From my Connecting blog Silicon Valley immortality: The resurrection of the head In general, legacy media explorations of culture today should be treated with considerable skepticism. Its mavens have a hard time imagining that traditional Christianity may thrive long after Terasem is a footnote in a learned dissertation on Silicon Valley culture. Would the media be safer if government regulated Photoshopping? If, for example, Jay Carney and Clare Shipman are comfortable with a Photoshopped library, impressive illusions are now socially accepted. Who then would be regulated? Noble words with insidious new meanings In practice, “accountability journalism” has often meant open instead of barely concealed partisanship. Increasingly, media refuse to cover both sides of an issue—say, climate change—or even to allow Read More ›

Here. (HT: VJT, also, Charles Babbage.) Video: [vimeo 17960119]

In a recent post over at his Sandwalk blog, Professor Larry Moran has been attempting to set the cat among the pigeons, with a list of five issues which, he anticipates, will lead to bitter recriminations within the “big tent” of the Intelligent Design movement. Professor Moran is shocked, shocked, that Intelligent Design advocates sometimes publicly disagree on certain issues, as illustrated by a recent series of posts (by Sal Cordova, Dr. Branko Kozulic and myself) on the neutral theory of evolution. He writes: The reason why this is so remarkable is that it almost never happens under the creationist big tent. Different Intelligent Design Creationists have widely conflicting views ranging from Young Earth Creationism to Theistic Evolution Creationism but Read More ›

I wrote here in 2006 that the Designer of life has put steganography (hidden messages in DNA) to help scientists understand DNA. The steganography cannot have emerged via selection or neutral evolution, it is just there, it is a design feature. We typically call them “conserved” sequences, but I’ve argued that “conserved” is the wrong term on empirical and theoretical grounds in Larry almost get’s it right. The prediction I made was at some point biotechnology industry will make money studying the steganography, they could care less about the phylogeny. They have done this unwittingly, but done it they have. Who is making money off of the Designer’s steganography? The ENCODE consortium, they’ve made 288 million dollars because of the Read More ›

Joe Felsenstein is a world class geneticist. Joe is credited with coining the phrase “Muller’s Ratchet” after Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller. Even though Joe is an evolutionist, Joe holds a unique position of being highly regarded by creationists for his work on population genetics. His work on Muller’s ratchet became a pillar of creationist population genetics. Most certainly creationists reject the bulk of his claims on one of his favorite topics, phylogeny, but they have high regard for his works on population genetics. Joe is incredibly generous in making the compilation of his research of 34 years into a freely downloadable textbook for students of population genetics. I can attest to the great effort Joe put into the book Read More ›