johnnyb

For those of you wanting to see the new movie about the Scopes trial, I just noticed it is available on Netflix streaming! I just watched it, and it is indeed excellent.

George Gilder has a new article up at National Review titled Unleash the Mind, which, though it never mentions Intelligent Design, is an direct application of ID thought to economics. In fact, for those more interested in technical definitions for what Gilder calls “surprise” and “creativity”, you might check out my talk on modeling non-materialistic representations of the mind at the Engineering and Metaphysics conference earlier this year. Anyway, I’ll leave you all to read the article, but here are a few interesting quotes: Increasing revenues come not from a mere scheme of carrots and sticks but from the development and application of productive knowledge With fewer resources diverted to government bureaucracy, they can conduct more undetermined experiments, test more Read More ›

I thought you all might be interested in an article I wrote titled Mathematics and Theology: Seeing to Infinity. The basic purpose of the article is to show how the “limit” concept from mathematics can be incorporated into theological reasoning. The larger purpose is to get theologians thinking more deeply about mathematics as a tool in theological reasoning. One of the disheartening things about modern theology is how disconnected it is from the rest of human knowledge. It doesn’t need to be disconnected — it’s just that there is a habit of thought that has developed over the past two centuries that separated out theology as “other” (perhaps as a euphemism for “fictitious”) and math and science as “real”. This Read More ›

We have been discussing lately the idea that mutations, rather than being haphazard, may actually be directed by cellular machinery. In a recent volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, several scientists presented evidence in favor of this view. One of these scientists has a paper on what he calls “mutation protocols” – that is, repeated patterns of mutations whose behavior is not only physical, but also logical. In other words, the pattern that the mutation follows is consistent with the overall architecture of the organism. You might call these design-consistent mutations. In any case, David King gives us examples of two mutation protocols – cut-and-paste functional segments, and tuning knobs. Tuning knobs are generally implemented Read More ›

Engineering is, by definition, a teleological effort. Things are done in order that something else may happen. I have wondered how biology might be improved by taking ideas, practices, and methodologies from engineering and applying them to biology. Any ideas? NOTE – I accidentally used the word “approved” rather than “improved” in the post. This is fixed. Sorry for the confusion.

In a recent paper, Olivera et al analyze the venom of Cone snails, which represent a fairly large and diverse genus of venomous marine snails. What they found was very interesting. The venom genes had the following properties: The gene was hypermutable – in other words, within the genus, the variability of the venom was immensely more variable than other gene regions The hypermutability of the gene was localized – in other words, there was a specific target of hypermutability in the gene. There were some parts which were highly conserved. The localization of the hypermutability was not due to selection – in other words, it isn’t that the whole thing was hypermutable and selection only kept the ones which Read More ›

A recent issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences has just been published, and the whole issue is stacked with topics that support ID ideas – specifically, the idea that genomic evolution, to the extent that it is beneficial, is largely teleological. The introductory paper refers to the “creative genome” which contain “organizational frameworks that affect genome behavior”. I have not read the papers, only the abstracts, so the information in this post is rather tentative. However, here are some papers that seem to be of interest to the ID community: parasites have a whole DNA library of surface proteins that they switch between, and a mutator that focuses the mutations in the right place to Read More ›

One criticism of ID that tends to come from those who might normally share our worldview (such as Thomists) is that ID attempts to measure meaning, while meaning is unquantifiable. I argue that this is partially correct – we currently don’t know how to quantify meaning or meaningfulness. Unlike others, I am not about to give up the search for a way to do this, but nonetheless I do agree that at present it is unquantifiable. However, ID doesn’t measure meaning. Instead, ID measures an indirect indicator of meaning – CSI, active information, etc. Indirect measurements are nothing new in science. In fact, thermometers are a great example of an indirect measurement. We can’t measure temperature directly. So, instead, we Read More ›

This is a great video on the interplay between the ideas of Gödel and Turing on what Gödel’s incompleteness means for the mind. This is of great importance to ID, because it indicates what it means for “design” as opposed to “mechanism”, and the limitations of any mechanistic/physicalist model of reality and humanity. Kurt Gödel: Incompleteness Theorem and Human Intuition Someone pointed me to this video a while ago, but I don’t remember who – thanks to whoever it was – it was certainly worthwhile! Also, does anyone know what video this is taken from? For those interested in more modern advances on the subject, you might check out these talks on the subject from the recent Engineering and Metaphysics Read More ›

In a previous post, I had taken Dr. Larry Moran to task about whether or not mutations, as they exist in nature, are random. Dr. Moran has responded, so I thought I’d give readers a summary of his response. Dr. Moran seems to have at least two different things in mind when he says that evolution is unguided. That’s not a problem per se, but it is always good to be precise about which concept of unguided-ness we are discussing. The appearance of homo sapiens was not an intended part of the evolutionary process Mutations are random with respect to their ultimate usefulness In my post, I was primarily concerned with #2, as I will be in this one. Presumably, Read More ›

I am always aghast that in the 21st century people still make the claim that mutations are unguided. This is a hold-over idea from before the discovery of DNA, simply because some mutations were found to occur independently of selection. However, modern evidence has showed that mutations are actually in large part due to mechanisms geared for adaptive purposes, just like the rest of biology. And, just like hearts have heart attacks, mutation systems can break down, too, and lead to disease. Just like bacteria, we discovered mutations first by noting the ones that were causing disease, but with every closer look we see that these are the exception rather than the rule. To point to a simple example (and Read More ›

I’m going to do a series of posts analyzing a talk given by renowned Thomist philosopher Ed Feser. The full video is available at the end of this post. In any case, the Thomists are well worth responding to, given that they are some of the most vocal Christian critics of Intelligent Design. Or are they? I contend that the biggest issue is that the Thomists misunderstand what Intelligent Design is, much the same way that atheists and creationists do. From the first part of the video, Feser criticizes ID because – lo and behold – ID is not worthwhile as an apologetic! I wonder if Feser realizes that perhaps the reason that ID is not a worthwhile apologetic is Read More ›

ID researcher Eric Holloway has posted an interesting question – if ID is true, how would that affect how you judge companies in the stock market? That is, which companies are basing their futures on things that ID would consider to be bad ideas vs ones that ID would consider to be good ideas? Eric gives some examples of things which would be bad investments: Companies whose futures are based on the assumption that Strong AI is possible Companies whose futures are predicated on the manipulation of biological form solely through DNA Then Eric gives an example of a good investment: Companies who make use of the distinction between human and artificial intelligences to maximize each one Anyway, I’m curious Read More ›

The recent Engineering and Metaphysics conference (abstract and videos available here) came about because of what I saw as a glaring need in the ID community – a place for mid-level ID researchers to come together and openly talk about topics of interest. Most ID conferences, historically, have been by a fairly closed group of people, often by invitation only. Therefore, those who want to do research in ID are left without venues to present and discuss their ideas. This is not a good state of affairs for a budding research area. Therefore, I decided to team up with some people and put on a conference of interest to ID people. Not specifically ID – there’s no reason to be Read More ›

In our final video for the Engineering and Metaphysics conference, we have Dr. Walter Bradley, famous in ID circles for his book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Here Dr. Bradley shares with us his work on helping relieve poverty in third-world countries through engineering. He also tells us about practices that people attempt to use to relieve poverty which are unhelpful. This is a great summary of the practices that work and the practices that don’t work. If you have trouble with this, you can see it at the following URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92BDBku6g4 I hope you enjoyed the Engineering and Metaphysics conference! It was great to get to know everyone, and to get to spend time talking about these things with Read More ›