On May 16, UD News reported on the Ben Carson speech at Emory, raising some significant issues on the tendency of some Darwinists to toss ad hominem rhetorical stink-bombs at those who question the ethical implications of their views. (And yes, I am pointing to the unanswered problem that evolutionary materialism, ever since at least the days of Plato in The Laws Bk X, has never been able to objectively ground OUGHT in a worldview foundational IS that they accept.  And in light of what Hume pointed out with his guillotine argument, if such an objective basis for ought does not lie in the foundation of the worldview, it can never be brought in thereafter. Since we cannot have turtles Read More ›

A new method has been developed for mapping the precise locations at which DNA has been marked with a hydroxyl group. The hydrogen-oxygen molecule, like the methyl group to which it is attached, influences gene expression and so helps organisms adapt. The adaptation of species to environmental pressures would seem like obvious evidence for evolution. But in recent years we have begun to understand the enormous complexity of adaptation. It is not a story of natural selection acting on undirected biological variations (that is, variations that are blind to environmental pressures). This sort of undirected process has been the evolutionary dogma for the past century. In what was known as the Modern Synthesis, biological adaptation was described as resulting from blind variations Read More ›

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”  George Orwell

Here’s an open access paper, just published in Nature online (May 16, 2012) , about whose abstract a friend writes to say, “You could request a full paragraph of explanation for each sentence.” Well-known examples of South American butterflies mimicking each other’s wing patterns may be due – not to wing panel by wing panel natural selection – but to hybridization. That would make more sense. Never mind the famous question “What good is five percent of an eye?” Well, some good. A more important question for many life forms is, what good is looking only five percent less like lunch? Five percent of an eye may be useful; looking only five percent less like lunch is not likely to Read More ›

David W. Gibson asks some interesting questions in a comment to johnnyb’s last post.  First, he writes concerning Darwinism:  “How could it ever have come to pass that tens of thousands of the most intelligent humans in the world, after decades of detailed study, could STILL fall victim to the ‘transparently ludicrous’?” Let me answer this question by referring to a couple of similar examples from hisotry. In the second century Ptolemy devised his system of cosmology.  In this system each planet moves along a “deferent” and an “epicycle.”  The planet’s movement along these two paths cause it to move closer to and further away from the earth.  For the system to work, the planets sometimes had to slow down, Read More ›

Physicists have come up with the idea that there could be an astronomical number of universes in addition to our own. They call it the multiverse. It can explain very improbable events, such as the origin of life, because no matter how improbable an event, it becomes a virtual certainty when you have so many universes in which it might happen. This idea of separated worlds is now emerging in genetics as well, as some evolutionists are contemplating the idea of different DNA worlds. The evolutionary tree model doesn’t work very well, and so evolutionists are experimenting with other models. One is a network model and using it evolutionists have found that DNA sequences in nature tend to separate into Read More ›