Who said that? Phillip Johnson? Mike Behe? Nope. Materialist atheists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, in What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. xxii: … we’ve been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless we shouldn’t say so. Not, anyhow, in public. To do that is, however inadvertently, to align oneself with the Forces of Darkness, whose goal it is to bring Science into disrepute. Well, we don’t agree. We think the way to discomfort the Forces of Darkness is to follow the arguments wherever they may lead, spreading such light as one can in the course of doing Read More ›

Historically, not a rare event. Here Rabbi Moshe Averick does an interview with host Ken R. Unger,a “true Renaissance Man”, who notes Atheists sound real smart until they come up against someone who knows science better than they do. Today’s guest, Rabbi Moshe Averick, is just that kinda guy. His book Nonsense a High Order: The Confused and Illusory world of the Atheist takes on top atheists and he usually comes out on top. Learn why he believes Intelligent Design is more scientific than the outdated pseudo science of Evolutionary Theory. Broadcast starts here.

In my last post I demonstrated that Leslie Orgel coined the phrase “specified complexity.” Then I demonstrated that William Dembski uses the phrase in an identical sense. This placed Mathgrrl on the horns of a dilemma. She can stick with her assertion that the concept of “specified complexity” is meaningless, but if she does that she has to admit that materialist hero Orgel was employing a meaningless concept. Or she can admit that Orgel’s concept of “specified complexity” is meaningful, but if she does that she has to admit that ID proponent Dembski’s use of the concept is legitimate. What is a good materialist to do? Dance, evade and obfuscate of course! Now Mathgrrl writes: “I have said nothing about Read More ›

In the face of charges from a frantic Darwinist, Paul Nelson points out that he is not “quote mining” when he quotes Lewis “Six Impossible Things” Wolpert making the same argument as himself: Read More ›

Bradley Monton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, offers: So does intelligent design count as science? I maintain that it is a mistake to put too much weight on that question. Larry Laudan got the answer right: If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like “pseudo-science” and “unscientific” from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us. If our goal is to believe truth and avoid falsehood, and if we are rational people who take into account evidence in deciding what to believe, then we need to focus on the question of what evidence there is for and against Read More ›

[If so, give your UD news staff a chance to duck before you tell their wives … Like, we just report, okay … ] Apparently worried by a recent trend toward critical thinking, the evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Covalence has republished a 2002 article by Christian Darwin stalwart George Murphy on what’s wrong with the idea that there might be evidence for design in nature; Just as the Son of God limited himself by taking human form and dying on a cross, God limits divine action in the world to be in accord with rational laws which God has chosen. This enables us to understand the world on its own terms, but it also means that natural processes hide Read More ›

Here, Barry Arrington notes that MatthGrrl seems to think that specified complexity is a meaningful term if Leslie Orgel uses it to mean A, but not if Bill Dembski uses it to mean A.

This reminded me of something, couldn’t think what it was for a while, then remembered…

For a while, one heard the claim that ID advocates invented the Marx-Freud-Darwin triad of materialist influences evident in your Sunday Fishwrap.

That was an unlikely scenario in my experience because, in order to communicate with a broad audience from a minority position (which they apparently do if you believe the frantic screeds of the Darwin lobby), they must riff off an accepted cultural link.

Well, they did. Here it is, in a textbook written a person who, to the best of my knowledge was a thoroughgoing Darwin advocate at the time, Read More ›

Paul Nelson has fun at Evolution News and Views with diagrams and “ontogenetic depth”: Understanding Ontogenetic Depth, Part I: Naming Versus MeasuringI was supposed to do this a year ago — well, long before that, too — but a glacier passed me on the interstate, and then I ran out of gas, got so depressed that I threw my notes into a box, and…oh, never mind. Let’s get started. After the second entry in this series (part II), we’ll open up the comments section for your responses. 1. Introduction: Why A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure, Ontogenetic Depth, Nevertheless Really Matters to Evolutionary Theory Then he has fun with the latest download of P. Z. Myers: I have to Read More ›

