vjtorley

“This has to be a joke,” I thought to myself, as I read the Phys.org article on Dr. Eugene McCarthy, the geneticist who believes that human beings originated as a result of hybridization between a pig and an ape. But it wasn’t. The guy is serious, and he is a bona fide geneticist who specializes in the study of hybridization and who has taught at the University of Georgia. In 2006, his Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World (Oxford University Press, 2006), was published and favorably reviewed. The book provides information on nearly 4,000 distinct types of hybrid crosses among birds and cites more than 5,000 publications. During his years of work as a geneticist, however, Dr. McCarthy had Read More ›

Can an evolutionist consistently believe in higher and lower life forms? That’s the subject of a recent essay by Emanuele Rigato and Alessandro Minelli, entitled, The great chain of being is still here, in Evolution: Education and Outreach, a SpringerOpen journal whose aim is to promote “accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience.” In their article (Evolution: Education and Outreach 2013, 6:18, 27 June 2013), Rigato and Minelli argue for a purge: they insist that “progressionist language” must be systematically eradicated from all scientific papers on evolutionary biology. The authors felt impelled to make this drastic recommendation, after making the shocking discovery that nearly 2% of all biological articles published between 2005 and 2010 in Read More ›

I’d like to confess two things up-front. First, I know next to nothing about Kabbalah (an ancient Jewish mystical tradition which forms an integral part of the Oral tradition of Judaism). Second, I’m not a big fan of the “day-age” interpretation of Genesis, having been turned off it at the age of twelve, when I learned that birds appeared only 150 million years ago, long after the appearance of land animals (or even mammals, for that matter) – in other words, the reverse of the order in Genesis. But I’d be the first to admit that my own personal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 might well be wrong – in fact, I’m quite sure that it is wrong, in Read More ›

A firestorm of controversy has been unleashed by the recent Uncommon Descent post, Economist John Maynard Keynes understood ID? (June 13, 2013), which claimed that whatever his merits may have been as an economist, John Maynard Keynes (pictured above) at least displayed an admirable grasp of the case for Intelligent Design, which he succinctly summarized in his classic work, A Treatise on Probability. No attempt was made to paint the man as an Intelligent Design sympathizer, and it was subsequently pointed out by Mark Frank that he was an atheist. Over at the Skeptical Zone, the author of the original Uncommon Descent post on Keynes was reproached in a post by KeithS for not including a follow-up quote from the Read More ›

NOTE: This post has been updated with an Appendix – VJT. My post yesterday, Order is not the same thing as complexity: A response to Harry McCall (17 June 2013), seems to have generated a lively discussion, judging from the comments received to date. Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mark Frank has also written a thoughtful response titled, VJ Torley on Order versus Complexity. In today’s post, I’d like to clear up a few misconceptions that are still floating around. 1. In his opening paragraph, Mark Frank writes: To sum it up – a pattern has order if it can be generated from a few simple principles. It has complexity if it can’t. There are some well known problems with Read More ›

Over at John Loftus’ Website Debunking Christianity, contributor Harry McCall has put up a short post entitled, The Theology of a God as an Intelligent Designer Exploded! (11 June 2013). He writes: Christian apologists claim that the detail of the universe proves the creation of a master designer: God. However, as you can plainly see in this video, a man made dumb frequency generator can create many different detailed intricate designs. Enjoy! On his post, he has embedded a Youtube video of the Chladni plate experiment. It’s only about three=and-a-half minutes long, but I can guarantee it will leave you spellbound. What I found funny when I saw McCall’s post recently was that the same video was also posted on Read More ›

In a recent post over at Panda’s Thumb, entitled, Does CSI enable us to detect Design? A reply to William Dembski (7 April 2013), Professor Joe Felsenstein, an internationally acclaimed population geneticist who is one of the more thoughtful critics of Intelligent Design, takes issue with the claim made by Professor William Dembski and Dr. Bob Marks II that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, far from solving the problem of where the complex information found in the cells of living organisms originally came from, merely pushes it further back. The thrust of Dembski and Marks’ argument is that even if we grant (for argument’s sake) that Darwinian evolution is fully capable of generating the life-forms we find on Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle has put up a post for Uncommon Descent readers, entitled, A CSI Challenge (15 May 2013). She writes: Here is a pattern: It’s a gray-scale image, so it is just one 2D matrix. Here is a text file containing the matrix: MysteryPhoto I would like to know whether it has CSI or not. The term complex specified information (or CSI) is defined by Intelligent Design advocates William Dembski and Jonathan Wells in their book, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas, 2008), as being equivalent to specified complexity (p. 311), which is then defined as follows: An event or object exhibits Read More ›

