I was recently engaged in correspondance with someone who told me that the theory of ID isn’t scientific because it doesn’t make scientific predictions. We’ve all heard it, right? Indeed, most of you are probably bored to tears having had to address, and respond to, this argument over and over, seemingly to no avail. As with so many things in this discussion, the constantly re-iterated response seems to repeatedly fall on deaf ears. So, I took a few moments to ‘brain storm’ and jot down those scientific predictions, made by ID, which immediately came to mind. This is what I came up with: Predictions In Astronomy/Cosmology ID predicts that the Universe had a beginning. ID predicts an increase (and not Read More ›

From Britain’s Truth in Science, reviews of how evolution is taught in textbooks from such sources as Oxford and Cambridge. For example, about “Biological Science 1 & 2 – Cambridge University Press”, we learn, This textbook has frequent caveats and disclaimers when explaining evolution, but also has dogmatic assertions, which sometimes makes the text highly confusing.  Not everyone sympathetic to design will agree with all of their criteria, but it is a great resource for what to expect.

… Expelled The late Karl Popper, universally regarded as a referee of what constitutes a valid scientific theory, complained that Darwinian selection is not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory because it can neither make predictions nor be rigorously tested abve the micro-level, where it is a mere truism. Unlike Einstein’s theory of gravity, the idea of evolution by natural selection is in principle not falsifiable. No matter what the complexity of an organism, a Darwinist can always make up an “adaptive” story explaining its origin. And when pressed to explain a severe problem like the usefulness of incipient organs, he can take refuge in the unobservable. This was Darwin’s own tactic in later editions of the Origin , where he Read More ›

This* paper suggests that geoscience education struggles with  quantitative vs. qualitative research methods:

Geoscience education and geocognition researchers are an interesting group. As geoscientists, we work in the world of natural processes, and we speak a language that quantifies and categorizes our observations in an orderly fashion. As education researchers, however, we enter a different world. Here, we often find ourselves confronted with problems and data that are difficult to measure, that resist experimentation, and that are quite often impossible to quantify. “Reality” may become fuzzy, multiplying from our expected single, objective version to something iterative and subjective. In these situations, we realize that our trusted tools of observation, experiment, and objectivity fail us, so we turn to the tools of qualitative inquiry to provide the insight that we seek. But here we hit some interesting, and often frustrating, hurdles.

First of all, it is an unfortunate fact that many of us have little or no formal training in qualitative research methods. Usually working in isolation, we enter an entirely new literature base; we engage with unfamiliar and, at times, uncomfortable ways of thinking and practicing. Each application of a new method or approach is, in a sense, a private re-invention of the wheel. The inevitable outcome of this private labor is that we tend to work in isolation—we are an archipelago, laboriously discussing in our publications the theory behind qualitative convention and justifying standard processes (“…is well established in the social and behavioral sciences…”). Having negotiated this challenging (but eminently rewarding!) process, we then find that our geoscientist peers are often highly skeptical of our methods, results, and interpretations. Sometimes skepticism becomes criticism without critique. The following comments, or variants of them, will be familiar to many geoscience education researchers:

• It’s all subjective!

• That’s not an interpretation! That’s just what you wanted to say! Read More ›

In “Human+: forecasting our future” (New Scientist, 15 April 2011), Cormac Sheridan takes us on a tour of metro retro speculation about the human future: The premise underlying Human+, the exhibition that opens today at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is that the future is knowable – even though everyone knows it’s not. As a species, we seem to be hard-wired to speculate on what’s going to happen next. Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman and his team have tapped into this tendency to put together a fascinating array of objects, creations and schemes, each of which explores some aspect of our engineered future. Gorman’s catalogue essay aptly describes the show as “an Alice-in-Wonderland world of pills, Read More ›

“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153 This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.

In “Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab” (New Scientist, 14 April 2011), Celeste Biever reports that the WIMPs (yes, yes,) wimped out: It’s just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe. After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn’t rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier Read More ›

In Salvo 15 (Winter 2010), Richard W. Stevens offers “What Gandalf Systems Tell Us About Intelligent Design”: I first saw Gandalf in 1974. No, not the wizard of The Lord of the Rings. This Gandalf was the colorful box attached to a PDP 11-40 computer, its lights blinking almost rhythmically amid a tangle of wires in the slightly dusty lab office. It had a label in faux Olde English lettering with that whimsical brand name.What was this device named Gandalf? It was a modem, an electronic machine that translates information from one symbolic form to another. A modem is a device that mod ulates (encodes) and demodulates (decodes). Modems allow computers to communicate with one another over telephone lines, cable Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), asks, After much seeking, you finally reach the oracle. You’ve come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: “Look, I’m busy, I only have time to answer one question. I know you’ve been thinking about intelligent design, and I’m glad you understand the doctrine now; Monton has given the right definition. I’ll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design in science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?” (P. 75) Well?

It’s Sunday, and here’s UCLA law professor Daniel Lowenstein questioning Oxford Christian mathematician (and ID sympathizer) John Lennox and on grounds for faith (April 6, 2011). Here’s Lennox vs.Christopher Hitchens. Here he gets Richard Dawkins to admit that a serious case can be made for God. He had debated Dawkins before.

Holly Bailey tells us, courtesy Yahoo News, (Apr 11, 11:41) “Will President Obama and the House GOP ever agree? Science suggests no”: Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” lead researcher Ryota Kanai writes of the study in the latest issue of Current Biology. “Our study now links personality traits with specific brain structure.” A caution is offered: While the London study Read More ›

Here are some excerpts from Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, and some articles, not for the faint of heart. For example, Secularism has crippled America’s ability to respond effectively to such threats, because it reduces morality to the subjective level—to personal feelings or ethnic tradition. These are things that cannot be rationally debated.Persuasion gives way to emotional manipulation and personal attacks. “Racist!” “Hater!” “Intolerant!” “Islamophobe!” The word tolerance once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate. Canadian free speechers, alas, wrote the book on that.

From the “earlier than thought” files, galaxies
From ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2011):

Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.Johan Richard, the lead author of a new study says: Read More ›

(Contest is now judged. Results are here.) First, here’s Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg: … There is also a less creditable reason for hostility to the idea of a multiverse, based on the fact that we will never be able to observe any subuniverses except our own. Livio and Rees, and Tegmark have given thorough discussions of various other ingredients of accepted theories that we will never be able to observe, without our being led to reject these theories. The test of a physical theory is not that everything in it should be observable and every prediction it makes should be testable, but rather that enough is observable and enough predictions are testable to give us confidence that the theory Read More ›

Here, kind readers were invited to “predict Darwin’s doom (or not)”, and win free stuff, either an Expelled or a Privileged Planet DVD.

Here are the winners: Read More ›