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How can we assert the great American novel The Right Stuff has near 100% sequence similarity with Mirriam Webster’s Dictionary? Simple, take the words in the dictionary and find identical words in the novel, and you’ll find the spelling is 100% identical in most cases! Would you then use such an illegitimate method to argue humans share a close genetic identity with fish. Apparently Darwinists are quite willing to do exactly that. Consider this recent paper: The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution which concludes: Through a phylogenomic analysis, we conclude that the lungfish, and not the coelacanth, is the closest living relative of tetrapods. The paper goes on and on about how closely related we are based Read More ›

Did a creationist actually say this? phylogenetic methods as they exist now can only rigorously detect sister-group relationships, not direct ancestry, No, it was Nick Matzke at Panda’s thumb 🙂 But a creationist did say: you get sister groups with no parent explicitly shown. Platonic forms do not suggest we evolved from fish 😯 Not much difference between what Matzke said and I said! I’ve been telling him that since 2006, and now he finally acknowledges it publicly. I’ve said that it was creationists (like Linnaeus) before Darwin’s time who lumped humans along with the primates, and the primates along with the mammals, etc. The creationists perceived the “sister groups” with no physical ancestor (which suggests the “parent” was an Read More ›

It is sufficient that NS does not act too strongly against, not that it must act for, a particular change. Allan Miller Comment on crossposted thread, Blindwatchbreaker Allan is wrong in using the word “sufficient”. The correct statement “It is necessary but not sufficient for NS not to act too strongly” Notwithstanding Allan Miller’s wrong choice of words, he rightly echoes the words of three scientists I’ve quoted before. For evolution of complexity to happen, Natural Selection must often be inhibited, Natural Selection is not the mechanism of innovation it is the INHIBITOR. many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection Michael Lynch opening, The Origins of Genome Architecture and a Read More ›

Yeah, only in Dawkins’ dreams. Look at the right atrium in these four creatures from Encyclopedia Britannica: How did that right atrium evolve from one side to the other along with changes in its connection to the pulmonary artery? In the crocodile and snake the right atrium is on the right ventricle but in the lizard and turtle they are on the left ventricle. Look at the aortas. In the lizard they are all on left ventricle, in the snake on the right ventricle, and then split for the turtles and crocodiles. How did those aortas migrate from on ventricle to the other without the transitionals being lethal? Study the picture more and you’ll see, the Intelligent Designer seems almost Read More ›

Our colleague Elizabeth Liddle has described the process of human design as trial and error, tinkering and iteration. Like Dawkins, she has argued nature (like human designers) is able to construct biological designs via trial and error, tinkering and iteration. However, when nature is properly compared and contrasted with the way humans go about creating designs, it is apparent Dawkins’ claim of a blind watchmaker is false. I refer to Elizabeth’s description because she articulated some aspects of the blind watchmaker hypothesis better than Dawkins, but in so doing actually helped highlight why Dawkins’ blind watchmaker is refuted by the evidence. [this is a follow up post to Selection falsely called a mechanism when it should be called an outcome] Read More ›

How can there be life, much less a Cambrian explosion, if the early Earth was an ice ball. Astrophysics tells us the Earth should be an ice ball, but why isn’t it? Astrophysics tells us that relative to today, the sun radiated 30% less energy in the time of the Early earth and 6% less energy in the late Cambrian (about 500 million years ago). But even as little as 2% less solar energy hitting the Earth could have turned the Earth into an ice ball. Simple energy-balance climate models of the Budyko/Sellers type predict that a small (2–5%) decrease in solar output could result in a runaway glaciation on the Earth. Susceptibility of the early Earth to irreversible glaciation Read More ›

HT: JGuy In a science journal Icarus, a journal dedicated to Solar System studies, we have this recent paper from Vladimir I. Cherbaka, Department of Mathematics, al-Farabi Kazakh National University and Maxim A. Makukov Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, Observatory 23. The “Wow” signal in the terrestrial genetic code Abstract It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might Read More ›

I’ve discovered some features of UD software that I wasn’t aware of and may be of help to all the 30 or so UD authors. It has been a pleasure to assist the News desk for the past week while Denyse worked on another project. I now appreciate how time consuming the task is. In the process of assisting the News desk, I discovered that if a UD author clicks “News” in the category list, then that article will automatically scroll beneath the featured articles when a new article is posted. I want to apologize to VJTorley and other authors since I did not fully realize how the “News” category automatically scrolls past featured articles like VJTorley’s Scala Naturae article. Read More ›

Natural Selection was pioneered by the creationist Blyth, and Darwin later plagiarized Blyth’s work and published his own corrupt variation of Blyth’s ideas. (See: Was Blyth the True Scientist and Darwin merely a plagiarist and charlatan). Blyth asserted that survival of the healthier individuals in a population was a mechanism of preserving a species (not originating them). Darwin, erroneously claimed Natural Selection was the mechanism of originating species and Dawkins in the present day vigorously insists selection is the mechanism for the appearance of design. I have no problem asserting selection is a mechanism for preserving species as Blyth proposed. However, expanding on Darwin’s ideas, Dawkins’ insistence that selection creates machines in biology is suspect at best. When is selection Read More ›

Can I find examples that can fit any of the four following descriptions? Are some even impossible in principle? [Assume first that the artifact in question has high improbability (like a set of a million coins or as stream of a million bits) or high Shannon entropy. Also assume by “disordered” I mean Kolmogorov simple or algorithmically simple or possessing low algorithmic entropy. Curiously (as far as I know), organization cannot be measured in terms of either Shannon entropy nor algorithmic entropy, it is a transcendent feature that can perceived almost only through subjective specification. Further, thermodynamic entropy isn’t even considered in any of these cases (and may not even be applicable)]. 1. ordered and organized 2. ordered but disorganized Read More ›

Why would a Biblical creationist be interested in the Design argument? Isn’t enough for a creationist to know “God did it?”. No! God also wants creationists to know the level of His genius, and that is where the Design argument has benefit for creationists. Design research will glorify the Creator in ways revealed theology cannot. To illustrate: a creationist could say “God created birds” but a Design theorist could say “God made birds and there is genius in the design of flight…” The Design theorist then shows the genius of the Creator rather than merely asserting “God did it”. Scripture doesn’t describe every design in the universe. There may be designs out there remaining to be discovered. Things a Biblical Read More ›

[the “Cocktail” designation in the title refers to ideas that are possibly true, but are speculative in nature and which are not offered with the same level of conviction as other arguments at UD.] In a rather terse report here: http://justpaste.it/2q1a we learn the C14 dates indicate dinosaur remains are only 22-40K years old, not tens of millions of years old! 1.On this page you can see where 20 samples of acrocanthosaurus, allosaurus, hadrosaur, triceratops, and apatosaur were C14 dated at the University of Arizona using both the AMS and beta-decay methods to be between 22-40k years old. Authors Jean De Pontcharra and Marie Claire van Oosterwych have Ph.D’s in physics and physical chemistry, respectively. It was originally presented as Read More ›

I care about truth if there is a God. But why should I care about truth if there is no God? In fact if there is no God, maybe I shouldn’t care about truth because it would be too sad to know…I’d rather live out my life with the illusion of happily ever after in that case. Two thousand years ago, someone echoed those sentiments: What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Paul of Tarsus 1 Cor 15:32 There was an exchange between KeithS and I in another thread, and he fired off this comment: Your comment epitomizes one Read More ›

Here is one pro-ID author I’m not endorsing without even reading his book: Lou Barreto who wrote the pro-ID book Who is this Alien?. Recently, Nick Matzke has been getting criticism for dissing pro-ID books he’s not even read. See: Nick Matzke Book Burner. To his credit, Nick’s at least read some of the material by the ID authors he disses. But I think I might do Nick one better, I’m going to diss a pro-ID author and his book without reading his book. Why? See what Barreto wrote about me: THE CRITICS OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN Article: By Lou Barreto It seems like the critics of Intelligent Design, such as Sal Cordova and others, will never acknowledge the concepts of Read More ›

The ID interpretation of No Free Lunch theorems argues that Darwinian processes on average will not do better than chance processes for the emergence of biological complexity. As has been debated at UD, it’s not merely a question of what is possible, but what we should reasonably expect. For example, see: The Law of Large Numbers vs. KeithS, Eigenstate, and my other TSZ critics. The Genetic Entropy hypothesis by creationist John Sanford argues that biological complexity is gradually going out of the human genome and possibly the entire biosphere. I provided cursory analysis that lends credence to both the ID interpretation of No Free Lunch theorems and the Genetic Entropy thesis here: The price of cherry picking for addicted gamblers Read More ›