Patrick

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore If you ever felt the need to play the role of the Intelligent Designer here is the game for you! I think Spore could be more aptly titled “Intelligent Design: The Game”. After all, notice in the presentation that evolution is always via design by the player and not a mechanism like the modern synthesis. Of course, that game would take forever and would likely go nowhere. 😉 Now let’s just hope our own Intelligent Designer isn’t like Will Wright and decides to take his UFO and nuke our planet. 🙂

http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Feb06/r021406

Researchers who speculate about human origins have come up with three main scenarios for how we ended up with our unique traits, Zhang said. The first possibility is that we acquired completely new genes that other apes don’t have. Another is that some of our genes have taken on different functions through mutation.

It’s also possible that we humans lost some genes along the way, and those losses provided opportunities for changes that otherwise could not have occurred. Read More ›

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/311/5764/1068b

Mesozoic mammals have been thought to have been small, nocturnal, and confined to a few niches on land until the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Most are recorded by isolated jaw fragments or teeth. Ji et al. (p. 1123; see the cover and the Perspective by Martin) now describe a Jurassic mammal from China that breaks this mold. The fossil is well preserved, and impressions of fur can be seen on its body and scales on a broad tail (similar to a beaver overall). The animal was fairly large, approaching not quite half a meter in length, and the shape of its limbs suggest that it was adapted for swimming and burrowing. The combination of both primitive and derived features in this early mammal, and the demonstration that mammals had occupied aquatic habitats by this time, expands the evolutionary innovations of early mammals.

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One thing that has always irked me is that rarely on this site do we find any critics of ID attempting to challenge the tools/methods of ID directly. For example, one could claim that “CSI isn’t a reliable indicator of intelligence” or “the explanatory filter breaks down under certain conditions” or “ID regularly produces false positives under x conditions” or “Irreducible Complexity can indeed be overcome via a Direct Pathway” and then show why and/or how. Instead, arguments are almost always made against the implications or we’re arguing over the interpretation of various data. Perhaps these challenges are not made because it’s so difficult to make sustainable arguments in this regard but I’d like to at least see people try. As such, I decided to make a topic on this myself with the last challenge to ID as the subject: “Irreducible Complexity can indeed be overcome via a Direct Pathway” Read More ›

https://www.discovery.org/f/697/

Behe covers several sections in detail but here is the overall summary at the end:

The Court’s reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; the incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself; a failure to differentiate evolution from Darwinism; and strawman arguments against ID. The Court has accepted the most tendentious and shopworn excuses for Darwinism with great charity and impatiently dismissed arguments for design.

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http://www.umc.pitt.edu:591/m/FMPro?-db=ma&-lay=a&-format=d.html&id=2297&-Find

Schwartz hearkens back to earlier theories that suggest that the Darwinian model of evolution as continual and gradual adaptation to the environment glosses over gaps in the fossil record by assuming the intervening fossils simply have not been found yet. Rather, Schwartz argues, they have not been found because they don’t exist, since evolution is not necessarily gradual but often sudden, dramatic expressions of change that began on the cellular level because of radical environmental stressors-like extreme heat, cold, or crowding-years earlier. Read More ›

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4620922.stm

Lead researcher Dr Tania Singer said: “Men expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment.

“This type of behaviour has probably been crucial in the evolution of society as the majority of people in a group are motivated to punish those who cheat on the rest.

“This altruistic behaviour means that people tend to protect each other against being exploited by society’s free-loaders, and evolution has probably seeded this sense of justice and moral duty into our brains.”

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http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/full/nature04168.html

Chinese scientists have found an interesting sample–a cretaceous symmetrodont therian with some monotreme like postcranial features–in the Liaoning fossil beds which they have named Akidolestes cifellii. Read More ›

The details of the lawsuit:

http://www.au.org/site/DocServer/Final_Complaint.pdf?docID=541

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-01-03-infidelity-study_x.htm

Some men cheat on their partners. So do some women. Now researchers say it is more than a wandering eye that might cause a woman to stray.

This conclusion was based on two studies of college men and women using questionnaires where the test group was asked how they felt (how scientific) about other men/women outside of their steady relationships. Read More ›

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
……….
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

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Fairly balanced reporting of the recent conference Dr. Dembski attended:

On a recent Tuesday evening, Moshe Tendler, an influential Orthodox rabbi and Yeshiva University biology professor, ambled onto the stage at Kovens Conference Center in North Miami. A stately figure with a wispy white beard and heavy glasses, he surveyed the 300-strong crowd of scientists and intellectuals — most clad in yarmulkes and dark suits with tallith tassels dangling about their waists — and urged them to spread the word that Darwin was wrong. “It is our task to inform the world [about intelligent design],” he implored. “Or the child growing up will grow up with unintelligent design…. Unintelligent design is our ignorance, our stupidity.” Read More ›