re•li•gion [ri-lij-uhn], noun: A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the world, especially when considered as the creation of a god or gods.  Read more

A friend pointed out that over at the Khan Academy, Salman Khan, while assuring his students he is not taking sides, seems to have been channeling such luminaries as John Ray and Alfred Wallace as he informs them that god would never design or create the particulars of this world. Khan—who has four degrees from MIT and Harvard and is certain that evolution and its natural selection created the entire biological world—assures the viewer that “You can ask any engineer” and they will tell you that simple laws underlying a complex design, as exemplified by the Mandelbrot set, is the better way. Of course non of this comes directly from Ray or Wallace—what this illustrates is not a homologous doctrine, Read More ›

It’s 1859 and Charles Darwin has just discovered a modern computer, transported back in time to his era. He turns it on. With a microscope he discovers a Core i7 920 CPU. Upon more investigation he discovers that it has approximately 781 million transistors. The computer has a terabyte drive, with an operating system that was compiled from more than 50 million lines of intelligently designed computer code. In my time-travel thought experiment, Darwin is transported into our contemporary era. Much to his amazement, he discovers that modern science has revealed that the simplest living cell is far more complex and sophisticated than the computer he discovered in 1859. What would Darwin do?

When I explained how astronomically unlikely protein evolution is, a professor complained that I had it all wrong. When he saw evolution’s ridiculously long odds he figured I must be assuming that the entire protein sequence space must be randomly sampled to yield functional proteins.  Read more