Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

UCEs: See Something—Say Something

Although it may seem that genomes would be made up of genes, in many higher species genes constitute only a small fraction of the DNA. The remainder of the genome is full of various elements and segments, some of which seem to be of little functional importance.  Read more

Professor Mohamed Noor: A gentleman and a scholar

Earlier this week, I put up a post about Professor Mohamed Noor, of Duke University, who also runs a free online course entitled, “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” through Coursera, which “gives interested people a very basic overview of the principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology … and tries to clarify some misconceptions.” People I know who have completed the course have praised it for the quality of its exposition. In the final lecture of the course for 2012, Professor Noor put up a Powerpoint slide claiming that Hitler believed in Intelligent Design. In my post, I argued that Professor Noor’s claim reflected a misunderstanding on his part of what Intelligent Design actually is. It takes a big Read More ›

The Big Easy Bans Intelligent Design, but the Big Story is Louisiana’s Good Science Grades

I visited New Orleans back in 1994, during a whirlwind three-month tour of the United States (courtesy of Greyhound buses) in which I crossed the continent four times, and got to see 34 states. I still have fond memories of the Big Easy: dining at Cafe du Monde, walking along Bourbon St. (pictured above, courtesy of Adrian Pingstone and Wikipedia), traveling on a street car along St. Charles Avenue, and going on a swamp tour along a nearby bayou, during which I got to meet a one-year-old pet alligator named Elvis. So it was with some amusement that I read an article by Stephen C. Webster in The Raw Story (19 December 2012) reporting that the school board for Orleans Read More ›

Transcriptional Noise: “We Once Thought it Was So Simple …”

Everyone has heard of the famous DNA macromolecule where our genes reside, but less well known is its cousin, the RNA macromolecule. Two different molecular machines produce copies of DNA for two different reasons. One machine copies the entire double helix for the purpose of duplicating the genome before the cell divides into two daughter cells. The other machine merely transcribes one of the two strands in the double helix, and only for a relatively short segment. This copy, or transcript, is an RNA, not DNA, molecule. If you remember only one thing about RNA it probably is that the RNA transcript is passed to the ribosome machine which translates RNA’s string of nucleotides into a string of amino acids Read More ›

Noor’s non sequitur, or: Did Hitler believe in Intelligent Design?

Dr. Mohamed Noor is the Earl D. McLean Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University. His specialties include evolution, genetics and genomics. Professor Noor also runs a free online course entitled, “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” through Coursera, which “gives interested people a very basic overview of the principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology … and tries to clarify some misconceptions.” By all accounts, Professor Noor’s exposition of evolutionary theory is admirably lucid and succinct. In the last week of his course, Dr. Noor discusses some applications and misapplications of the theory of evolution. In the final lecture, Dr. Noor puts up a Powerpoint slide claiming that Hitler believed in Intelligent Design! The text is below: Read More ›

Registration Now Open For 2013 Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design

From here. The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute announces two intensive 9-day seminars for college students during the summer of 2013. The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences will prepare students to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID). The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, cosmology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. This seminar is open to students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the natural sciences or the philosophy of science. Applicants must be college juniors or seniors or already in graduate school. Details and registration information. The C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Read More ›

The Naturalists’ Conundrum

Kantian Naturalist writes that almost all naturalists (including, presumably, himself) believe selection tends to favor true beliefs. I don’t know why he would say this, because Neo-Darwinian Evolution (“NDE”) posits that selection favors characters that increase fitness as measured by relative reproductive fecundity. Per NDE, selection is indifferent the truth. It will select for a false belief if, for whatever reason, that belief increases fitness. Now the naturalist might say that it is obvious that true belief must increase fitness more than false belief. Is it obvious? Consider the conundrum of religious belief from an NDE perspective: 1. By definition the naturalist believes religious belief is false. 2. The overwhelming majority of people throughout history have held religious belief. 3. Read More ›

New Research Shows Retina Complexities

New researchout of Germany is helping to pinpoint details of how the mammalian retina converts incoming light into digital signals which ultimately make their way to the brain. Before the information is shipped off to the brain, however, it undergoes massive processing which, among other things, helps to extract features present in the incoming image. It is so complex that we are still a long way from understanding how it all works. The new research, as one report explains, “show that the retina is by no means as well understood as is commonly believed.” We have discussed some of the complexities of converting the incoming light into digital signals to be sent to the brain here, here andhere. There is no doubt much yet to Read More ›

The Problem of Quantity and the Importance of the Immaterial

I am a big fan of numbers. One of the reasons that I like Intelligent Design is because it presents a quantitative approach to many issues and questions that were previously unquantifiable. However, sometimes an over obsession with quantity can cause one to get a distorted picture of reality. Read More

Larry Moran asks: “Do philosophers take William Lane Craig’s arguments seriously?”

Over at his blog, Professor Larry Moran is shocked, shocked, that the arguments of Professor William Lane Craig for the existence of God are treated with respect by Craig’s philosophical colleagues. “Is it true that philosophy departments have sunk to this level?” he asks. A few days earlier, Craig had written an article for The Washington Post entitled, Humanism for Children, in which he pointed to “a resurgence of interest in arguments for God’s existence based on reason and evidence alone” among philosophers, and added: All of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments, find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary philosophical scene. Professor Moran Read More ›

A tale of two tragedies, in China and the US — reflections and suggestions

Yesterday was a hard day, even for those like me who were quite late to the news. We woke up here to the news on BBC — a Caribbean tradition — that someone in China had attacked a classroom with a knife of some kind and had slashed twenty-two children. This, in a country where there is a very harsh one child per family law, backed up by forced abortions etc. And, apparently, it is not the first such recent attack in that country. (Cf article in the Hartford Courant — and yes, that is tragically close to home.) Then, across the course of the day, news emerged of a similar attack in an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, USA. Read More ›

Today We Grieve With Those Who Grieve

Our hearts cry out in anguish at the unspeakable evil visited upon the students, staff and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  Tears are rolling down my face as I write this.  For those who will try to make sense of this senselessness, I leave you with the following from David B. Hart: [When confronted with enormous evil we must not attempt to] console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the Read More ›