The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays has just been published from the always interesting and highly engaging David Berlinski. You can find it on Amazon here. Also, Dr. Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion has just been released in paperback.
Wesley J. Smith has written an interesting article about assisted suicide at The Weekly Standard called “Abandoning the Most Vulnerable.” The article is about the true story of Myrna Lebov who committed suicide at the age of 52 in her Manhattan apartment with the aid of her husband George Delury. According to Smith, Lebov had been suffering with progressive multiple sclerosis. The fallout:
Delury became an instant celebrity. He was acclaimed as a dedicated husband willing to risk jail to help his beloved wife achieve her desired end. The assisted-suicide movement set up a defense fund and renewed calls for legalization. Delury made numerous television appearances and was invited to speak to a convention of the American Psychiatric Association. He signed a deal for a book, later published under the title But What If She Wants to Die? Delury soon copped a plea to attempted manslaughter and served a few months in jail.
However, the story is more sordid than Delury’s public persona revealed. It turns out that he kept a diary, in which he explained what a burden Lebov was to him, and how he encouraged her to die only to free himself from the responsibility of caring for her. Excerpts:
Anika Smith has noted at Evolution News and Views that Richard Dawkins, author of the recently published book The Greatest Show On Earth, refuses to debate Stephen C. Meyer, author of the recent book The Signature in the Cell.
Dr. Meyer challenged Dawkins to a debate when he saw that their speaking tours would cross paths this fall in Seattle and New York. Dawkins declined through his publicists, saying he does not debate “creationists.”
“Dawkins’ response is disingenuous,” said Meyer. “Creationists believe the earth is 10,000 years old and use the Bible as the basis for their views on the origins of life. I don’t think the earth is 10,000 years old and my case for intelligent design is based on scientific evidence.”
According to Discovery Institute, where Dr. Meyer directs the Center for Science & Culture, the debate challenge is a standing invitation for any time and place that is mutually agreeable to both participants.
Wesley J. Smith has written a blog on human exceptionalism at Secondhand Smoke, his blog at First Things, in light of the recent publications about “Ardi”, the hominid that is supposedly “pretty close” to the common ancestor of humans and chimps way back 4.4 million years ago.
Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes…I bring this up because some Darwinsists and other assorted materialists have attacked human exceptionalism on the basis that our supposed emergence from the great apes and/or our genetic closeness means that we should not think of ourselves as distinctive. I never thought that was in the least persuasive. What matters is what we are now, not what might have been millions of years ago or how we got here…
And that brings me to Ewen Callaway’s review in New Scientist of the book Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human authored by Jeremy Taylor. As Mr. Callaway explains, Jeremy Taylor’s book sheds light on the issue of genetic similarity:
In this book, his first, the former BBC producer synthesises recent genetic, behavioural and neuroscientific research to argue that far more than a handful of genes divides humans from our evolutionary cousins, 6 million years removed.
Take that 98.4 per cent, an oft-repeated figure that has been used to argue that chimps deserve human rights. True, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes share an extraordinary amount of genetic similarity – yet humans and mice share almost as much.
Karl Giberson has responded in a post at Beliefnet to Dr. Dembski’s previous post here at UD. The post that Dr. Dembski wrote was in response to another Beliefnet post written by Darrel Falk. What is left out of this triangle is that I had also posted a response to Darrel Falk’s post right after Dr. Dembski’s post. But Karl Giberson seems to have missed my post, because not only am I not mentioned in his reply, his reply has already been directly refuted by my post, and I would assume that Karl Giberson wouldn’t have written his post if only he had read mine. He wrote:
The key point here, that Dembski claims to miss, is that the gift of creativity that God bestowed on the creation is theologically analogous to the gift of freedom God bestowed on us. Both we and the creation have freedom…In exactly the same way, less the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine, God is “off the hook.” Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy its autonomy, such things occur. Likewise, unless God coercively micromanages human decision making, we will often abuse our freedom.
