I have a hard time getting some materialists to admit that two plus two is infallibly four. Here, a 5’9″ white guy has a hard time getting college students to admit that he is infallibly not a seven year old, 6’5″ Chinese woman.
Readers of these pages are familiar with the logical fallacy known as Miller’s Mendacity. From our glossary: Miller’s Mendacity is a particular type of strawman fallacy frequently employed by Darwinists. It invariably consists of the following two steps: 1. Erect the strawman: The Darwinist falsely declares that intelligent design is based on the following assertion: If something is improbable it must have been designed. 2. Demolish the strawman: The Darwinist then demonstrates an improbable event that was obviously not designed (such as dealing a particular hand of cards from a randomized deck), and declares “ID is demolished because I have just demonstrated an extremely improbable event that was obviously not designed.” Miller’s Mendacity is named for Brown University biochemist Ken Read More ›
In a comment over at Sandwalk Larry writes: Bill says, But the point is moot. ID is not a scientific endeavor. Never has been. It’s a political movement with a social agenda to inject religion into American public schools. Simple as that. The debate took place in Canada where we allow the teaching of religion in public schools. None of us give a damn about the American Constitution. We’re interesting in knowing whether the science is valid or not. If the Intelligent Design proponents have legitimate complaints about evolution and if they have good scientific arguments in favor of design then those ideas should be taught in Canadian schools in spite of what some judge in Pennsylvania said ten years Read More ›
Nye sounds like old Uncle John discoursing on the “big issues” after six beers, except he is stone sober. Check it out: Why Are So Many Smart People Stupid About Philosophy?
This is the third of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. This is a good time in our discussion to note that the title of Denton’s book has resulted in considerable unnecessary confusion, because far from believing that “evolution” as such is a theory in crisis, as we have seen, Denton is a firm believer in evolution defined as descent with modification. Denton believes that the specific evolutionary theory of Neo-Darwinism is in crisis, and he wanted to title his book “Neo-Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis,” but his publisher prevailed upon him to use the more widely used, but far less accurate, term. In Chapter 3 Denton notes that everyone agrees Read More ›
For some time now Upright Biped has been arguing that information cannot be reduced to chemistry, and last year he started his own website to further his key idea that when information is translated by cellular machinery, it organizes inanimate matter (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc) into all the living things on earth. See biosemiosis.org Essentially, UB says all of life is an artifact created by the manipulation of chemicals according to the information embedded in the cell. Now comes the March 2016 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society with a special issue on DNA as Information. The table of contents is here. We would like to draw special attention to the article What is Information by Marcello Barbieri. The abstract Read More ›
This is the second of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. “Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” George Gaylord Simpson, “The History of Life,” in ed. Sol Tax, Evolution After Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 1:149. “Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery; commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional ancestral forms.” D.M. Raup and Steven M. Stanley, Principles of Paleontology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1971), 306. “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing Read More ›
This is the first of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. The fossil record has always been a problem for Darwinism, as Darwin himself was the first to note. In Origin of Species he asserted that if his theory of gradual transformation of organisms through the accumulation of micro-adaptions over eons of time were true, “then the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, [must] be truly enormous.” And in the very same paragraph he admitted that: “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.” Darwin tried to save his Read More ›
Did you catch the headlines about a group of scientists trotting out the venerable old Doomsday Clock because the US has not agreed to destroy its economy in the service of climate change alarmism? Whatever its merits during the Cold War (when actual Armageddon was sometimes only literal minutes away), the Doomsday Clock today is about nothing but scientists vying for political power. As the Federalist helpfully explains here: This desire to translate scientific knowledge into political power is likewise at the root of the climate change debate. Climate change scientists who are trying to instill a sense of crisis in us with Doomsday Clocks aren’t telling us that we have to find better ways to continue our way Read More ›
Teleology in biology is unavoidable. Dawkins was surely correct when he wrote that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” He even characterized that appearance as “overwhelming.” Of course, Dawkins does not believe living things were designed, and his entire project has been to convince his readers that the overwhelming appearance of design is an illusion. The problem with the “it is all a grand illusion” position is that as science has progressed – even in the relatively short time since Dawkins wrote those words in 1987 – it has become increasingly more difficult to believe. Advances in our understanding of genetics have revealed a semiotic code of staggering Read More ›
In a few short paragraphs here. For some reason the phrase “epic smackdown” keeps coming to mind.
We have had several comments lately about problems with the “captcha” function on comments. As you might imagine, UD is inundated with spam, and the captcha function is designed to prevent the spammers from accessing the combox. We have decided, however, to ratchet back on the captcha. Now, you will need to fill in the captcha only when you log in to your user ID. You will not need to fill it in to post comments. We will try this for a while. We worry that advanced spammers will take advantage of it, and if that happens we might have to change course. But for now we will see how this works.
After spending the last few years pretending to be an ID proponent, all the while bashing every other ID proponent and disparaging most ID ideas, Salvador Cordova has finally come clean and formally withdrawn from the ID movement. Here. He did it over at The Skeptical Zone, of course, where he has found a home with more like-minded folks.
TPeeler brings this oldie but goody back to our attention: Darwin’s theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals. Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin’s theory has been Read More ›
By James Hannam: As it happens, much of the evidence marshaled in favor of the conflict thesis turns out to be bogus. The Church never tried to outlaw the number zero or human dissection; no one was burnt at the stake for scientific ideas; and no educated person in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat, whatever interpretations of the Bible might imply. Popes have had better things to do than ban vaccination or lightning conductors on churches. The thought of a pope excommunicating Halley’s Comet is absurd, but this has not prevented the tale of Calixtus III doing just that from entering scientific folklore.