In recent exchanges  in and around UD on origins and the tree of life, Theobald’s 29 evidences claims (and by implication the sort of summary presented by Wikipedia in its articles on Abiogenesis and Evolution) have come up. [NB: to carry forward discussions, I suggest here on. I intend to do a for reference in support of discussion here in this FTR post.] That leads me to point out the case of the UD pro-darwinism essay challenge and the strange absence of and reluctance to provide a guest essay here at UD over the course of a full year, Sept/Oct 2012 – Sept/Oct 2013. The big issue seemed to be that in my challenge as explained, I required tackling the Read More ›

In this short post, I’d like to explain what’s wrong with KeithS’s argument for unguided evolution. The argument, in a nutshell, goes like this: 1. We observe objective nested hierarchies (ONH) 2. Unguided evolution explains ONH 3. A designer explains ONH, but also a trillion alternatives. 4. Both unguided evolution and a designer are capable of causing ONH. Conclusion: Unguided evolution is a trillion times better at explaining ONH. The first thing I’d like to point out is that while KeithS, in his post over at TSZ leans heavily on the evidence assembled by Dr. Douglas Theobald in his article, 29+ Evidences of Macroevolution, it is very odd that Dr. Theobald himself does not put forward this argument anywhere in Read More ›

In the face of confusing, accusatory, polarising and dismissive rhetoric emanating from all too many objectors to design thought in our day, it is useful to put on record the core design view and the pivotal design inference as a marker for reasonable discussion. That is, a key current task is to clear the air of obfuscating, polarising, ill informed and/or confusing or misleading and/or manipulative polarising rhetoric projected by objectors to modern design thought. First, the modern, scientific design view can be reasonably summarised in words from the NWE article on Intelligent Design: Intelligent design (ID) is the view that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that “certain features of the universe and of living things are Read More ›

Congratulations to all of those Darwinists who seek to exclude ID from science whenever the CSI in a structure or DNA sequence is difficult to quantify exactly.  You’ve just excluded a highly influential form of evolutionary analysis (cladistics) from science as well.  The following lengthy quote is from Adrain, Jonathan M.; Edgecombe, Gregory D. & Lieberman, Bruce S., Fossils, Phylogeny, and Form: An Analytical Approach, New York: Kluwer Academic (2002), pp 56-57: Phylogenetic inference is pivotal to an understanding of the systematics of any group.  Cladistics offers an objective framework for the analysis of data that inevitably incorporates elements of subjectivity (Hennig 1966, Swofford 1993).  A cladogram is a hypothesis of relationships derived from a set of putatively homologous morphological Read More ›

Thanks to News for posting this interview with Michael Behe. Here’s the money quote for me because it corresponds to my own expectation when I first started debating origins that someone would surely come along and explain to me why my commitment to ID is is naive because the evidence for Darwinism is so overwhelming (See my No Bomb After 10 Years post). Instead, the problems for the Darwinian side have only expanded. Starting at 3:30: Q. It’s been about 18 years since you first presented the concept of irreducible complexity. That was in your book Darwin’s Black Box, I believe, and I’m wondering if you feel that it stood up to criticism. Do you feel that IC is as Read More ›

I want to draw readers’ attention to a great debate that recently took place at the University of Texas at Dallas, between Blake Giunta, the founder of a recently-developed online apologetics resource called “TreeSearch“, and Justin Schieber, the host of the Reasonable Doubts radio show and podcast. Blake posted a postmortem review of the debate at his website. That, along with a video of the debate itself, can be found here. I highly recommend watching this debate for yourself and reading the summary over at the TreeSearch website. Blake is an up-and-coming intellectual who is supportive of ID (this comes out in the debate) and has shown himself to be widely read, thoughtful and reflective, and winsome in his approach. I am sure we Read More ›

The essence of the “Black Knight Taunt” is to pretend overwhelming victory after suffering a crushing defeat. Here we have a classic example from a commenter named “keiths.” In my No Bomb After 10 Years post I noted that after 10 years of debating origins I had never encountered a “science bomb” that would disabuse me of my ID position. Amusingly, keiths insisted that he had posted just such a bomb over at The Skeptical Zone that proved that Darwinism is “trillions” of times better at explaining the data than ID. His argument failed at many levels. Yet, even more amusingly, he kept on insisting he had debunked ID after his so-called bomb had been defused by numerous commenters. See, Read More ›