Dave S.

From Panspermia 10 January 2007 …It is not enough that companies make disclosures of financial information…. In addition it is vital that there be a set of financial intermediaries, who are at least as competent at receiving, processing and interpreting financial information … as the companies are at delivering it — Yale Law professor Jonothan Macey, writing about the financial collapse of Enron. Macey was cited in a New Yorker article suggesting that, prior to its collapse in 2001, Enron’s extreme financial fragility was not concealed from the public — it was disclosed in the company’s own financial statements. The condition went unnoticed because the disclosure information was convoluted and took great effort to understand. Almost everyone relied on Enron Read More ›

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I sent the following [addresses munged to foil email address harvestors]: From : David Springer Sent : Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:41 AM To : bforrest CC : dembski, richard.dawkins, Kenneth_Miller, eugeniescott, ddennett, krauss, patricia.princehouse, pennock, welsberr, kpadian, rthompson Subject : Debate Challenge Dear Professor Forrest, I wanted to make sure that you were aware that Professor Dembski has challenged you to a debate. Topics “Perhaps we can settle the matter of cowardice directly: let Forrest and me debate the matter at a symposium spanning a day with each of us delivering two hour-long lectures and then going toe-to-toe in a final exchange.” Many of the commenters think you will decline but are eager to see it should you take Read More ›

We used to keep this linked on the sidebar. I added it back.

Comments about Comments
by William Dembski on April 16th, 2005

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Over on Panda’s Thumb they’re so desperate for something to talk about that when I ban someone it’s front page news over there. Don’t people like Richard Hoppe have more important things to do with their time like making sure the entries in the tree of life are in the proper order? I guess not. Who I ban and why is more important than evolutionary biology these days. Ouch. Read More ›

Over on Panda’s Thumb Steve Reuland uses Darwinian methodology to dispute the notion that medical doctors tend to accept ID in greater percentage than scientists in general. So what’s the first thing ole Steverino does to make his case? Why, he trots out a strawman – ID and “evolution” are mutually exclusive. Here’s a clue for Stevie. You can accept ID, descent with modification from a common ancestor, and a 4 billion year-old earth all at the same time. Not all IDists do but many of us do including me. What you can’t accept if you accept ID is that random mutation filtered by natural selection turned mud into man or bacteria into baboons. Got that? Write that down. I Read More ›

Recently and many times in the past I’ve remarked that life doesn’t have the illusion of design. Design is real. It has the illusion of chance and neccessity. Over at ATBC I noticed a couple members of the anti-ID peanut gallery clucking to themselves that mutations plotted on a fitness curve have a random distribution. IOW there is no predictability in where any one mutation will fall on a fitness curve (harmful/neutral/beneficial). It will be a scattershot plot without any pattern. Thus even if the universe is deterministic and no mutation is truly random they appear random when plotted on a fitness curve. This is just utter dreck. You can predict with almost 100% confidence that any given mutation will Read More ›

Fun facts you should know. For every 1000 species that has ever lived during the history of our planet, 999 of them became extinct in an evolutionary dead end street (no species descended from them). Estimates range up to 5 billion species that have walked, crawled, swam, flew, rooted, or slimed our planet in the past. About 10 million are alive today and we have names for about 1 million of those. The average lifespan of a species is about 10 million years. Most species enter the fossil record abruptly and disappear abruptly looking mostly the same at both entrance and exit. The next time you’re thinking of how random mutation and natural selection works keep in mind that in Read More ›

In the comments of Gil’s article about why a greater percentage of engineers vs. scientists are open to the idea of life being a result of intelligent design I remarked that medical doctors are another occupational outlier in there being a larger than expected percentage open to ID. I asked the MDs here if they could comment on that because while I can understand the POV of engineers and mathematicians I couldn’t figure out why MDs would also be an exception. After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that medical doctors, like engineers, understand the cost of mistakes in complex systems better than academic scientists. Orthodox evolution theory is based on the notion that sometimes a mistake Read More ›

“I thought creationists were monsters, until I married one.” -Tatiana Hamboyan Harrison

Loving the Enemy -Special to Newsweek

Hat tip to the shimmying atheist Kristine for pointing to this article.

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp The emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa, also known as the jewel wasp) is a parasitoid wasp of the family Ampulicidae. It is known for its reproductive behavior, which involves using a live cockroach (specificially a Periplaneta americana) as a host for its larva. A number of other venomous animals which use live food for their larvae paralyze their prey. Unlike them, Ampulex compressa initially leaves the cockroach mobile, but modifies its behaviour in a unique way. As early as the 1940s it was published that wasps of this species sting a roach twice, which modifies the behavior of the prey. A recent study using radioactive labeling proved that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia. Ampulex Read More ›

December was a record month for Uncommon Descent traffic. New Record 12/06 Average Daily Visits: 5,311Old Record 06/06 Average Daily Visits: 5,262 New Record 12/06 Total Visits: 164,646Old Record 08/06 Total Visits: 161,799 September is when we got nicked by Google delisting and traffic declined. We’ve finally recovered from that and are setting new records again. And for icing on the cake, in October we switched over to the Cutline for WordPress format which streamlined our website and so we got our new record number of visitors with barely half the bandwidth we were using for the previous records! Thanks everyone for a great 2006 and here’s to an even better 2007!

Creationism gains foothold in schools

THE government has cleared the way for a form of creationism to be taught in Britain’s schools as part of the religious syllabus.

Lord Adonis, an education minister, is to issue guidelines within two months for the teaching of “intelligent design” (ID), a theory being promoted by the religious right in America.

Until now the government has not approved the teaching of the controversial theory, which contradicts Darwinian evolutionary theory, the basis of modern biology.

1/1/07 Update: Additional information from Truth in Science

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“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” -William Shakespeare

In The Grand Canyon is How Old? PZ Myers whines like a little girl that the National Park Service includes in its bookstore The Grand Canyon: A Different View. The book attempts to explain the formation of the Grand Canyon from a young earth creationist point of view. The book isn’t in the science section of the bookstore but rather in the inspirational section.

Carl Zimmer hears the sound of taxonomy exploding. PZ Myers, in his haste to dismiss the notion that genotype and phenotype aren’t increasingly at odds in where to place different critters in the so-called Tree of Life, inadvertently refers to an article by his comrade-in-arms Carl Zimmer which backed up the very point I was making.

“But there are times, I must confess, when I feel like I am watching a blind fistfight.” -Carl Zimmer