumption that universal laws undergird the origin of life. Such an appeal to natural law is of course not a novel one. Indeed even thousands of years ago Aristotle philosophized over the existence of some universal organizing principle that could shape life into the easily identifiable forms we see today. From a protein sequence perspective Pennsylvania State University biochemists Gary Steinman and Marian Cole gave seemingly empirical substance to the idea that there were certain combinations of amino acids that were more likely to form as a direct result of amino-acid bonding energies. Along the same grain, biophysicist Read More ›

Dinosaurs from birds?

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

Can SETI’s algorithm detect intelligence?

TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to:

. . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. . . . You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. . . .With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can prov de digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,”

The Challenge for ID
1) Is SETI’s methodology valid? Read More ›

Not Just Intelligently Designed, Intelligently Engineered

Those of us who are ID proponents often hear the following from ID deniers (hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander): “You mindless, science-destroying, knuckle-dragging, religiously fanatical ID clowns keep talking about complexity. What’s the big deal about complexity? Complex stuff happens all the time by chance and necessity. Get a life, and stop trying to impose a theocracy on those of us who have it all figured out. The science is settled.”

So goes the highly persuasive, ever-logical, empirically validated, ideologically neutral argumentation of the ID denier.

The problem is that living systems are not just transparently intelligently designed; they are intelligently engineered. It’s not just ID; it’s IE.
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Who Performed the Surgery?


Stephen Barr misunderstands the place of natural laws and regularities in design inferences. Barr writes:

…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God.

Frank Beckwith (in the comments following Barr’s post) echoes the misunderstanding:

As I have already noted, the ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends.

Hm. To quote Hamlet (Act 2, scene 2): “Nay, that follows not.” Here’s a vignette to make the point.
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London Showing of EXPELLED + Debate Afterwards

Justin Brierley asked me to publicize this. If you’re near London on the 27th, please attend. Premier Christian Radio invites you to “Expelled” the Movie. Due to popular demand an additional screening of the controversial Intelligent Design film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” and a debate to follow will take place on Saturday 27th February 6.30pm at Imperial College London, South Kensington. The event will be hosted by Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio’s faith discussion programme “Unbelievable?” For details and booking for this significant event visit www.premier.org.uk/expelled. The post screening debate and Q&A time will include: Dr. Alastair Noble (Former Inspector of Schools) and Dr. Vij Sodera (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) who advocate intelligent design and Prof. Read More ›

Darwinian Desperation: Petition to Re-Classify “Non-Science” Books

Not content with their virtually complete hegemony over public school science education, now the Darwinists have a new ploy to eradicate ID from scientific consideration: just re-classify it away. In a petition, some PSU science students are demanding the complete re-classification and re-shelving of ID related books to a non-science category. Apparently the instigators of this petition believe that the mere presence of an ID related book on a science shelf serves to further confuse an already confused public about what is and is not science. Citing a recent survey by the NSF that “70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process,” the petition claims that “further confusion surrounding what is and is not science is particularly problematic.” According to the petition, (and the NSF), the general public is just to stupid to know the difference between “real” science, and philosophy masquerading as science. Read More ›

In Remembrance of Privileged Planet Star Robert Jastrow

In case we haven’t mentioned it previously at UD, I thought today would be a good day to remember Robert Jastrow, one of the stars of the pro-ID movie Privileged Planet.

Jastrow passed away February 8, 2008, a little more than two years ago today. He was the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the celebrated ID-sympathetic book: God and the Astronomers (available at www.ARN.org).

bob jastrow

Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world…
The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts in Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading up to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

Robert Jastrow
God and the Astronomers

Here is the tribute written in the NY Times:
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Coffee!!: Miss Shelver strikes again, but this one must use men’s room, I gather

A while back, I wrote about a self-absorbed female Darwinist* who was misshelving Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution in the “religion” section of the bookstore, to make some odd personal point:

At a blog called “biologists helping bookstores,” a Pasadena-based woman whose handle is Shandon explains how she deliberately misshelved Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution, and a number of other books – distributing them around the store according to her private tastes.

Well, the misshelving bug has struck Darwinists again.

Here is another one – a guy, apparently, this time – helping to make life a bigger pain in the neck for everyone, in defense of Darwin:

Today I went to Hastings and had my camera with me. The copy of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell I moved a few months ago was in neither the science nor religion section, and was probably purchased. Today I moved The Edge of Evolution and The Darwin Myth away from the shelve directly under where copies of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth were, and placed them next to – I just had to – the Adventure Bible and the Princess Bible in the religion section.

Now, if I had to say one thing about modern Darwinism that should raise suspicion in any citizen anywhere, it is this: The lengths to which these people will go to prevent their fellow citizens from discovering information that they are actually looking for.

If you ever wondered what a world run by Darwinists would look like, well, this is what it would look like: An unending stream of busybodies running your life by limiting goods and services, in the name of “evolution” or some similarly unquestionable cause. The big thing is to render the cause, whatever it is, unquestionable, by whatever means needed.

I hear that someone has complained about the problem to the bookstore- and hope that others will, and that the current Miss Shelver runner-up will be asked to take courses in information science, or something.

Earlier, I wrote to friends, Read More ›

Transposable Elements: From Junk DNA to Evolution Mechanism

Imagine if, back in 1859, Charles Darwin explained that evolution proceeds in fits and starts. Species rapidly appear as if planted there, and then go unchanged for eons. There would have been, as we say today, no bounce. In fact Darwin would have been laughed off the stage, and he knew it. Darwin had to present a narrative of gradualism. Funny thing is, the fits-and-starts narrative is today precisely what evolutionists tell us.  Read more

More Accelerated Sequence Evolution

Evolutionists have a wide range of explanatory mechanisms from which to draw when trying to figure out how the species evolved. But sometimes these supposed mechanisms look more like a cover-up than an explanation. For instance, the differences between the human and chimp DNA instructions are not sprinkled, more or less at random, throughout our genome. Rather, these differences are found in clusters. Even more interesting, at these locations the chimp’s genome is quite similar to other primates–it is the human that differs from the rest, not the chimp. Evolutionists refer to these clusters as human accelerated regions (HARs) because they believe the human genome evolved from a human-chimp common ancestor. These HARs cause several problems for evolution. For instance, Read More ›

Jason Rosenhouse on Stephen Barr’s “First Things” Publication on ID

I’d like to critique Jason Rosenhouse’s critique of Stephen Barr’s critique of ID. I know, round and round we go, where we stop, no one knows. Rosenhouse appreciates the first paragraph of Barr’s analysis, but is disappointed with the rest. I am disappointed with it all. But Rosenhouse does make a few good points in taking stock of the ID movement’s influence with the public:

I hope he is right about no one being moved toward religious belief by ID writing, but I do not think he is. The ID folks are tapping into deep intuitions people have that complex, functioning structures do not arise from natural, non-intelligent causes. Many are already uncomfortable with the naturalism of modern science and see evolution as dehumanizing and implausible. They like the idea that modern science can provide some rational support for theism. My experiences at ID gatherings suggest to me that an awful lot of people are being led just where they want to go. Certainly the public opinion polls show a great deal of sympathy for ID, to the point of wanting it taught next to evolution in science classes.

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