2012

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 ›

There are two regular tragedies in the Intelligent Design movement. The first tragedy is the student who airs his or her doubts about Darwin, and a faculty member then makes it their life mission to block that student from a degree, or, if they get a degree, prevent them from getting any further. This sometimes happens via a bad letter of recommendation or a notice in their file or sometimes even calling other programs to tell them not to include the student. The second tragedy is the student who plays it safe, presuming that some day in the future they will have the position, stature, or whatever to present their doubts about Darwin. Many people counsel this procedure – keep Read More ›

Physicist Sean Carroll, an outspoken but ever-courteous defender of the New Atheism, has recently written a post entitled, The Case for Naturalism, at the end of which he kindly encloses a 10-minute video summary of the reasons which have led most scientists to reject the supernatural and accept that the natural world is all there is. The video, which is well worth watching, is excerpted from a two-hour debate held at Caltech on 27 March 2012, on the topic, Has Science Refuted Religion?. Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer argued for the affirmative, while Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson argued for the negative. In the course of his video presentation, Professor Carroll makes reference to a most remarkable woman from the Read More ›

(UD Editors:  We didn’t know what “SUSY” was.  It means “supersymmetry.”) When this happens within the corridors of high-energy physics, then science is in a bad way. Tomasso Dorigo, in a recent blog entry, chastens those who determinedly cling to SUSY despite no show of evidence for it at the LHC. Here’s what he says (but, of course, just plug in “Darwinism” where you see “SUSY”): What SUSY enthusiasts in fact do when they resort to the “Nature chose elsewhere to hide” argument is to manifest that their prior belief in SUSY being the correct theory of nature is 100%. This, in a Bayesian formalism, can be mathematically described as a “point mass” prior probability density function (PDF): a Dirac Read More ›