A week or so ago, Cornelius Hunter referenced a paper by Christoph Adami titled “Information-theoretic considerations concerning the origin of life” available here. Hunter cites the NewScientist article about Adami’s paper, “Chances of first life improved by weighted dice” and highlights in particular the remarkable statement: “Christoph Adami of Michigan State University in East Lansing decided to study the origin of life purely in terms of information theory, so he could ignore the chemistry involved.” The article continues: “[Adami] assumed that molecules must exceed a certain length in order to have enough information to self-replicate. These long molecules are made from different kinds of short molecules, called monomers.  Adami calculates that if you start with an equal number of each Read More ›

As the old saying goes, it’s not what they don’t know that scares me, but what they know for sure. Nowhere is that more applicable than with evolution asThe Guardian’s Andrew Brown reminds us today when hewrites, “Evolution is actually true.” Don’t blame the messenger, Brown is merely repeating what evolutionists say. And while it is true that evolution in a limited sense it true (change over time, adaptation, and so forth), no such nuance is intended by evolutionists. When evolutionists inform their audiences that evolution is true, they are referring to the origin of species. The problem here is not that this claim of knowledge is questionable or controversial—the problem is that the claim is unequivocally false. We can Read More ›

Evolution is a narrative, not a law-driven theory, and narratives are all about plot lines, conflicts and resolutions, good guys and bad guys, value-laden themes, motives, goals, objectives and so forth. These elements repeatedly appear in the evolution literature. For instance, in evolution there was at one point a “push” toward smaller dinosaur sizes, and the smaller sizes in dinosaurs helped to “trigger” a host of different traits. A wing-like surface area would have developed “to help glide” from tree to tree. After all, dinosaurs “were experimenting” with flight in various modes and finally “made the crucial leap” to powered flight, and so birds “were born.”  Read more

I’ve been saying the OP’s title for years now. And, every day, I read review articles in the like of Phys.Org (they usually get out the articles first!) and, sure enough, there’s an article undermining Darwinian orthodoxy and the neo-Darwinian mechanisms that underpin it. Here’s today’s latest. It involves the insect genome and proteins once considered indispensible, hence ‘conserved’, throughout all eukaryotic lineages: Cell division, the process that ensures equal transmission of genetic information to daughter cells, has been fundamentally conserved for over a billion years of evolution. Considering its ubiquity and essentiality, it is expected that proteins that carry out cell division would also be highly conserved. Challenging this assumption, scientists from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have found Read More ›

In my prior post UD News commented regarding someone who has denied that the difference between a random string of text and a string of text that consists of English sentences is that the latter conforms to a specification, i.e., the conventions of the English language. She said: It is hard to believe anyone doesn’t know this. My initial impulse was to write that I would modify her observation to: “It is impossible to believe anyone doesn’t know this; it is hard to believe anyone would not admit they know what they must know.” Upon reflection, however, I decided it is not really hard to believe after all. I remember very vividly when my friends told me Santa Claus was Read More ›

Over the last ten years in these pages we have seen versions of the following basic progression hundreds of times: 1.  Materialist makes false claim about ID. 2.  ID proponent explodes false claim and asks materialist to acknowledge his error. 3.  Materialist never gives an inch, bobs and weaves, and tries to change the subject. In this post E.Seigner gives us such a pristine example that I decided to use it as a paradigmatic illustration of the progression. At 265 E.Seigner trots out a version of the hoary old “ID proponents just think complex things must be designed” error. He writes: The further problem is that the contrast is not solid, but it’s a point on a continuum, where the point is Read More ›