For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
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In part 1 of this series, I discussed one application of ID concepts to the biological sciences. In this post, I’m going to move my focus into two areas where I apply Intelligent Design to my own field of software engineering.
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I realized after my previous post about Academic Freedom legislation that I did not mention why it is that I care about the ability for teachers to “teach the controversy”.
I have been told by several research leaders that any attempt to change curriculum, or do anything with public schools, is a Bad Idea™. I understand where they are coming from. But let me tell you my personal story, and why it leads me to think that biological science itself needs the controversy to be taught.
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One endless discussion that always happens with the proposal of academic freedom bills in state legislatures is that the Darwin camp always says that they are about introducing religion into science classrooms. Even if the bill says, “this does not permit anyone to introduce religion into the classrooms,” the pro-Darwin crowd somehow misses this clause, or thinks that judges interpret bills based on the “secret agenda” of those proposing them, rather than the actual language of the bill. I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed. Pubmed is run Read More ›
This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
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Many, many people seem to misunderstand the relationship between Intelligent Design and Common Descent. Some view ID as being equivalent to Progressive Creationism (sometimes called Old-Earth Creationism), others seeing it as being equivalent to Young-Earth Creationism. I have argued before that the core of ID is not about a specific theory of origins. In fact, many ID’ers hold a variety of views including Progressive Creationism and Young-Earth Creationism.
But another category that is often overlooked are those who hold to both ID and Common Descent, where the descent was purely naturalistic. This view is often considered inconsistent. My goal is to show how this is a consistent proposition.
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We’ve been discussing Falk and Ayala’s theological support for evolution. However, while reading Falk’s arguments, I came to the realization that the only way Falk’s arguments about evolution freeing God from responsibility for the created world make sense is if they assume Intelligent Design is true.
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Tonight at the University of Oklahoma there was a debate between Michael Ruse and William Dembski. I must say, it was one of the most cordial events I’ve been at, especially compared to last week’s event, where the question and answer session got pretty ugly. The topic was whether or not Intelligent Design was science. I tried to write down the gist of the debating points, so a summary of the debate follows.
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Today there was a great article in the OU Daily about the controversy surrounding the Darwin 2009 Project at OU. Not only were all parties fairly represented (at least as best as I could tell), but they even got the definition of ID right!
This year, the University of Oklahoma is celebrating Darwin with the Darwin 2009 Project. It appears from the speaker list (at least for the names I am familiar with) that where this project touches on the mechanisms for evolution or the wider debate about its potential implications for other areas of life, this is going to be entirely one-sided.
I know from some friends of mine that there is an undercurrent of opposition brewing from OU supporters, alumni, and other Oklahoma residents. Below is the letter I am writing to OU’s President Boren, and I hope that some of you will do the same. Please don’t copy my letter directly – write your own – but feel free to be inspired 🙂
I just got through reading Slaughter of the Dissidents, and I must say, it is fantastic. I was a little skeptical at first, simply because the title of the book was so extreme. After reading it, I still think that the title is extreme (there are real slaughters of people happening in different parts of the world), but I can see why it was chosen – the extent to which Darwin skeptics are being persecuted in academic environments is simply astonishing.
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Last week I posted about issues with the production of variation that Darwinists often overlook. So then, the question becomes, what is the mechanism for variation production? In a recent book, called Eight-Legged Marvels: Beauty and Design in the World of Spiders, Chad Arment invites us to examine that very question. In the introduction, Arment says:
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Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA – when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed Darwinism rather than design?
And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA. … Can we measure the information capacity of that portion of the genome which is actually used? We can at least estimate it. In the case of the human genome it is about 2% – considerably less than the proportion of my hard disc that I have ever used since I bought it. [Copied from Research Intelligent Design which cites: Richard Dawkins (1998) “The Information Challenge.” the skeptic. 18,4. Autumn 1998.]
Well, it seems that those people who “spent earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA” have been the real winners in the past (and likely upcoming) decade of genome research.
In any case, it seems despite the repeatedly failed efforts to assign vestigality to a range of structures, some people keep pursuing the case.
I’ve been reading a lot of the classic literature lately on mutation and selection from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. It’s interesting to read old science material with the advantage of hindsight. It’s like watching a movie — you might know what’s going to happen next, but the characters don’t. And so, reading Muller’s experiments with X-ray induced mutations, and other similar literature, I realize that while performing these experiments, they are really shooting in the dark. They know this thing called “evolution” happened (the existence of fossils is the key evidence factor for them), and now they have found a way to mutate genes. And they think that the combination of these is going to solve the riddle of evolution. All of this reminds me of my first experiences with an Apple II GS computer back in the 80s.
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