This morning I was observing some of the recent comment thread activity on Uncommon Descent, and my attention was drawn to this comment by Nick Matzke on the subject of the “onion test” argument for junk DNA: I have [The Myth of Junk DNA], and all [Jonathan] Wells does is gloss past T. Ryan Gregory’s onion argument; Wells gives the more important point, the huge variability in genome size as a widespread pattern, much attention at all. Considering Wells’s book is the definitive ID treatment of the junk DNA issue, and us ID critics have been bashing ID for its complete failure on the genome-size variability issue for years, this was a huge omission on Wells’s part. Here, I offer Read More ›

Dawkins is clearly a fading star in a world in which modern science, technology — and especially computational and information theory — have relegated him to the status of a vestigial remain of the 19th century. Richard Dawkins: Science doesn’t yet know how everything started. And as I said last time, they’re working on it. Dawkins’ logic and grammar are strangely confused. Science is not a person, and therefore doesn’t “know” anything. Of course, “they” are still “working on” how inanimate matter spontaneously generated complex information-processing software and hardware, just as the alchemists were “working on” how chemical reactions could turn lead into gold. The only problem is, lead can’t be turned into gold with chemical reactions; it doesn’t work Read More ›

From “Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: ‘Humans Are Just Modified Fish’” ScienceDaily (October 7, 2011), we learn: “We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs,” said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal’s body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the Read More ›

Pasted here with minimal comment (for now) is Eugenie Scott’s reply to an open letter written regarding a years-ago controversy involving the concept of evolution as proposed by the National Association of Biology Teachers. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I make this post because (other than the site I link from) this letter seems to have next to no internet presence – I’d hate for it to be lost.

The letter follows below.

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The UK Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID) director, Dr. Alastair Noble, has published a new report on the C4ID website. He writes, I participated in a series of short interviews on Sunday 25th September on a number of BBC Local Radio stations with James Williams, a lecturer in Science Education at the University of Sussex. The theme of the interviews was the recent statement from some 30 scientists, including Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, demanding that, among other things, intelligent design (ID) be banned from discussion in schools as a scientific proposition[1]. Williams has subsequently blogged about the encounter at WordPress.com.[2] Both in the interviews and in his blog, Williams is significantly confused about ID.  The current misrepresentation of Read More ›