At the First Church of Darwin, at the University of Chicago, Reverend Jerry Coyne preaches on evolution. Reverend Coyne’s preaching is very much in the Darwinian wisdom literature tradition, explaining all manner of religious doctrines that, as evolutionists have explained many times, we all must accept. As a service, Reverend Coyne has gathered those theological dictates he has deemed most important to the Church of Darwin in his book Why Evolution is True. These truths need to be preached to all peoples, and so here we begin. Here is, then, the Word of Coyne:  Read more

Over on the Biologos Website, Dr. Darrel Falk has posted a response to Dr. Stephen Meyer’s claim in “Signature in the Cell,” that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Dr. Falk cites a counterexample: “Consider the generation of antibody diversity for example. When a bacterium invades the body, a process results in a whole lot of random rearrangements of DNA sequence, and this eventually produces trillions of highly specific antibodies which specifically recognize and bind to the invading bacterial cells. The antibodies are highly specified. They bind only to that one type of bacteria. We go from a state of lower complexity to higher complexity—higher specified complexity!”   As I understand it, Read More ›

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt. Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error Read More ›

It would be foolish for me to try to predict what the twenty first century’s theory of origins will be, but I can tell you one thing: it will be called evolution.  Read more

Thought I’d whack the hornets’ nest with that deliberately provocative title.

But Dawkins isn’t the only person who can pack a lecture hall to capacity these days. Last Friday evening (1/22), molecular biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago spoke to a standing room-only (800+) audience in Ramsey Auditorium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. His topic was “Evolution in the 21st Century,” and you can see his slides here. I don’t know if an audio file will eventually be made available, but here are some observations about the lecture and Q & A:
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The UK Government’s chief scientist has called for honest dialogue on climate change. Quoted from the Timesonline Science chief John Beddington calls for honesty on climate change 27/01/10 “” “The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser. John Beddington was speaking to The Times in the wake of an admission by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it grossly overstated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were receding. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned Read More ›

2010 sees the beginning of a new series in Spanish exploring key findings from contemporary science that support the intelligent design inference. The series Passeos 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. First installment can be found at: Paseos Por La Naturaleza Evolucion de la comunicacion en las ballenas? Los darwinistas deberian estar preocupados, by Robert Deyes and Carolina Deyes (transl: Whale Evolution? Darwinist ‘Trawlers’ Have Every Reason To Be Concerned)

The first species to have its genome decoded by ‘next-generation-sequencing’ (NGS) machines is the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). The individual animal was known previously to the world as the mascot of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Scientists have been excited by the report because the NGS approach is significantly cheaper and faster than other methods. [. . .] The estimated size of the giant panda genome is said to be 2.40 Gb (compared with 2.45 Gb for the dog genome and 3.0 Gb for humans) making up about 21,000 genes (similar to humans). “Overall, we found that the quality of the predicted panda genes was comparable to that of other well-annotated mammalian genes.” Although the panda eats only bamboo leaves, Read More ›

A protein is created in the cell by copying its DNA gene, making any necessary edits to the copy, and passing the copy to the ribosome machine which uses the genetic code to translate the copy (a series of nucleotides) into the protein structure (a series of amino acids). But the story does not end here. The final step, after translation, is to fold the protein into its three dimensional structure. It is a step that is difficult to monitor and difficult to predict. The chain of amino acids folds up in a tiny fraction of a second and the final shape it assumes is not obvious. And sometimes the folding process is literally hidden as the nascent protein chain Read More ›

Dawkins is back from his Christmas break – a shame he didn’t listen to the message of Christmas about peace and goodwill to all men but launches into another ill informed attack on religion. Dawkins in the Times Of course for Dawkins a world without religion would be a better one. But when ever atheism has been tried out it leads to great tyranny – a shame he doesn’t mention Hitler, Stalin, Lennin, Pol Pot in his article. But Dawkins is a man of doubt and depressing hopelessness for all mankind. Atheism destroys the basis on which to make value judgements about right and wrong and leads to the tyranny of relativism in ethics. Out of the frying pan into Read More ›

Whenever I hear the phrase “overwhelming evidence” or “overwhelming scientific evidence,” my antennae go up and I know that someone is trying to sell me something. Last night, if you were watching the networks, you heard the following remark: I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future — because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. I’d like to encourage people to post in the comments to this thread other examples where the phrase “overwhelming [scientific] evidence” is Read More ›

Whenever I tune in to any discussion on the subject of “methodological naturalism,” I often marvel at the extent to which Darwinists will rewrite history and manipulate the language in their futile attempt to defend this so-called  “requirement” for science. In order to set the stage, we must first try to understand what methodological naturalism could possibly mean.

First, we have what one might call the “soft” definition, characterized as a preference for identifying for natural causes, a position which makes no final judgment about a universal  line of demarcation between science and non-science. Second, we have the “hard” definition as used by all the institutional Darwinists. In the second context, methodological naturalism is an institutional “rule” by which one group of researchers imposes on another group of researchers  an arbitrary, intrusive, and non-negotiable standard which states that scientists must study nature as if nature is all there is.

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Here is my post at Examiner on why. I thought it would never happen, actually. But I should have remembered – all psychology fads are inherently ridiculous because they are attempts to evade the depth of the human condition with some silly new idea. They collapse under the weight  of their own folly.

A key question for evolution has always been: How does biological variation arise? Darwin’s theory of evolution explained that natural selection killed off the less-fit variations, but how did the variation arise in the first place? In the nineteenth century the mechanisms of biological variation were not well understood and it was possible to imagine a sort of simple, perturbing force at work which gradually altered designs. This model did not match up very well with what Gregor Mendel was discovering about change in pea plants. About the same time that Darwin was working on revisions to his book Mendel was uncovering the fundamental laws of genetics. But Mendelian genetics would call for discrete jumps in biological variation rather than Read More ›

A fundamental, and often false, prediction of evolution is that functionally unconstrained DNA should not be conserved in distant species. As described here, everything from proteins to long stretches of DNA, though highly similar across different species, defy evolutionsts who search for a functional constraint, as required by their theory. And how do evolutionists respond? They claim that the mystery DNA must have a function, even though myriad tests have found none. If we cannot detect the function, then there must be a problem with the tests. There must be a function which otherwise is undetectable to us. It is a perfect example of how religious belief resists falsification as Antony Flew once illustrated in his gardener parable.  Read more