Barry Arrington

I was looking at some numbers concerning the Cambrian explosion.  The results were quite stunning to me. Simple life, we are told, emerged 3.8 billion years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion occurred 550 million years ago.  In a single 10 million year period (taking the longest estimate), 95% of the animal phyla appeared.  The math: For the first 85% of the history of life there was no significant animal life. Almost all animal life arose in only the last 15% of the history of life. Indeed, 95% of animal phyla arose in a length of time that is only one forth of one percent of the history of life (0.25%). If the entire history of life were 3,800 years long, almost all Read More ›

. . . so long as the predicted event is safely 100,000 years in the future:  Human race will split into two different species  The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry . . . Dr Curry’s theory may strike a chord with readers who have read H G Wells’ classic novel The Time Machine, in particular his descriptions of the Eloi and the Morlock races.  In the 1895 book, the human race has Read More ›

In my last post I referred to Richard Dawkins’ assertion that a state organized according to Darwinian principles would be a fascist state.  In response some of the commenters alluded to Dawkins’ statement that he is “anti-Darwinian” when it comes to politics.  Dawkins, the commenters said, believes we can “rise above” our Darwinian impulses.  The problem with this assertion is that Dawkins is trying to have it both ways.  He writes: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA Read More ›

As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty.  Over at First Things  Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview  Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state.”

Dr. Dembski’s and Ms. O’Leary’s earlier posts today have produced some, shall we say, “intemperate” rhetoric from the commenters.  I suggest we calm down and look at this issue dispassionately, starting with the raw data.  The raw data is unambiguous.  There is in fact a difference between racial groups when it comes to standard measures of intelligence.  This report of a task force ofthe American Psychological Association (which certainly cannot be accused of conservative bias) makes this clear.  As the report says, Asians do best on IQ tests.  Whites are in the middle.  Blacks score somewhat lower.  The controversy is not over the raw data.  The heat comes when the cause of these differences is discussed.  It is the classic “nature or nurture” debate.  Are intelligence differences among races Read More ›

My tongue-in-cheek response to Denyse’s last post got me to thinking seriously about a practical way to demonstrate the lunacy of materialists’ invoking the “multiverse” to get around the statistical impossibility of life arising though blind unguided natural forces through pure random chance . See here for an example of this hand waving in action. I came up with a thought experiment. See below for more. Read More ›

Al Gore won the Nobel Prize today for his work in global warming.  I understand that each Nobel winner gets a cash award of about $1,500,000.  This will come in handy for Gore, so he can pay all those utility bills for his home, which consumes more than 10 times the energy of the average American home.

 See the whole interview in the Guardian here: In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”

 In a previous post a commentor attacked design on moral grounds using this example:  “Would you conclude that the designer was sadistic for creating insects that kill one another in the mating process?”  Of course, at one level this attack has been answered again and again.  In this blog’s “arguments that have been defeated over and over” section we say: This [argument] is really odd as it is basically a religious argument being made against Intelligent Design. The proponent of this argument is making a faith based assertion that God is perfect and hence incapable of bad design. ID makes no claim that the source of complexity is a perfect God incapable of imperfection [or, in the commenter’s example, sadism]. Read More ›

A couple of days ago I received the following email from a student in France:

 Hello,First of all, please excuse my poor English (I am a French native).  I am currently writing an essay in epistemology with two of my co- students (I’m in second year of M.Sc in research, specialized in Evolutive Ecology and Epidemiology of Host-Parasites relationships), in which we focus on the gloabl acceptance by society of different models to explain evolution. More than the models (we choose the “original” theory of Charles Darwin, the transformist theory of Lamarck, the “balanced equilibrium” theory of Stephen Jay-Gould, and the more recent Intelligent Design), we are interested in the people who believe in them.I contact you because the blog “Uncommon descent” states you as a friend of them. This blog is well known in France as one of the main information stream on Intelligent Design. My question is: how do you comme to trust in Intelligent Design? What do you think to be the most important flaws in the modern theories describing the course of evolution?

Read More ›

Once again I direct our readers to First Things.  This time Amanda Shaw discusses how imaginary numbers, once rejected as “Impossible, irrational, delusionary, absurd, untrustworthy, fictitious, imaginary,” are now a staple of everyday math.  See http://www.firstthings.com/ Is there an analogy to ID here?  The fact that imaginary numbers were not part of the math “system” did not mean they were not out there waiting to be used by those who were willing to look beyond the blinders of the existing paradigm.  Now, as has been argued at this site before, ID can be fit within the existing scientific paradigm; but even if this were not the case, the point is should we cling to a limiting paradigm that prevents us Read More ›

“In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses. Occam’s razor also states the ‘principle of parsimony.’”  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsimony In the post below (“Multiverse of the Gaps”), I point to a recent paper in which a Darwinist attempts to get around the extremely small probability (less than 1 in 10 raised to the negative 1,018) of life emerging by chance by invoking an infinite “multiverse.”  The question for the class today is which is the most parsimonious hypothesis:  One designer or infinite universes?

Irony again.  I love it.  How many times have ID proponents been accused of resorting to the “God of the gaps” to explain the hard questions? For years Darwinists have said, essentially, “yes, the questions are hard, but we’re working on them and the answer is just around the corner.  No need to invoke design, especially if you believe God may have been the designer.”  (O’Leary’s “promissory materialism”) Now the Darwinists appear to be giving up and invoking a gap filler of their own.  I call it the “multiverse of the gaps.”  This article is an example:  http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/15 The author, an avowed Darwinist, gives up on Darwin to ever explain the origin of life.  He admits: “to attain the minimal complexity Read More ›

Kudos to Anthony Sacramone over at First Things for his hilarious (and insightful) take on the latest self help super-bestseller.  See here.  http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=833  Excerpt:  “After all, who wants to believe that they’re at the whim of chance, accident, or worse—a sovereign God? The idea of being either lost in a Darwinian universe or limited by environment, genetics, and luck is much too disheartening. And the prospect of being in the hands of an unsafe Creator, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, is absolutely infantilizing.”

A few days ago Sal posted the following quote from Darwin: From Letter 3154 — Darwin, C. R. to Herschel, J. F. W., 23 May [1861] One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed As Jack Krebs pointed out (and Sal freely admited, which was why he posted under “humor”), this was a quote mine, and Saint Charles went on to distance himself from this view.   Nevertheless, as Darwin’s son Francis made clear in his book, Darwin was haunted by thoughts of design to the end of his life.  In a July 3, 1881 letter to W. Grahm Darwin wrote:  “Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far Read More ›