GilDodgen

I had no idea that my original literature-bluffing post would spark this much discussion, but I’m certainly pleased that it did. The entire history of Darwinian theory has been characterized by literature bluffing and legend accepted as fact. Phillip Johnson has observed that his challenges are not new, and that they have been dismissed with comments like, “These concerns were addressed long ago.” But when Phil checked the literature, he discovered that his concerns were not addressed with anything more convincing than glorified speculation. This Darwinian tradition persists. It was known in Haeckel’s day that his embryo drawings were faked, but these drawings persisted in public-school textbooks for more than a century. How could this have possibly happened in a Read More ›

In the Old West, in the days of the Pony Express, information could not be transferred more rapidly than a horse could gallop. Then came the telegraph. Bank robbers could no longer escape to nearby towns without the residents having been informed in advance, at the speed of light in Morse Code.

Then came wireless communication. It was no longer necessary to lay out telegraph or telephone lines. Information could be transferred at the speed of light to Neil Armstrong on the moon.

Then came the blogosphere. At the speed of a URL click, one can check up on references. Literature bluffing is no longer a viable tactic in a debate. Bluffers can no longer escape to a nearby town without being intercepted before they get there.

Michael Behe was instrumental in making the Darwinian literature-bluffing tactic public.
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I would argue that, indeed, they are. In a previous UD thread, Tom English made the following comment: I have seen a number of brilliant and highly educated people do abysmally stupid things when they stepped outside their domains of expertise. Computer scientists make abysmal biologists. Journalists make abysmal biologists. Philosophers make abysmal biologists. Theologians make abysmal biologists. Mathematicians make abysmal biologists. Physicists make abysmal biologists. I would argue the following: Darwinian theorists do foolish things when they step outside their domain of expertise. They are generally not competent mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, philosophers, theologians, or physicists. Yet, they make sweeping claims of incontrovertible fact that impinge upon all these disciplines, and then expect immunity from challenges from those with Read More ›

One of the things I really enjoy about UD is that it is a catalyst for new insights.

I have blogged at UD on numerous occasions about computer programs and computer programming and their relationship to ID and Darwinian theory (for example, here and here). Doug’s post, Hidden Codes Within Codes, inspired some new insights.

Michael Denton has referred to biology as “wheels of complexity within wheels of complexity.” It seems clear at this point that we have only scratched the surface of life’s vastly sophisticated program.
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In his post about the fossil record, Barry raised an important point concerning honesty and integrity in science. Proponents of a scientific theory should consider all the evidence and weigh its overall implications, not choose evidence selectively to support a conclusion that has already been reached. This is a basic axiom in the scientific enterprise. There are mountains of evidence supporting long periods of stasis and sudden emergence in the fossil record, especially where the record is most complete. This is usually ignored. Instead, emphasis is placed on putative, rare (especially in comparison to the entire known record) “transitionals,” with no means of establishing ancestor/descendent relationships except through the use of imagination.

David Berlinski refers to the fossil record as “completely mystifying.” The same could be said of the existence of life’s complexity, functional integration and information content, at least in the absence of design.

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DaveScot summed it up in a previous UD comment perhaps better than I have ever heard it expressed:

…the ballyhooed 150 years of acceptance of Darwinian evolution is irrelevant — it was based on vastly incomplete knowledge of the nanometer-scale machinery and information that drives all of life. Even today we have barely scratched the surface of this nanotechnology marvel that is the DNA-based living cell. All previous bets are off. The modern synthesis can best be described as obsolete — a patchwork quilt of ad hoc hypotheses propping up a failed theory worse than the epicycles used to keep alive the theory that the earth was the center of the universe.

All previous bets are indeed off.
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Cosmological fine-tuning for the existence of life is so well established that it is essentially beyond question at this point, unless one is willing to put blind faith in wildly-fantastic speculation about an infinitude of in-principle undetectable alternative universes. A huge amount of complex, specified information was clearly infused into the origin-of-the-universe process. Not only did matter, energy, space, and the physical laws of the universe come into existence at this point, but time itself did as well. This means that the cause of the universe must exist outside of matter, energy, space, the physical laws of the universe, and even time. This raises an interesting question about design and temporal supernatural intervention: If the source of the universe exists Read More ›

JanieBelle made the following comment in a previous UD thread about the possibility of alternative living systems: “In order to rule out chance, don’t we have to rule out the chance of any possible kind of life? Do we know for an absolute fact that silicon or bzywhateverium can’t make life?” Pick up a copy of Michael Denton’s second book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. This book was recommended to me by Michael Behe when I chatted with him after a lecture he delivered at the University of California, Irvine. Denton addresses this very question in his second tour-de-force work. As it turns out, life other than we know it here on earth Read More ›

Over at evolutionnews.org (http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/06/whats_up_with_ronald_numbers_a_2.html) Casey Luskin comments on an article coauthored by Ronald Numbers for the Journal of Clinical Investigation (“Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action”).

In this article we once again hear the bogus co-option argument as a proposed refutation of irreducible complexity: “…Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument ignores exaptation (co-option)…”

This claim of the refutation of IC by co-option is so ubiquitous that some people are actually starting to believe it. I therefore feel that it is my civic duty to refute this “refutation” of IC, which turns out to be a trivial exercise.

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After my post at UD (https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1204) about creating a Hello World computer program by random mutation and natural selection, apollo230 alerted me to the fact that the Panda’s Thumb crowd had created a special thread designed to demolish my thesis. This pleased me to no end, because it was obvious that I had created major trouble. If my arguments and logic were utterly vacuous, no response would have been required.

Just to prove that I’m not a complete coward, I decided visited Panda’s Thumb, check out the thread, and make a reply. After wading through a tome of hand-wringing PT diatribes, I posted the following comment:

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A fellow named William sent me, in a personal e-mail, the link below. I won’t disclose any further information about William, just in case his entire life and career might be destroyed by the DI (the Darwinian Inquisition). Have fun mutating any originally meaningful sentence into your next great novel! http://www.randommutation.com/darwinianevolution.htm

I’m suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199695,00.html Those of us with room-temperature IQs are perpetually assured that there is overwhelming evidence for Darwinian gradualism in the fossil record. So, after reading the news release linked above, I asked myself, “Self, why is this big news?” I guess I just don’t get it. Why has the missing link in bird evolution just been found, when I have been assured for years that there is overwhelming evidence in the fossil record that the enigma of bird evolution was already solved? Sigh. I’m apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic.

This should help boost sales! Two New Jersey Democrats are pushing to have Ann Coulter’s new book “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” banned from all bookstores in their state because she criticized four 9/11 widows known as “the Jersey Girls.” http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/6/10/235539.shtml

The first computer program every student writes is called a “Hello World” program. It is a simple program that prints “Hello World!” on the screen when executed. In the course of writing this bit of code one learns about using the text editor, and compiling, linking and executing a program in a given programming environment.

Here’s a Hello World program in the C programming language:

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Ironically, ancient wisdom, much of it presumably discredited by modern science, is making a comeback and vindicating itself. Consider that living matter was once thought to be fundamentally different than non-living matter. This idea was presumably discredited with the discovery of the chemical synthesis of urea (http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5905): Urea is of major historical significance. It was the first organic chemical compound ever synthesized. The German chemist Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 attempted to make ammonium cyanate from silver cyanide and ammonium chloride and, in the process, accidentally made urea. Wöhler wrote his mentor Jöns Berzelius, “I must tell you that I can make urea without the use of kidneys, either man or dog. Ammonium cyanate is urea.” This pioneering experiment disproved the Read More ›