In my post I wrote:
Author Dan Brown is interviewed at Parade, and comments on his loss of faith as a kid: I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, “I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and Earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?” Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Nice boys don’t ask that question.” A light went off, and I said, “The Bible doesn’t make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.” And Read More ›
Chuck Colson at Break Point discusses Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer… But here is your takeaway, and I’ll let Dr. Meyer do the talking: “Our uniform experience affirms that specified information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in Read More ›
In light of Judge Jones coming to Southern Methodist University today and tomorrow, for what seems to be an unbalanced discussion of ID, I thought I would add some clarity to the affair with these remarks by Nick Smyth from the blog 3quarksdaily pertaining to Jones’s poor reasoning in his 2005 Kitzmiller decision as to what constitutes science: For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both. It is enough to say that today, even those writing anti-pseudoscience manifestos concede that it is not possible to give a complete definition of what constitutes science or pseudoscience. Rather, they tend to revert to weak, vague and totally indefensible “ballpark” definitions that are designed Read More ›
As noted by Dr. Dembski in a previous blog, Darrel Falk has written a theological blog about what God would and would not design: So while we may love to think about the Intelligent Designer as being the great engineer in the sky drawing up magnificent plans to make things like the mammalian eye, the blood complement system, the immune system, or even the bacterial flagellum, it is not that simple. Countless millions of these structures and processes are designed to make people very sick and even to kill them. The Creator described in the Bible is not a sinister God who is off in a great machine shop “intelligently designing” machinery to make people very sick. Some will say Read More ›
Norman Borlaug, an American hero, died this past Saturday at the age of 95. The Wall Street Journal has an article giving some light on his illustrious and incredible life: Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II. In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s efforts combined with Read More ›
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book The Signature in the Cell is reviewed by Dan Peterson in The American Spectator (September 1st, 2009). Here is an excerpt: “Of the approaches taken by ID theorists, Signature in the Cell is most closely aligned with the pioneering work on design detection published over the last decade by mathematician William Dembski, one of Meyer’s colleagues at the Discovery Institute. Dembski and Meyer both rely, at least in part, on information theory and probabilistic analysis to determine whether a phenomenon is best explained as the product of unguided “chance and necessity,” or of design by an intelligence… Signature in the Cell is a defining work in the discussion of life’s origins and the question of Read More ›
Wired.com has a new article about why ID isn’t science because it’s been falsified. Usually the tactic against ID is that it isn’t a science because it isn’t falsifiable. I reckon use whatever club is closest at hand when you’re interested only in beating ID instead of being consistent. The article states: “You look at cellular machines and say, why on earth would biology do anything like this? It’s too bizarre,” he said. “But when you think about it in a neutral evolutionary fashion, in which these machineries emerge before there’s a need for them, then it makes sense.” “In which these machineries emerge before there’s a need” for the machineries. I don’t see how that makes any sense. Evolution Read More ›
PZ Myers has, once again, railed against something that he doesn’t understand at his blog Pharyngula. Hi PZ! Notice that he doesn’t actually address the content of Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks’ paper, which you can read here: Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success, published at the IEEE. Given his argument, he doesn’t know how to measure the cost of success, yet claims that Dr. Dembski doesn’t understand selection. A bit of advice PZ, the argument presented by Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks is very sophisticated PZ, your mud slinging isn’t PZ, you need to step it up PZ. I know this new stuff isn’t ez, but you may want to consider a response that has Read More ›
Investor’s Business Daily posted an article relating Obama’s Healthcare Bill to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the technocrats responsible for the U.K.’s health care. The article states:
This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which “cost-effectiveness” is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient’s final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.
The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.
The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”
One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.
The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.
The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.
These NICE people bring to mind another technocratic group I’ve read about called the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE)” in C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. Those NICE folks in Lewis’s novel were an institution which would decide who lived and who died in accordance to their agenda of control and advancement of the remaining people into a Utopian, omni-competent and global scientific technocracy. That Hideous Strength was the fictional representation of the governmental materialism and scientism philosophy of social control Lewis described in The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis explains:
It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.
The Investor’s Business Daily article continues: Read More ›
Journalist Ed Brayton, at his website ScienceBlogs, becomes an expert at education, aside from already being an expert on Panda’s Thumbs. His complaint is with the efficacy of Dr. Dembski’s educational approach of assigning his students, as part of the course requirement, the task of writing at least 10 posts defending ID on “hostile” websites. I would assume anti-ID folks and Darwinsts at these hostile sites would encourage the exchange, given that they think themselves the educational corrective to ID. Why the opposition? And as far as educational theory is concerned, engaging the opposition in a “real world” context, and not theoretically in a classroom, is wonderfully educational. As a matter of fact, not only will Dr. Dembski’s students be Read More ›