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I found a comment by CLADIVS (Claudius) in Good and bad reasons for rejecting ID that is worth highlighting. But without a testable explanation, ID remains in the realm of metaphysics, philosophy or religion, not science. I responded: ID may not be science, but that does not mean automatically it is religion. If I have a coin in a box and shake it, look at it at 11:27 AM on 6/26/13 and determine it is heads. You have no way of scientifically verifying the claim via a process of repeated experiments 10 years from now. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The fact that a true claim about the history of the physical universe is not accessible Read More ›

In the video, Dawkins gets his head split open and then all we see are his brains and eyeballs, then they multiply…. at the end he says, “as for me, I’d rather spread memes than genes anyway.” We then see him tooting his own horn while a dinosaur swallows a shark. The video that Richard Dawkins made for an advertising company in Cannes is like a particularly vivid anti-drug commercial: this is your brain on bad acid, except, of course, that this is a portrait of a brain wrecked by self-importance. Richard Dawkins Meaningless Meme Skip to about 4:50 to see the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFn-ixX9edg Enjoy! HT: Mike Gene PSDespite all the sadness in the world, the few glimpses of beauty Read More ›

Although I accept ID, I actually think there are respectable reasons to reject or at least withhold judgment on ID in biology. I am writing this essay because I expect I’ll refer to it in the future since I will frequently grant that a critic of ID might be quite reasonable in not embracing ID. Unlike some of my ID colleagues, I do not think rejection or non-acceptance of ID is an unrespectable position. It may not be obvious, but several revered “ID proponents” either currently or in the past said they are not convinced ID is true. Foremost would probably be David Berlinski. Next is Michael Denton, and next is Richard Sternberg. I do not know for a fact Read More ›

I went through a great deal of trouble to contest the idiosyncratic claim of a critic at TheSkepticalZone who said: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone This critic (who goes by the handle “Eigenstate”) would probably keep singing the same tune if we were dealing with 500,000,000 fair coins. I said this was wrong, and KeithS disagreed and demanded I make a retraction. See his comments here in SSDD: a 22 sigma event is consistent with the physics of fair coins?. I insisted the expectation value of 50% heads has to be respected, Read More ›

SSDD – Same Stuff, Different Darwinist. This time someone said at skeptical zone: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone So if someone has 500 fair coins, and he finds them all heads, that is consistent with expected physical outcomes of random flips? 😯 I don’t think so! Correct me if I’m wrong but if you have 500 fair coins, the expectation is 250 coins will be heads, not 500. Now if you have 261 of the 500 coins heads, that is still within a standard deviation of expectation, and thus would still be Read More ›

SSDD is an acronym for “Same Stuff Different Day”. In debate with Darwinists, it’s always the same stuff, different day. SSDD can be also an acronym for Space Shuttle Denying Darwinists — that is to say Darwinists that are so against ID that they will even deny that Space Shuttles are intelligently designed. Such people suffer from SSDD syndrome. There is no remedy for their philosophical malady. Over at ARN the following exchange happened which I summarize: Sal: Is a man-made design an example of intelligent design? Alan Fox: NO!!! Sal: Given what you said, is the Space Shuttle an example of intelligent design? How about GMOs? Alan Fox: Nothing is an example of intelligent design unless you want to Read More ›

Irreducibly Complex systems are those systems (man-made or otherwise), where removal of critical core parts results in malfunction. By way of contrast, fault tolerant systems allow removal of parts or entire sub-systems, yet intended function is still retained. Removable parts or subsystems in fault tolerant architectures are also contrasted with useless parts which serve no purpose. Like spare tires, removable parts in a fault tolerant systems can still serve a purpose even if never used. From Wiki on Fault Tolerant Intelligent Design: In engineering, fault-tolerant design is a design that enables a system to continue its intended operation, possibly at a reduced level, rather than failing completely, when some part of the system fails. A fault tolerant system can be Read More ›

John C. Sanford’s work is part of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Bioloistic Particle Gun Gene guns were the brainchild of plant geneticist Dr. John C. Sanford, who spent much of the early 1980s looking for a way to insert foreign DNA into plant cells in order to create transgenic plants. At the time, the most successful process for doing this relied on a species of bacteria. The method, however, only worked for certain plant species and was not successful with important crops like wheat, rice, or corn. Sanford considered a variety of techniques, including piercing cell walls with a laser, but it was not until he teamed up with Dr. Edward Wolf of the Cornell engineering labs, Read More ›

