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In a recent interview with David Klinghoffer and Michael Denton over at Evolution News and Views, author David Berlinski revealed the big question he’d like to ask Darwinists about the transition from a land-dwelling mammal to a sea-dwelling whale: “How many changes would I need?” Biochemist Larry Moran answers: “Evolutionary biologists who have spent their entire careers studying evolution, genetics, and developmental biology are comfortable with a few thousand mutations causing the transformation from land animals to whales.” And that’s not all. A mere 340 beneficial mutations would have been sufficient to transform the common ancestor of man and chimp into a human being, according to biologist Ian Musgrave of Panda’s Thumb. (That’s 240 mutations in protein-coding genes and 100 Read More ›

John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, would surely have been banned by the United Methodist Church leadership from presenting his views on Intelligent Design at the church’s General Conference in May 2016, were he alive today. His crime? Not only was he unapologetically pro-Intelligent Design, but he also denounced the theory of evolution as godless. In a recent post over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Flannery alluded to Wesley’s pro-ID views. In this post, I intend to remove all possible doubt, by supplying chapter and verse from Wesley’s own writings. (For those readers who haven’t been following the controversy over the United Methodist Church leadership’s decision to bar Discovery Institute from sponsoring an information table at the church’s Read More ›

Over at his blog at coldcasechristianity.com, homicide detective, ex-atheist and Christian apologist Jim Warner Wallace has written an interesting post (July 30, 2015) in which he identifies no less than eight attributes of an object which point to its being a product of intelligent design: I believe there are eight attributes of design we employ when reasonably inferring the existence of a Designer. To make them easier to remember, I’ve assembled them in an acronym (DESIGNED): D- Dubious Probability (Given Chance) Is random chance an insufficient explanation for the formation and assembly of the object we are examining?E -Echoes of Familiarity Does the object resemble other structures we know (with certainty) were designed by intelligent designers? S- Sophistication and Intricacy Read More ›

In a recent article in the Guardian, Nick Cohen defends “the freedom to argue for your own ideas without being forced to comply by authoritarians,” but goes on to argue (incorrectly) that this freedom owes everything to Enlightenment skeptics, and nothing to Judaism and Christianity. For him, ISIS and the Judaeo-Christian tradition are morally equivalent: Cultural conservatives do not want to be reminded that there is no Islamist crime so great the Judaeo-Christian tradition did not once authorise it. The Iranian judiciary murders gays and Islamic State throws them from tall buildings to delight the faithful. The Book of Leviticus would approve. It says that men who have sex with each other “shall surely be put to death”. Assad, Iran Read More ›

Over at her BackReAction blog, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, has written an article titled, Free will is dead, let’s bury it. However, her arguments against free will are both scientifically unsound and philosophically dated. She writes: There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it Read More ›

In 2010, Lynch and Abegg claimed in a widely cited journal article that neutral evolutionary processes could generate complex adaptations much more rapidly than was previously believed. Their article contained a mathematical flaw, which was pointed out by Dr. Douglas Axe, but Axe’s critique continues to be ignored by senior evolutionary biologists, including the article’s authors, Professor Joe Felsenstein and Professor Larry Moran. Want proof? Read on. For those readers who don’t know him, Michael Lynch is an eminent scientist: he is Distinguished Professor of Evolution, Population Genetics and Genomics at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. He has also written a two-volume textbook with Bruce Walsh, which is widely regarded as the “Bible” of quantitative genetics. In 2009, he was elected Read More ›

A team of researchers led by Professor Sijbren Otto of the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, has announced that it has observed not only self-replication, but also mutants and even new “species,” in a bunch of molecules in the lab. Does this research show how life might have arisen spontaneously, or is it nothing more than a case of intelligent design by clever chemists? In today’s post, I’m going to argue that the claims made by Professor Otto and his team are flawed, on no less than seven counts. But before I examine their press release and their paper in Nature Chemistry, I’d like to discuss a Science LinX video that was posted on Youtube last year (March 17, Read More ›

In a new 9-minute video, physicist Sean Carroll eviscerates the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. Or does he? Apart from its science-of-the-gaps optimism, the video’s main flaws are that it fails to state the fine-tuning hypothesis correctly, and employs poor Bayesian reasoning. But first, let’s have a look at the video, which was posted on Youtube by a user named bdwilson1000: The text of Dr. Sean Carroll’s video can be found in the opening speech of his debate with Professor William Lane Craig on the topic, “God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology” in March 2014. Professor Jerry Coyne has provided a handy summary of Dr. Carroll’s five main points in a post Read More ›

