Sometimes our commenters’ excellent insights need their own OP.  This is one of those times.  In the thread to the “naked, normal Darwinism” post Timaeus writes this regarding BioLogos’ Darrel Falk’s response to Bill Dembski’s BioLogos post: Falk concluded his column with the words: “Darwin’s views on teleology, human exceptionalism, and miracles were not compatible with Christianity. Quite simply, this is why I do not consider my views to be Darwinian and why I am not a Darwinist.” What Falk is trying to do here — and what all TEs try to do — is to divide Darwinian evolution into a scientific part and a philosophical part, and call the philosophical part “Darwinism.” The standard TE move is then to Read More ›

For some time now, one of the ID Foundations series, has been on the UD “most popular” list. I had occasion to visit it just now, to see why. I found a statement by a Mr Peter Griffin regarding an exchange with the pseudonymous anti design theory web personality known as Zachriel, and find myself compelled to reply to the issue of violation of confidence and willful poisoning and polarisation of issues by embroiling attacks to the person. In particular, I must note how this post plainly reflects a violation of confidence of correspondence in the teeth of an explicit act of protest regarding earlier violation of confidence. It seems that Zachriel thought he could get away with such violation Read More ›

It has long been known, and even longer been suspected, that organisms not only can adapt rapidly to environmental challenges, but that such adaptations can be passed on to subsequent generations. Evolutionists have resisted such findings, but they now are beyond dispute. Whereas the evolutionary dogma had been that populations undergo change via selection acting on random variation, the science revealed that populations can change quite rapidly and in response to the environmental shift. Indeed there are is a variety of mechanisms that are now at least partially understood that play a role in this environmentally-directed process. Some influence which genes are expressed and others modify the DNA using the so-called adaptive mutations. So now at least some evolutionists are trying Read More ›

Some of you have written privately to complain about some of the ads that show up on this site.  Believe me, we are not always thrilled with them ourselves.  However, we have a contract with an online ad company and the revenue we receive from these ads is a major factor in helping us keep this site operating.  Please be assured that we do not select the ads.  In fact, the ads showing up on your computer are probably not the same ads that show up on mine.  Web marketing is so sophisticated now that highly specific targeting is possible.  For example, a few weeks ago I inquired about purchasing a particular product.  Now, every time I go on the Read More ›

Richard Owen is best known for naming the Dinosauria and for opposing Darwin’s “On the origin of species“. For the former, he is (usually) celebrated, as the name is in common usage around the world. For the latter, he is reviled as a bigot and his stance allowed subsequent generations of evolutionists to tar him as an obscurantist (although conveniently overlooking his scientific arguments). Owen’s statue used to have pride of place in London’s Natural History Museum (he oversaw the transfer of the natural history collections to the new South Kensington museum in 1881 and he was knighted in 1884). However, in the lead up to the bicentennial celebrations for Charles Darwin, Owen was moved and a marble statue of Read More ›

In today’s PhysOrg highlights, we hear about how yeast cells are able to communicate with one another via biochemical means. Using mathematical means to separate “noise” from information pathways. These beasts have “broadband”! “The mathematics provides variance decomposition techniques for dynamic systems,” said Dr Bowsher. “We were able to make rigorous connections between the concept of intrinsic noise in systems biology, the notion of information capacity used in communications engineering, and a correlation ratio introduced in the 1950s by Alfréd Rényi. We constructed a generalised signal-to-noise measure from the variance components to quantify the efficacy of information flow through a biochemical network.” Here’s a quote: The paper, which describes the application of this approach to yeast cells, shows that the Read More ›