GilDodgen

Arthur Asuncion sends some links about the recent University of California, Irvine ID colloquium. I had the opportunity to attend, and reported on the event in a previous UD blog posting. Gil Arthur’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/colloquium-on-origins-was-success.htm Arthur’s colleague’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/thoughts-on-wednesdays-origins.htm The New University Article (campus newspaper): http://www.newu.uci.edu/article.php?id=4742 Daily Pilot Article (affiliated with LA Times, and more pro-evolution): http://www.dailypilot.com/education/story/45788p-69359c.html Perspective from Robert Camp (a skeptic): http://litcandle.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-if-they-held-colloquium-on-id-and.html

I had a great time last night at the ID colloquium on the UC Irvine campus, and had the opportunity to meet Paul Nelson for the first time. He is an extraordinarily bright, articulate, insightful, and congenial fellow. The thought-provoking and information-filled seminar was excellent in every way, and I was particularly impressed with the UC Irvine professors on the opposing side (Walter Fitch, Timothy Bradley and Gregory Weiss). The debate focused on science, logical inference from the evidence, and state-of-the-art scientific research — with, of course, occasional and inevitable detours into the philosophical and theological implications of the issues — but always in a very respectful and civilized manner. Would that the ID/Darwinism debate be this civilized and informative Read More ›

I am anxiously awaiting a transcript of the recent Ward versus Meyer debate. In the meantime you can check out the transcript of their last debate here: https://www.discovery.org/f/3097

Peter Ward is way out of his league in the presence of Stephen Meyer. Frankly, I was embarrassed for Ward.

Here are a few excerpts. Check out the transcript and judge for yourself.

In a previous post one commenter exclaimed: “…it is perfectly reasonable to say that, since no evolutionary prediction has ever been contradicted by data, that it reasonably won’t be any time soon.” Darwinian theory predicts everything, but only after the fact. It predicts that people will be selfish, and that they will be selfless. Predictions must precede what they predict. Predictions that predict everything predict nothing. This is yet another example of after-the-fact, just-so storytelling, in the grand tradition of Darwinian logic and reasoning.

For those who haven’t seen it, check out this episode of The Root of all Evil. Note the editorial comments about the persecution of the “rational atheist minority,” Christian fascism, atheists suffering career damage, and the McCarthy era. What irony.

You must not miss this: http://cartagodelenda.blogspot.com/2006/04/great-debate.html

In response to my previous post here, great_ape made the following comments:

On the one hand, we must concede–we should concede, at least–that it boggles the mind how observed biological complexity can emerge from such a inherrently blind trial and error approach (BWM) [blind watchmaker]. Then again, given the timescale involved, the sequence/mutational space involved, the geographic scale involved–I do not even rule out interplanetary scale–well, those factors are also difficult to fathom as well.

I have yet to see a compelling argument–beyond “gee wiz, that’s sure a lot of complexity to generate”–that has convinced me the RM+NS [random mutation plus natural selection] process is *not* capable of generating observed complexity. Thus, I default to uniformitarianism, which holds that the forces in the past are effectively the same as those we see occurring today (i.e. RM+NS).

There are some key issues in these observations that I thought deserved a new thread, so here goes.
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Arthur Asuncion at UCI sends this notice about an ID event at UCI. I posted the following comment: Dear Arthur, I just spent some time at the iDesign UCI site. Thanks so much for sending the link. It’s a terrific resource. It is going to be very interesting to watch the Intelligent Design versus Blind-Watchmaker-Evolution debate in coming years, because technically competent people who have a reasonably well-integrated knowledge of modern hard science (mathematics — especially combinatorics — chemistry, physics, and software engineering), know way too much for very many of them to buy BWE for much longer. The first of the two main reasons that those with the above-mentioned technical knowledge and experience are holdouts, and continue to accept Read More ›

Evolutionnews.org has a post and a link to discovery.org where you can find a PDF file of a great article from Crisis magazine, “An Evening With Darwin in New York,” by George Sim Johnston. It concerns the much-celebrated Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.

Here are a few excerpts:

The show tells us that Darwin’s theory helps us to “understand” the fossil record. This is odd, because the exhibit’s curator, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, has written extensively about how Darwin’s idea of gradual evolution has never been supported by the fossils and certainly doesn’t explain them.

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I got a chuckle (make that a bellylaugh) out of this article: http://foxnews.webmd.com/content/article/120/113762

Get out your notepad and check off the evolutionary presuppositions, like the notion that laughter predates speech. Make special note of speculation presented as fact.

Be aware that the Provine mentioned in this article is not William, but Robert. Here are some excerpts:

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As the result of a somewhat insensitive and politically incorrect comment I made about evolutionary anthropology here, I have been immortalized for a few minutes at scienceblogs.com. My comment was as follows: “The methods and concepts of evolutionary anthropology often consist of making up stories, presenting them as facts, and arriving at silly conclusions.” Apparently this comment struck a nerve, because the author of the article (linked below) launches into a brilliant explanation about how studying tooth enamel reveals so much about human evolution. He makes my point much more effectively than I. I’ll leave it to UD readers to be the judge. http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/03/14/what_teeth_can_tell_us_about_h/#more

DaveScot recently offered a post entitled “Biologists Are Not Design Experts” in which he commented about Darwinian (i.e., blind-watchmaker) evolution apologists who propose that those in other disciplines should keep their noses out of Darwinian evolutionary theory, presumably because these would-be naysayers are not experts in blind or (as Phillip Johnson so eloquently puts it) comatose watchmaking.

In reply to a commenter, DaveScot retorts: “Keep in mind this [Dave’s original post] is a response to a Panda’s Thumb article saying scientists ought to stay within their expertise. They of course are directing it specifically at mathematicians like Dembski and Berlinski telling them to butt out of biology, plus non-specifically to any of the scientists on the Dissent from Darwinism list that aren’t biologists. I’m just giving them a taste of their own medicine.”

The problem is that Darwinian evolutionary theorists (and their spinoff cohorts in evolutionary sociology and psychology, who really should seek medical or other counseling to put them back in touch with reality) have lost touch with the rest of the scientific community.

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I recently posted a brief essay entitled “Beware of Question-Begging Computer Simulations” (linked below) in which I referenced an article by Eric Anderson. Since then Eric and I have corresponded by e-mail and he offers the following comments.

Gil

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The following text and image were sent to me by colleague and fellow Darwin-doubter Stu Harris. It’s well known that people tend to look like or take on the visage of their pets, pop heroes and spiritual mentors. Daniel Dennett is apparently not immune to this process. Over the years he has more and more taken on the countenance of his guru Charles Darwin. Below is a recent picture of Dennett set against two of Darwin. Astounding isn’t it? Could this be a form of mimicry that protects Darwinians in some way? Could it be that the iconic image of Darwin shields one from intellectual attacks by normally rational members of the scientific community, thus promoting the survival of the Read More ›

Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved or defended is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one or more of the premises. It is a type of circular reasoning in which the truth of what one is trying to prove is assumed from the outset. One encounters a lot of question-begging arguments in defense of blind-watchmaker evolutionary theory.

Question-begging reasoning can appear in unexpected places…
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