News

In “Yet another “post-Darwinism,” Evolving Thoughts complains about Shapiro’s Evolution:/a> A view from the 21st century thusly:

Over the years there have been many books that purport to “radically revise” or “supplant” Darwinian evolutionary biology; they come with predictable regularity. Usually they are of three kinds: something is wrong with natural selection, something is wrong with inheritance, or something is wrong with phylogeny. This book, by geneticist James A. Shapiro, exemplifies all three.

Shocka! Read More ›

Readers may recall U.S. prez hopeful Michele Bachmann, who is sympathetic to intelligent design: In “The National Organization of Women defends Bachmann against Newsweek” (Daily Caller, August 8, 2011) Caroline May reports,

“It’s sexist,” NOW president Terry O’Neill told TheDC. “Casting her in that expression and then adding ‘The Queen of Rage’ I think [it is]. Gloria Steinem has a very simple test: If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man – has it ever been done to a man? Surely this has never been done to a man.”

While some have pointed out that Newsweek has used unflattering photos of men such as Rush Limbaugh and John McCain on its cover, O’Neill says that is not the issue.

“Who has ever called a man ‘The King of Rage?’ Read More ›

In “’Lucky’ woman who won lottery four times outed as Stanford University statistics PhD” (Daily Mail, 7th August 2011), Rachel Quigley recounts the curious tale of a very lucky lady from Texas:

Ms Ginther won four lots of vast sums on lottery scratch cards, half of which were bought at the same mini mart

blockquote>First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2 million, then two years later $3 million and finally, in the spring of 2008, she hit a $10 million jackpot.

Which proves that darn well anything can happen.

The odds of this has been calculated at Read More ›

In “Water on Mars: Materialism’s Shroud of Turin” (Evolution News & Views, August 5, 2011), David Klinghoffer muses on the “water on Mars” cult:

The news in today’s Science about water on Mars and with that the consequent possibility of Martian microbial life — how many times have we heard this before? — offers what might be the materialist’s Shroud of Turin.

Actually, there is a lot more to be said for the Shroud of Turin.  The Shroud exists. If water on Mars were like the Shroud of Turin, we would know it existed, but wouldn’t know if life resulted. Read More ›

A friend at ProgettoCosmo, the Italian ID site, writes to remind us of J. P. Moreland’s dictum: “There will never be a natural explanation for consciousness from matter, period.”

Moreland is arguing from principle, that is, putting forward an argument from impossibility: “There will never be…” is not “it is unlikely…”.

But what happens when Moreland, or any ID advocate, defends similar positions by arguing from principle. When debating materialist supporters of scientism/evolutionism, they usually faces a Kafka-esque situation:

[Early 20th century Czech writer Franz Kafka wrote about hopeless impasses with irresponsible bureaucracies, thus lending his name to the increasingly frequent situation.] Read More ›

In relentless pursuit of evidence that animals think like people, Science publishes “Do Tayras Plan for the Future?” by Helen Fields (5 August 2011):

Humans buy unripe bananas, then leave them on the kitchen counter. The tayra, a relative of the weasel native to Central and South America, appears to do much the same thing, picking unripe plantains and hiding them until they ripen, according to a new study. The authors speculate that tayras are showing a human-like capacity to plan for the future, which has previously been shown only in primates and birds.

The problem is, Read More ›