At National Public Radio, Marcelo Gleiser asks (April 6, 2011), “Can Scientists Overreach?”.Glieser, a theoretical physicist, offers an appreciation of Marilynne Robinson’s Yale lectures, offering: For science to advance it needs to fail. The truths of today will not be the truths of tomorrow. For example, … Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were just “two little dark clouds” floating around Newton’s classical “law of gravity” physics. They were Michelson and Morley’s measurements of the velocity of light and the puzzling phenomenon of blackbody radiation. Kelvin was quite sure that these troublesome little clouds would shortly be blown away. Yet modern physics advances—relativity and quantum mechanics—derive from these two little dark clouds, not from the theory to which they Read More ›

At TechCrunch (Apr 10, 2011), Sarah Lacy catches Peter Thiel in a politically incorrect moment in “We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.”: the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.[ … ] But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to Read More ›

File under this one under: If it ain’t broke … In Current Biology (Volume 21, Issue 7, 612-616, 24 March 2011), we read that A 525 million year old fossil hemichordate with preserved soft tissues is the earliest and largest fossil hemichordate zooid and offers unmatched insight into the fossil anatomy and evolution of the group. Abstract: Hemichordates are known as fossils from at least the earliest mid-Cambrian Period (ca. 510 Ma) and are well represented in the fossil record by the graptolithinid pterobranchs (“graptolites”), which include the most abundantly preserved component of Paleozoic macroplankton [1]. However, records of the soft tissues of fossil hemichordates are exceedingly rare and lack clear anatomical details [2]. Galeaplumosus abilus gen. et sp. nov. Read More ›

“A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.” You might reasonably wonder whether writing a critique of the classical Darwinist programme is worth the effort at this late date. Good friends in ‘wet’ biology tell us that none of them is ‘that kind” of Darwinist any more; no one in structural biology is a bona fide adaptationist. … We are pleased to hear of these realignments, but we doubt that they are typical of biology at large (consider, for example, ongoing research on mathematical models of optimal natural selection). They are certainly not typical of informed opinion in fields that either of us has worked in including Read More ›

(Part 3 in three-part series. In Part 1 we discussed how NASA had chosen a schizophrenic approach to life on Mars. In Part 2 we discussed how Hoover’s ET paper destroyed their control of the narrative, as well as discomfitted many Darwinists. In this final part of the series, we look at how NASA has attempted to regain control of the ET narrative while making it comfortable for Darwinists again. But wait, these NASA types are all members of the Mars Society. Why am I confusing them with Darwinists? [You must read CS Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, to understand the connection between planetary “manifest destiny” and a cosmological “social darwinism.” Lewis’ is the best book I know to Read More ›

University of Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller has commented The Guardian (3 May 2010): The most basic formulation of ID is that biology is divine technology. In other words, God is no less – and possibly no more – than an infinitely better version of the ideal Homo sapiens, whose distinctive species calling card is art, science and technology. Thus, when ID supporters claim that a cell is as intelligently designed as a mousetrap, they mean it literally. The difference between God and us is simply that God is the one being in whom all of our virtues are concentrated perfectly, whereas for our own part those virtues are distributed imperfectly amongst many individuals.It is easy to imagine how this way Read More ›

Jerry Coyne, DN*, disses Lynn Margulis, NAS**, over her recent Discover magazine interview, here:

round 1970, biologist Lynn Margulis achieved renown for suggesting, and then showing, that eukaryotic cells originated by a symbiotic union of early prokaryotes, with some engulfing others and then the engulfed bacteria evolving into at least two of the cell’s vital organelles: mitochondria and (in plants) chloroplasts. Although others had suggested this before, Margulis gets the credit for pushing the theory forward, supporting it with biochemical and microbiological data, and recognizing its implications. Later work on DNA sequencing supported her completely.

But, alas, in his view, Read More ›