This post is my personal attempt to reconcile recent statements made by Barry Arrington and Eric Holloway, regarding whether or not a supernatural Designer is required in order to produce a living thing. The claim I am putting forward here is that there are four levels of inquiry in Intelligent Design: (1) Which patterns in Nature can be identified, through a process of scientific investigation, as the work of intelligent agents? That is, which patterns in Nature can be shown to have intelligent agents as their proximate causes? (2) Which of the patterns identified in (1) can be shown to have been caused by intelligent agents outside the observable universe? (3) For which of the patterns identified in (2) as Read More ›

There seems to be a lot of chatter on the news and the Internet about the candidates’ beliefs about origins. While many in the media are using this as a test of scientific savvy (and a way to discredit people they don’t like), I think there are deeper reasons why the question of origins is important to an election.
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Although for many years I was a classical concert pianist, I was raised by a wonderful father, who is the most brilliant scientist I have ever known, and he imparted to me a love of science. My love of mathematics and science never left me, and my superb education in these disciplines has benefited me well, since I now earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace R&D. The first experience I had with computational search algorithms involved AI games theory, which you can read about here. Brute (but intelligently designed) computational force can do some interesting things (and even elegant things, as you can discover from my perfect-play endgame databases), but only in domains with restricted search horizons, Read More ›

The real battle in cosmology today is the war on rationality and orderliness. From physicist Bruce Gordon, “Balloons on a string,” The Nature of Nature (ISI Books, 2011) p. 585: The mindless multiverse “solution” to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter. What the absence of efficient material causality in fundamental physics and cosmology reveals instead is the limit of scientific explanations and the need for a deeper metaphysical understanding of the world’s rationality and orderliness. That explanation has always been, and will forever be, Mind over matter. When the logical and metaphysical necessity of an efficient cause, the demonstrable absence of a material one, and the realized implication of a universe both contingent and finite in Read More ›

At the turn of the 19th century, Darwinism was dealt a harsh blow due to the discovery of Mendel’s work on genetics. The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium, among other such consequences, flowing from this newly minted science, dramatically pointed to the limitations that Mendel’s theory represented vis-a-vis Darwinism.

Darwinists, ever religiously motivated to come up with rationalizations, found a cudgel—through the work of neo-Darwinists—with which to fight back against the discovery of genes.

A new century. New discoveries. New challenges.

In a paper just published in Science, the authors present the findings of their work on the ‘lab-rat’ of plant studies, Arabidopsis thaliana which show the profound, if not defining, influence that epigenetics can have on “evolution”.

Here’s the link.

One quote that I love:

Ecker said the results of the study provide some of the first evidence that the epigenetic code can be rewritten quickly and to dramatic effect. “This means that genes are not destiny,” he said. “If we are anything like these plants, our epigenome may also undergo relatively rapid spontaneous change that could have a powerful influence on our biological traits.”

I have been arguing here for years that the environment has to be involved in some kind of triggering event for gene ‘turn-ons/turn-offs’. How else to explain “cecal valves” developing in a lizard living alone on an island in the Adriatic in only thirty or so years. (Here’s the link)

But there’s more.
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It could have been Godzilla vs. King Kong … From “Ancient Crocodile Competed With Titanoboa, World’s Largest Snake, for Food, Paleontologists Discover” (ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2011), we learn: In a new study appearing Sept. 15 in the journal Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe a new 20-foot extinct species discovered in the same Colombian coal mine with Titanoboa, the world’s largest snake. Researchers think that the 14 metre titanoboa and the 7 metre croc both lived in and around fresh water and ate fish. When the snake was not eating younger crocs. We can assume it was not chummy with the older ones. Challenges theories? The new species is a dyrosaurid, commonly believed to be primarily ocean-dwelling, coastal reptiles. The Read More ›

While evolutionists consistently state that evolution is a fact beyond all reasonable doubt, the empirical evidence consistently states otherwise. One can see examples of this in the scientific journals, where articles assume evolution is true from the beginning, but then also present the scientific evidence which point in the other direction. It is interesting to see this manifestation of science versus religion buried in the depths of research papers. Here is one paper that tries to explain how evolution works, but must admit that “we know little about the fundamental principles of phenotypic variability that permit new phenotypes to arise.”  Read more