I’ve had a very interesting night. After watching Dr. David Wood (a Christian apologist and former atheist) and skeptic John Loftus (an atheist and former Christian preacher) debate whether Jesus rose from the dead in a very lively exchange, I decided to have a look at David Wood’s fascinating but very disturbing conversion story (WARNING: Do NOT watch this with children in the room!) At one point in the video (20:38), David Wood describes how several things combined to destabilize his entire atheistic belief system. The first was the argument from design: First, what’s called the design argument finally hit me. I was looking at a wall, and how the bricks were arranged, and I thought to myself: “You know, Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne is gleefully celebrating the impending demise of Discovery Institute and of Intelligent Design. But before he pops the champagne, I wonder if he would care to answer two questions I’d like to ask him, in relation to some remarks he made on Casey Luskin’s recent announcement that he would be leaving Discovery Institute to further his studies. 1. Professor Coyne, you wrote that “the early claim that ENCODE showed that 80% of our genome had a function was incorrect, and there remains a huge portion of the human genome that’s nonfunctional,” and you added: “And even if 80% of the human genome were functional, how does that prove the existence of Read More ›

In Part Two of my series on methodological naturalism, I critiqued the claim that it was espoused by philosophers as far back as the Middle Ages. In Part Three, I rebut a different claim, that methodological naturalism was a product of the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to this claim, methodological naturalism arose largely in reaction to the superstitious thinking of the Middle Ages, in which epilepsy was attributed to the Devil, and epidemics and lightning bolts were ascribed to the wrath of God. I show that on the contrary, doctors in the Middle Ages knew that epilepsy was a disease of the brain, and that epidemics were a contagious disease. The cause of epidemics was Read More ›

In Part One of my series on methodological naturalism, I addressed the question: Is methodological naturalism a defining feature of science?. In Part Two, I rebut the oft-heard claim that even as far back as the Middle Ages, natural philosophers espoused a form of methodological naturalism. Proponents of this claim commonly cite passages in the works of medieval natural philosophers, which sound as if they are supporting this principle. I show that in fact, they were supporting two other methodological principles, which when combined, lead to conclusions which could easily be mistaken for methodological naturalism by a careless reader. Because these philosophers followed Aristotle in (i) defining science as the systematic study of natural bodies in motion, and (ii) limiting Read More ›

We’ve all heard about Mandelbrot sets – fantastically complex structures that can be created from a single equation and a very short program. Why, some people ask, couldn’t life be like that? And wouldn’t it be more mathematically elegant if it was? Physics types are especially prone to feel this way. Many of them might want to echo Louis IX’s famous remark on the Ptolemaic system, that if the Almighty had consulted him, he could have told Him a simpler way to make the cosmos. I would ask these people to take a good look at the two pictures above. What I’m claiming is that life is not like a Mandelbrot set. It’s like an origami bull. The reason is Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mikkel “Rumraket” Rasmussen has written a post critical of Dr. Stephen Meyer, titled, Beating a dead horse (Darwin’s Doubt), which is basically a rehash of comments he made on a thread on Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog last year. The author’s aim is to expose Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “extremely shoddy scholarship,” but as we’ll see, Rasmussen’s own research skills leave a lot to be desired. Did Dr. Meyer fail to document his sources? Rasmussen focuses his attack on chapter 10 of Dr. Meyer’s book, “Darwin’s Doubt.” He writes: Having read the book, a recurring phenomenon is that Meyer time and again makes claims without providing any references for them. Take for instance the claim that the Read More ›

In the fourth video in the “Twelve days of evolution” series produced by PBS and “It’s okay to be smart,” Joe Hanson, Ph.D. (Biology) tells a whopper about the evolution of the eye. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Computer simulations have replayed the process in just 350,000 generations, showing simple light patches can evolve into camera-like eyes in tiny, adaptive steps, 1,829 to be precise. Nature took a little longer than that, but genes, biochemistry, fossils, and anatomy all tell the same story. Eyes are pretty easy to evolve. So easy that nature has done it independently 50 to 100 times. That kind of complexity, rather than overthrowing Darwin’s theory, is proof of its power. Back in Read More ›