scordova

ID proponents and creationists should not use the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to support ID. Appropriate for Independence Day in the USA is my declaration of independence and disavowal of 2nd Law arguments in support of ID and creation theory. Any student of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics will likely find Granville Sewell’s argument and similar arguments not consistent with textbook understanding of these subjects, and wrong on many levels. With regrets for my dissent to my colleagues (like my colleague Granville Sewell) and friends in the ID and creationist communities, I offer this essay. I do so because to avoid saying anything would be a disservice to the ID and creationist community of which I am a part.

 [Granville Sewell  responds to Sal Cordova here. ]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I don’t think Granville Sewell 2nd law arguments are correct. An author of the founding book of ID, Mystery of Life’s Origin, agrees with me:

“Strictly speaking, the earth is an open system, and thus the Second Law of Thermodynamics cannot be used to preclude a naturalistic origin of life.”

Walter Bradley, Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life

Read More ›

I believe this is already the 2nd time that Nick has graced the pages of the world’s leading science journal. See: Predicting a state shift in the biosphere, and communicating it. Looks like it is the cover story too! Nick and I have been opponents in the ID / Evolution debate for years. I’m glad that scientists of his caliber visit UD and debate with us. Congrats Nick. PS The other time I congratulated Nick was here: Congrats Nick Matzke for Publishing ID Sympathetic Paper

HT: Jammer, UD commenter The Clergy Letter Project was organized to help promote Darwinism in the churches. They maintained a directory of Scientists on call to help Clergy. However the clergy letter project has a checkered past of recruiting scientists with dubious ethical standards to help spread the Gospel according to Darwin. Were it not for the diligent reporting of news at Uncommon Descent it is possible that they might not have so swiftly removed the name of Darwin Day Slayer Amy Bishop from their list of Scientists on call to help Clergy. Amy Bishop was removed from their rolls, but they need to update their directory again as it currently reads: Name: Stephen Matheson, Ph.D.Title: Associate Professor of BiologyAddress: Read More ›

Art Hunt, from the archives of Uncommon Descent June 14, 2010: As far as the functional vs. non-functional business, there is one key fact that IDists ignore in all of this. I refer, of course, to the fact that intronic RNA is made and then thrown away. We don’t call it “junk” because we don’t know if it does anything, we call it so because it is discarded. Arthur HuntSternberg Plasters Matheson, Comment #357009 So Art says something is labeled junk because it is eventually discarded. How much of an organism is eventually discarded? If humans discard most of the molecules that constitute their bodies over the years, then by that standard everything is junk! The fact that something is Read More ›

Who is #1 in education at the grade school level? In 2010 it was South Korea. World Education Rankings Math Science Reading And who is #1 in dumping Darwinism from the educational system? From the pages of the prestigious scientific journal Nature it would seem it is also South Korea.

From the pages of the prestigious scientific journal Nature: A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. … Even the nation’s leading science institute — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — has a creation science display on campus. “The exhibition was set up by scientists who believed in creation science back in 1993,” says Gab-duk Jang, a pastor of the campus church. The institute also has a thriving Research Association for Creation Science, run by professors and students, Read More ›

World-renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is under fire from several biology professors at Emory University, where he’s scheduled to give the commencement address. They wrote a letter to the school newspaper after learning Carson does not believe in evolution,….. Dr. Ben Carson’s Beliefs On Evolution Stir Controversy At Emory University About 500 Darwinist alumni, students, and faculty from Emory decided to pile on by signing the letter. Carson is the director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, by President George W. Bush in 2008. Hopkins boasts 17 Nobel prizes in medicine/physiology and researchers associated with the university were awarded Nobel prizes Read More ›

If we genetically engineered an organism that had superior reproductive properties, could we logically say the following: This organism is clearly the product of natural selection since it survives better than its peers. Clearly it evolved the abilities which make it more reproductively successful. The proof that Natural Selection is responsible for creating the traits is that natural selection selects for them. No. This is an obvious non-sequitur. The fact that something is selected for does not imply that it natural selection was the mechanism that created its complex features. In order to help people remember my points, I like using illustrations, especially silly ones to get the point across. In the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, space aliens intelligently Read More ›

The NCSE has boasted about the list of people named Steve who are evolutionists. The irony is that The NCSE’s Project Steve is named after Stephen J. Gould who has been labeled by his peers as an “Accidental Creationist”. I guess it’s too late for the NCSE to rescind their Steve list now that we know the Steve list was in honor of someone who is bad for evolution. From THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution by Robert Wright: Gould has advanced a distinctive view of evolution. He stresses its flukier aspects…In fact, if you really pay attention to what he is saying, and accept it, you might start to wonder how evolution could have Read More ›

[HT: idnet.com.au] Would an intelligent designer deliberately build a biological system that self destructs. Can something be intelligently designed that is reproductively unfit? Absolutely! But first consider the essay ID’s Broken Watchmaker Analogy, where a Darwinist unwittingly concedes an important point (in an otherwise confused, ignorant and illogical rant): Products of intelligent design typically have capabilities that exceed usefulness and complications that would be profoundly maladaptive in a living system Alexander Nussbaum By that line of reasoning, the existence of humans evidences design. Why? Compared to bacteria, humans are profoundly maladaptive. Darwinists like Bryan Sykes concede the human species might exist for only 100,000 more years. The question then arises, in light of this, why are we here? Why aren’t Read More ›

Darwin once remarked the tail of the peacock made him sick because the unnecessary extravagance of nature was suggestive of Intelligent Design. What made Darwin sick then still holds true today, he never solved the problem, and it is more in evidence by the problem of Irreducible Complexity (IC). To illustrate extravagance, consider the simple goal of getting a card to lie horizontally. This goal is easily achieved. Simply let a card fall down on a table. But one can take the same card and get it to lie horizontally by making part of the flat roof of a house of cards like this one. Cleary one could argue there is an irreducibly complex core of this system, namely the Read More ›

Esteemed biologist Massimo Pigliucci offers a goldmine of quotable morsels: I simply don’t buy Dan Dennett’s idea that “Darwinism” (which of course is not a scientific theory, but an ideological-philosophical position) is a “universal acid,” …. Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even Read More ›

[As I recall, Jason Rosenhouse objected that Bill Dembski’s notion of specification cannot be applied to biology. This essay is written to challenge some of the objections think I’ve heard him raise informally over the years at my ID talks at his school and our discussion at ID and creation conferences. He’s one of the brightest critics of ID that I know, and thus I think objections he might raise should be addressed.] The opponents of ID argue something along the lines: “take a deck of cards, randomly shuffle it, the probability of any given sequence occurring is 1 out of 52 factorial or about 8×10^67 — Improbable things happen all the time, it doesn’t imply intelligent design.” In fact, Read More ›

I’ve publicly said, I’m generally ambivalent to negative on teaching ID and creation in the public schools. However, I am for teaching good science in the public schools. Here is a video that does just that. http://programmingoflife.com/watch-the-video The video has been for sale at Amazon, but it can be watched from the website, now.

If you google the phrase “intellectual honesty” you’ll see that an essay by ID author Mike Gene ranks very highly (#3 as of this writing). In contrast, if you google “intellectual dishonesty NCSE Gleik”, the NCSE’s Gleik is at the top of the list, having resigned after he was caught lying. Mike’s essay can be found at: Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty