An unknown poet’s riff on “junk DNA”, arrived by post at the top secret UD bunker in an undisclosed, unimaginable location:
(Would go well to tune of “Way Up on Old Smoky” – here. Try it! )
On top of our genome
All covered with cash,
I see BioLogos
And they’re talkin’ trash. Read More ›
In the University of Houston alumni mag Parameters (Spring 2011) , vision researcher Haluk Ogmen says: Computers beat the brain in many tasks, like large number multiplication and database searches,” he said. “But there are other tasks that no computer even comes close to what we can do. In the area of navigation, the most powerful supercomputers cannot even match insects. So what’s missing are the engineering design principles that capture the fundamentals of biological information processing. That’s my goal as an engineer, to reverse–engineer vision, memory, and cognition and see how our brains and minds work. Design principles in vision? See “Biologist goes to war against language” for the correct Darwinspeak protocols currently in force.
The controversial textbook, The Design of Life came up recently. (Did an origin of life researcher actually read it? Stunner.)
Instead of the approved textspeak about how hardworking scientists are slowly piecing together the origin of life, it contains eye-openers like these: Read More ›
While explaining how he believes complex biochemical information just happen to arise through random processes, Brown University’s Ken Miller dismisses Mike Behe’s mousetrap, introduced in Darwin’s Black Box. To show that it is not an example of irreducible complexity that points to design, he recounts a childhood recollection of a pupil using a mousetap to fire spitballs, which showed that the mousetrap could be used for something other than killing mice (pp 54-57). That is how Miller, who has just won the Stephen Jay Gould award for promoting Darwinism, knew that ID biochemist Behe was wrong.
Ralph David Westall, an IS prof at California Polytechnic University, Pomona*, contacted Uncommon Descent to say, Read More ›
The most recent Stephen Jay Gould prize has been awarded to anti-ID Catholic biochemist Ken Miller of Brown University:
Through his writings, teaching and appearances in court, Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method.
Some Miller comments:
The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question. – Kenneth MillerThe new strategy is to teach intelligent design without calling it intelligent design. – Kenneth Miller
There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory. – Kenneth Miller
Bradley Monton, atheist philosopher and author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), who thinks carefully about intelligent design, has some thoughts on Miller’s arguments:
Now, Miller thinks that naturalism is an essential part of science. He holds that if one drops the constraint of methodological naturalism, then science will stop, because one can imply appeal to God as an explanation of any scientific phenomenon. Miller writes:
A theistic science … will no longer be the science we have known. It will cease to explore, because it already knows the answers. Read More ›
Look, it’s the armchair, okay? It’s got to go. There are real philosophers out there, besides which great scientists have taken the philosophy of science very seriously.
Undeterred by that history, Stephen Hawking recently dismissed philosophy in The Grand Design (with Leonard Mlodinow). In his view, philosophy did not contribute to knowledge compared with science. His view garnered a good deal of disapproval. The Economist sniffed,
There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles. Read More ›
At Slate , reporter David Dobbs muses (May 2, 2011) on the Marc “but the monkeys talk to ME!” Hauser research scandal, which he covered:
First, let’s recall that “scientific misconduct” in this case does not mean sloppy work; it means, by the NIH definitions Harvard uses in such investigations, either plagiarism (not on the table here) or the manipulation or fabrication of data. Extremely serious charges. I covered this heavily last year here at Neuron Culture and in a wrap-up at Slate.
Given the seriousness of those findings from Harvard, many wondered if Hauser would be fired. Harvard has kept its cards close, however, probably for a mix of legal and strategic reasons, and probably too because a federal investigation is apparently underway, Read More ›
Here at “Does Darwinism depend on evidence?”, Richard Dawkins’ has said we must, because it is the only plausible theory of evolution.
But Fodor responds that being a materialist atheist like himself, his co-author Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, and Dawkins has nothing to do with needing to believe Darwinism.
Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini respond in What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), that physicalism (the basic assumption they share with Dawkins, that everything is ultimately physical = bottom up, not top down) requires no such thing: Read More ›
Oxford is hiring a mathematician to try to rescue Darwinism. Because it was the math that got Darwinism into trouble in the first place:
The concept of fitness optimization is routinely used by field biologists, and first-year biology undergraduates are frequently taught that natural selection leads to organisms that maximize their fitness. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) promoted a conceptual integration of modern evolutionary theory in which genes are viewed as optimising agents, which is extremely influential and widespread today and encompasses inclusive fitness theory and evolutionarily stable strategies as well as general optimality ideas. However, mathematical population geneticists mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind. Read More ›
Agnostic Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) offers:
One wishes that the US legal system exercised the same diligence in authenticating people’s religious beliefs s their scientific beliefs. Ayala, Miller and Collins claim that their scientific inquiries are driven by their faith in God. Yet, as they are the first to admit, the science they do is indistinguishable from those who do not share that faith.One might reasonably wonder: how exactly does their faith influence their science, especially given the enormous import of their religious commitments? Would it not be reasonable to expect their Christian beliefs, assuming they have some cognitive content, to colour the theories they propose and the inferences they draw from the evidence? If not, why should we think that their Christianity has any impact on their science whatsoever – simply because they say so? Read More ›
Not if you go by best-known Darwinist, Richard Dawkins: Note the importance of evidence for reaching Darwinian conclusions. “important as the evidence is, in this article I want to explore the possibility of developing a different kind of argument. I suspect that it may be possible to show that, regardless of evidence, Darwinian natural selection is the only force we know that could, in principle, do the job of explaining the existence of organized and adaptive complexity.” [Daw82] “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life… even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory.” [Daw96Bp287-88] “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only Read More ›
Over at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne says that Karl Giberson has left Christian Darwinist site BioLogos:
I am informed that Karl Giberson, formerly Executive Vice President of The BioLogos Foundation, has left the organization. He has disappeared from their posted list of “team members,” hasn’t yet been replaced, and confirmed to me by email that he resigned.
Sources speculate that for a site that tried to provide a bridge for Christians to cross over to Darwinism, Giberson was a bridge too far: Read More ›
Marvin Olasky of World Magazine interviews Robert Sloan, the Baylor prez who recruited the ID folk at the Polanski Centrer and ended up having to leave (that was one of many disconnects between him and the post-Baptist culture at Baylor) You created the Polanyi Center for the Study of Intelligent Design. That became controversial: Why? We brought a couple very fine scholars to be there, but immediately they encountered much opposition by the neo-Darwinians. What objections were there to Intelligent Design at an ostensibly Christian university? I don’t think there was a good objection. Critics said you’re going to embarrass us professionally, everyone knows evolution is true, and who are these people but a bunch of seven-day creationists? The list Read More ›
Yesterday, original Darwinist assumptions about “junk DNA” were offered; today, again courtesy Donald Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability LITE: A Call to Scientific Integrity. Now, let’s see what the ID guys had to say about it (p. 57):
“Junk DNA” has been classified as a misnomer by ID proponents as early as 1986 [Den86], since “Junk DNA and directed evolution are in the end incompatible concepts” [Den98] The journal Science refused to print a 1994 letter that pro-ID scientist Forrest Mims wrote warning about assuming that “junk DNA” was useless [Mim94*]*9. Rejected Publications
They’ve been saying it ever since, popular or otherwise. Read More ›
Because they were right-handed! Or so says this MSNBC story on handedness and language:
Frayer and his colleagues looked at these markings on the teeth of Neanderthals (from around 100,000 years ago) and their ancestors from 500,000 years ago. In both groups, most of the teeth showed more right handed scratches than left.
[ … ]
No animals other than humans show such a bias toward right-handedness. In some primates, such as chimps and gorillas, a small 5 percent shift toward the right can be seen in some studies. This is an example of brain asymmetry, where one side of the brain takes on functions that the other side doesn’t. Read More ›