Reading through a recent article by KeithS over at The Skeptical Zone, I was reminded of the following lyrics from the musical Annie Get Your Gun: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. Yes, I can. No, you can’t. Yes, I can, Yes, I can! The article, which is entitled, Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 1 — Intelligent Design is not compatible with the evidence for common descent, argues that evolution guided by an Intelligent Designer fares much worse – in fact, trillions of times worse – than unguided Darwinian evolution as an explanation of how living things arose in all their Read More ›

In my last post, The Edge of Evolution?”, I drew readers’ attention to a 2011 paper by the Croatian biochemist Dr. Branko Kozulic, titled, Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species, which argues that the presence of not one but literally hundreds of chemically unique proteins in each species is an event beyond the reach of chance, and that since these proteins exhibit specified complexity (as the amino acids which make up the polypeptide chain need to be in the correct order), each species must therefore be the result of intelligent planning. (A parallel argument can be made for de novo protein-coding genes.) In this short post, I’d like to discuss a few falsifiable predictions which I believe are entailed by Read More ›

A few years ago, Intelligent Design researcher Professor Michael Behe wrote a thought-provoking book entitled The Edge of Evolution, which argued that design was much more pervasive in Nature than commonly thought. Professor Behe argued that each and every class of living things, and quite probably each and every family, had been intentionally designed. Now, a recent paper by Dr. Branko Kozulic, a biochemist who serves on the editorial board of the Intelligent Design journal Bio-Complexity, argues that each and every species of living things was intelligently designed, and that the biological concept of a species can best be defined in terms of the unique proteins and genes that characterize it. In a nutshell, Dr. Kozulic’s argument is that there Read More ›

Could proteins have developed naturally on Earth, without any intelligent guidance? The late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) thought not, and one can immediately grasp why, just by looking at the picture above, which shows the protein hexokinase, with much smaller molecules of ATP and the simplest sugar, glucose, shown in the top right corner for comparison (image courtesy of Tim Vickers and Wikipedia). Briefly, Hoyle argued that since a protein is typically made up of at least 100 or so amino acids, of which there are 20 kinds, the number of possible amino acid sequences of length 100 is astronomically large. Among these, the proportion that are able to fold up and perform a biologically useful task as proteins Read More ›

Some readers will recall the case of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, who was publicly exposed in 2011 for faking his data in several dozen published papers about human behavior that had made him famous – and who, after being caught, decided to publish a book about his con, detailing how and why he’d done it. Uncommon Descent ran a story about the case (see here), and another story about how it was exposed (see here), while James Barham discussed it at further length over on his blog, TheBestSchools.org, in an article entitled, More Scientists Behaving Badly. A story about the case appeared in The New York Read More ›

It is commonly believed that Dr. Dan-Eric Nilsson and Dr. Susanne Pelger of Lund University in Sweden demonstrated in a scientific paper written back in 1994 that a fully-developed vertebrate eye could have developed from a simple light-sensitive spot by a process of unguided natural selection, in “less than 364,000 years.” That, at any rate, is the popular myth. What’s the reality? Nilsson and Pelger certainly made a convincing case for gradualism in their paper, but they failed to bolster the case for Darwinism. Looking at the eye from a purely anatomical standpoint, they showed how a vertebrate eye could have developed from a patch of light-sensitive skin by the accumulation of numerous tiny modifications over the course of time Read More ›

Most people are aware that Sir Isaac Newton believed in God. But it may come as a surprise to many readers to learn that he was also an Intelligent Design advocate. What prompted me to write this post was a recent comment by Genomicus that while Newton’s remarks on the Bible were interesting, they were “irrelevant to the hypothesis that life was engineered by some intelligence(s).” Genomicus will be interested to know that Newton explicitly argued that all of the various kinds of living things in Nature were personally designed by God. For those wanting to know more about Newton’s views on God and science, I would heartily recommend an essay by Stephen Snobelen, a professor of the history of Read More ›