For the sake of argument, let us assume, as Michael Denton did, that there is universal common ancestry. The problem, both in terms of comparative anatomy and biochemistry, is that an unprejudiced view of the data suggests we didn’t evolve from fish. When I brought the topic up earlier in Taxonomic nested hierarchies don’t support Darwinism, in the course of my arguments in that thread, it became ever more apparent even at the molecular level, it was hard to justify the claim that we evolved from fish. Linnaeus and other creationists perceived Platonic forms we know by names today such as: Vetebrates, Mammals, Primates, and Humans. These forms defy the story that we evolved from fish. Again, let us suppose Read More ›

Superficially, the phrase “survival of the fittest” seems undeniably true, but in the proximal and ultimate sense it is false. If this claim is false then Darwinism is also false. The notion of “survival of the fittest” is an illusion in the general sense though seemingly true in the Darwinian sense. Critical oversights in Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and in Dennett’s algorithm can be demonstrated. Finally, population genetics can be used to critique Dawkins Weasel, Avida and various other fallacious computer simulations that are used in promoting the falsehoods of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism. To demonstrate that “survival of the fittest is false” it is sufficient but not necessary to demonstrate “death of the fittest is Read More ›

I think the NCSE got tired of defending Darwinism. I guess the Discovery Institute promoting ID and the creationists promoting creationism was bad enough, but when mainstream scientists began to join the anti-Darwin fray, it was too much. So what did the NCSE do? They found something to replace Darwinism as the central core of science education. See for yourself what this new core of science education is here. 🙂 NOTESThis post was filed under humor. Don’t take it too seriously, but I think there is a grain of truth to what I said. UPDATEsince this is a humor post, I’ve decided to make this UD’s first official OPEN THREAD. Have at it guys, but keep it civil and family Read More ›

Joe Felsenstein is an evolutionist that has a unique distinction of having his work favorably cited by creationists and bible scholars (except where he disagrees). For example, religious scholars are using Joe’s work to find descendants of the line of priests from the time of the Bible’s King David. See: Y-Chromosomal Aaron. Joe is also widely credited with coining the phrase “Muller’s ratchet”, a concept articulated in a paper 40 years ago! He must have written that when he was really young, 1973 was a while back. The wiki entry on Muller’s ratchet: In evolutionary genetics, Muller’s ratchet (named after Hermann Joseph Muller, by analogy with a ratchet mechanism) is the process by which the genomes of an asexual population Read More ›

There is the forgotten book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism written by a non-creationist agnostic Richard Milton. Milton expressed his skepticism of mainstream claims of the old-age of the fossil record. His work further motivated me toward the idea that there could an empirically driven critique of the accepted ages of the fossils. This is a short bio of Milton: Richard Milton is a science journalist and design engineer based in London. He is a member of Mensa, the international high-IQ society, and writes a column for Mensa Magazine. He has been a member of the Geologists’ Association for twenty years, and did extensive geological research for this book. He has been featured on the BBC, NBC, and other television Read More ›

In addition to accumulating 5.7 million dollars in science grants, he has published 186 scientific papers, 102 of which are in refereed journals, the others in conference proceedings. It might be instructive to compare Hartnett’s total number of publications with other scientists using a graph (created by Mike Gene) of the number of scientific papers published. The researcher who surpasses Hartnett is Francis Collins, who, in the eyes of some is a “creationist” because he believes there are some features in the universe (like human compassion) that are not the result of mindless forces. The vocal GNU atheists evolutionists, especially Sam Harris, ought to be a little embarrassed that a YEC surpassed them in scientific productivity. Hartnett surpasses the self-appointed Read More ›

Is the hypothesis of Young Earth Creation (YEC) relevant to ID? Most in the ID community will say, “NO”, but let me offer some reasons to think the answer could be, “YES”. The hypothesis of a young Earth or young universe comes from religious beliefs rooted in a chronology constructed by taking the genealogies in the Bible (like Luke Chapter 3, 1 Chronicles or the Table of Nations in Genesis 10). YEC is not strictly an Evangelical Christian hypothesis but is accepted by some Jewish traditions. For example, see this commentary on the Jewish calendar by physicist Gerald Schroeder: One of the most obvious perceived contradictions between Torah and science is the age of the universe. Is it billions of Read More ›