In my previous post I discussed David Barash’s op-ed piece in the New York Timesreviewing the usual religious beliefs that motivate evolutionary thinking. Barash’s piece is not peculiar, it is standard evolutionary reasoning. For instance, another evolution professor, Jerry Coyne, responded today, in support of Barash’s arguments. Coyne explains that he agrees with Barash “100%” and adds a few additional comments of his own.  Read more

Well it’s fall again and the beginning of a new school year. That means evolution professors will be warming up their religious indoctrination messages for their unsuspecting students. A cynical and unfair criticism? No, actually, metaphysical and value-laden messages, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, are rampant in the life sciences. In fact evolutionists are certain they area right and so make no attempt to hide their absurdities. Consider David Barash, evolution professor paid by your tax dollars at the University of Washington. Barash gives a special lecture each fall to indoctrinate his young charges. He calls it “The Talk” (yes, evolutionists really are that pompous and condescending) and he happily tells the world about it today in the New York Times.  Read more

SalC has occasionally put up such threads and I see merit for it. I am sparked to do this by noticing a BA77 O/T comment picked up in a headline on water (or at least it seems so. END

logically_speaking says: In my opinion questions such as who was the designer and who designed the designer are only important after design has been detected. In fact this is how many branches of scientific endeavor must proceed. Ask any detective at a crime scene, do they ask who was the murderer before answering the question of was any murder committed in the first place. There are two separate questions (1) was there design and (2) who was the designer. It really is a common sense observation that the second question is logically downstream from the first. It is a corollary to that common sense observation that anyone who insists that one cannot address the upstream question until one has resolved Read More ›

AVS writes concerning the comparison between human codes/languages and the biological translation system: Do you not see how superficial your comparison is between the biological translation system and human codes and languages? Yes all these systems have a “code” of some sort that translates into “meaning,” but once you start digging deeper into the biological side of the equation, the differences become quite clear. I think the problem is that we as humans explain the translational system using letters and words (how else would we do it), which makes it seem like there is huge similarities between this system and actual languages themselves. My point is that when you get down to it, the biological translational system does not read Read More ›

Don’t miss the Workshop on Scientific Imperialism in Helsinki next April where attendees will consider whether “conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields, or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain.” Keynote Speaker Stephen Downes will ask  “Is the Appeal to Evolution in Explanations of Human Behavior a Case of Scientific Imperialism?”  Read more