The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 passed by a 244-173 house vote Tuesday. The bill bans the award of attorney fees in establishment clause cases (like Kitzmiller v. Dover). The ACLU has turned establishment clause cases into a cottage industry for underemployed lawyers. Naturally, they are quite alarmed at this turn of events. More at Stop The ACLU.
Dawkins says Given that 93% of the National Academy does not believe in any kind of personal god, a statistician would expect that at least some members of Congress, if not a majority, would also be atheists. Yet, as far as I can discover, the number of avowed atheists among the 535 members of Congress is not 93%, not even 10%. It seems to be zero. What is going on here? I think we all know. Yeah, I think we all DO know, Richard. The National Academy membership is a self-elected body where your chances of becoming a member if you’re not an avowed atheist is akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The National Academy Read More ›
A more apt title for Dawkins’ tome, based on his essay describing it, would be The Dawkins Delusion.
More pap from it:
If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket.
Playfully? Let’s see about that. Read More ›
Dawkins says Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design. Hello? Earth to Richard Dawkins. Do you copy? From What Do The State Science Standards Say About Evolution and Intelligent Design? The Education Week Review According to a 2005 Education Week survey of state science standards from 41 states, 39 state standards documents offer some description of biological evolution and how it accounts for the diversity of species that exist today, while 35 of these documents go further and give similar treatment to Darwin’s principle of natural selection. Note that the title of the article has “Intelligent Design” in Read More ›
In the extreme, it never arrives at all. A case in point below. Dawkins says Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. In Dawkins’ case intelligence appears to have never arrived at all. What does he base his claim on that intelligence (among other things) come late into the universe? A sample size of one. In typical Darwinian fashion he takes one thing that he knows in the present (intelligence in the form of humanity appearing some billions of years into the history of the universe) and Read More ›
Richard Dawkins says As an outsider, I observe American culture polarizing fast, and religion is at the center of the action. Side note: Dawkins’ essay disappeared from his website after 3 days. I wonder if the thumbsters will accuse him of deleting embarrassing articles as they accuse us of doing? Something tells me Dawkins’ faux pas will escape mention over there. Can you spell “hypocrite”? Or how about “double standard”? I knew you could. Anyhow… As an outsider, I observe European culture deteriorating fast, and religion is at the center of the action. Rushing in to fill in the cultural power vacuum created by Christians abandoning their beliefs Muslims set fire to France. Europe, the birthplace of the Protestant church, Read More ›
The reason we have been excluded from Google’s index is several mirror sites that automatically copy and republish our content have sprung up. In the past there was only one such mirror site which is Wesley Elsberry’s at http://antievolution.org/buud/ To address this I am going to post a copyright message at the bottom of our webpage saying that all content here is copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. I will then explicitely warn Wesley Elsberry and other mirrors that they are in violation of the law and will copy the warning mail to the abuse address of their respective ISPs that I expect the violations to end immediately. I will also undertake the task of modifying our blog Read More ›
One of our commenters here, trrll, made the oft-cited claim that evolution is unrepeatable. I asked what evidence there is of this and he made some unsubstantiated claims. Because of the frequency of such claims here I asked that he back them up before he comments here again. As of now the result of my request is the sound of crickets chirping. To be fair, perhaps trrll didn’t see my last response. If not he’s sure to see this. I posted a paper on the sidebar back in January written by Jean Staune titled Non Darwinian Evolution. Professor Dembski had originally linked to it as an article but I thought it important enough to make a permanent link to it Read More ›
An ID hypothesis is that abiogenesis is practically impossible without intelligent agency. A predictionmade by this hypothesis is that no method of abiogenesis absent intelligent intervention can ever be demonstrated in a laboratory. The prediction may be falsified in principle by demonstrating a chemical pathway whereby abiogenesis takes place. This is a legitimate hypothesis that makes a testable prediction. Therefore all attempts to demonstrate that abiogenesis is possible absent intelligent intervention is an attempt to falsify biological ID. So I don’t want to hear the tired canard again that ID has no research programs. We have many of them and they’ve been going on for God only knows how long. At least since Aristotle in 350 B.C. said it was Read More ›
Random mutation is so attractive to chance worshippers because it is easy to demonstrate that unpredictable mutations do happen and that, in principle, any possible outcome can be produced. This is to say that, for instance, a shower of cosmic rays can hit a group of people and change the DNA in their germ cells in any manner whatsoever. It’s just a matter of how probable any given change might be. No change is impossible. Set incredulity aside and the comic book characters “The Fantastic Four” become real possibilities. Hence random mutation can explain ANYTHING and the only argument against it is the argument from incredulity. That’s why it just won’t die. It’s too good at its explanatory ability. Nothing Read More ›
Commenter Tom English admonishes us for mocking “legitimate scientists” (these I presume are like real Scotsmen) in their inquiries into how abiogenesis could be accomplished. This raised a question in my mind. If abiogenesis is real science then how may it be falsified in principle? It seems to me that legitimate scientists (TM, Pat. Pending) could look for plausible paths for abiogenesis from now until forever, come up empty handed, and continue to claim as Tom does that any question of its legitimacy is nothing but an argument from incredulity. How convenient. Abiogenesis “research” has everything to win and nothing to lose. So tell me, Tom English, how can abiogenesis be falsified? What prevents it from being a hypothesis that Read More ›
I read for a second time today an article about an amazing person nicknamed Kim-puter. Read More ›
This is in regard to the Pharyngula thread where PZ Myers bashes Ken Miller. I think it’s been made clear by Bill and Denyse what’s a bad atheist. In reading the comments on Myers’ screed a person named “plunge” demonstrates what a good atheist thinks and relates it to science. Plunge asserts he is an outspoken atheist but he sure sounds like an outspoken agnostic to me. I find it a little irritating that atheist and agnostic are commonly conflated because that throws me into the atheist camp when in reality I am simply unsure one way or the other – in a no man’s land between theists and atheists. Read More ›
Congratulations all on another record month in all the metrics! We continue to reach a larger and larger audience. Thanks to our tireless authors for all the great articles and a special thanks to our members for all the great commentary! July was down because the blog was shut down for a few days but we got right back on track in August. September, although you can’t see it here, is shaping up to be yet another record month.
Nick Matzke at Panda’s Thumb, what evidence is there that the type III secretion system appeared in nature before the flagellum? If the flagellum coopted the ttss then the ttss must predate the flagellum. The ttss mediates elaborate interactions with plant and animal hosts of the bacteria. The flagellum on the other hand is for locomotion, not parasitic or pathogenic relationships with more complex cells. The flagellum is useful absent more complex organisms in the environment while the ttss is not. It seems to me quite likely that the flagellum appeared in nature before the ttss. Probably billions of years before as the following supports: J Mol Microbiol Biotechnol. 2000 Apr;2(2):125-44. Phylogenetic analyses of the constituents of Type III protein Read More ›