In Kairosfocus’ very good thread about functional complexity, I posted about antibody affinity maturation as an example of a very complex engineering process embedded in biological beings. Both Kairosfocus and Dionisio suggested that I could open a new thread to discuss the issue. When such good friends ask, I can only comply.  🙂 For lack of time, I will try to be very simple. First of all, I paste here my original post (#6 in the original thread): KF: Thank you for the very good summary. Among many other certainly interesting discussions, we may tend to forget sometimes that functionally specified complex information is the central point in ID theory. You are very good at reminding that to all here. I would Read More ›

I despise Henry Kissinger. He is an evil man. I am currently reading his On China (2011), and I was reminded of just how evil he is when I read his apology for Zhou Enlai (pp. 241-43). For those who do not remember, as premier of the PPR during the tumultuous 60s and 70s, Zhou was Mao’s chief henchman. The world will never know how many people Mao killed. Estimates range from 40 to 80 million, and Zhou was at his side implementing his policies every step of the way. Of this henchman to a genocidal maniac Kissinger writes: Surely Zhou’s methods of political survival involved lending his administrative skill to the execution of policies that he may well have Read More ›

Over the past few months, I noticed objectors to design theory dismissing or studiously ignoring a simple — much simpler than a clock — macroscopic example of Functionally Specific, Complex Organisation and/or associated Information (FSCO/I) and its empirically observed source, the ABU-Garcia Ambassadeur 6500 C3 fishing reel: Yes, FSCO/I is real, and has a known cause. {Added, Feb 6} It seems a few other clearly paradigmatic cases will help rivet the point, such as the organisation of a petroleum refinery: . . . or the wireframe view of a rifle ‘scope (which itself has many carefully arranged components): . . . or a calculator circuit: . . . or the wireframe for a gear tooth (showing how complex and exactingly Read More ›

Professor Krauss, author of “A Universe from Nothing,” has responded to Eric Metaxas’s Wall Street Journal article, Science Increasingly makes the case for God with a rebuttal titled, No, Astrobiology has not made the case for God (New Yorker, January 24, 2015). Having read Krauss’s rebuttal, I found it to be utterly devoid of quantitative reasoning, scientific predictions or novel arguments. That should tell you something: it’s a polemic masquerading as science. A question of bias Let me note for the record that Krauss is not merely an atheist, but a self-described antitheist. On the subject of God, he does not pretend to write as a disinterested scholar: he openly admits that he has an ideological axe to grind. As Read More ›