William Dembski

Paul L. Williams is a name I first heard two years ago when I saw him interviewed on television about terrorist ambitions to create havoc in the United States. I hoped that he was exaggerating the threats, but after following some of his leads and reading two of his books I concluded that he was at least 90 percent correct and needed to be taken seriously. Nuclear-Biological-Chemical terrorism has been an interest of mine over the years. The first book I read that addressed this topic was TERRORISM: HOW THE WEST CAN WIN (1986), edited by then Israeli representative to the U.N. Benjamin Netanyahu (it seems I’ve heard his name since then). The essay by Alan Cranston in it, “The Nuclear Terrorist State,” still sounds surprisingly relevant to our present situation: “Does anyone doubt that if the Shah of Iran had succeeded in developing a full-fledged nuclear program in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini would have used a nuclear weapon against Iraq? Does anyone now doubt that if Iraq had been permitted to make swift progress toward a nuclear-weapons capability, Saddam Hussein would have used a nuclear bomb against Iran? Or that either of them might have resorted subsequently to a nuclear strike in a jihad, a ‘holy war,’ against Israel?” (pp. 177-78)

Williams’ interview and books were in this vein, sounding a warning siren, along with many others, that the terrorist threats likely to materialize in the future promise to dwarf anything we’ve seen in the past. It’s one reason that, last I checked, survivalist James Wesley Rawles’ HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: TACTICS, TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES was doing better on Amazon.com than Richard Dawkins’ THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH: THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION (other reasons no doubt include that Dawkins’ book is sheer dreck from the standpoint of current evolutionary theory — see here). In any case, after a brief email exchange with Williams two years ago, I didn’t expect to hear much about him again except as a modern-day Cassandra, whose predictions would be ignored until too late. It was therefore with some dismay that I saw him appear in the press on a matter at once related and yet quite different.

Williams works as a journalist and it’s in this capacity that he is being forced, as an American citizen, to submit to a lawsuit in Canada. Specifically, for charging McMaster University with abetting terrorists and allowing radioactive materials to be stolen, McMaster is suing him for millions of dollars. How could he be tried in a Canadian court given that he broke no U.S. law and did everything that McMaster University is upset about on U.S. soil? Read More ›

Some evolutionists are thoughtful and measured, willing to admit the anomalies that evolutionary theory must still explain. Richard Dawkins is not one of them. Instead, he seems to inhabit a la-la land where all the conceptual difficulties connected with the evolutionary theory are resolved or swept under the rug. As one colleague who wishes to remain out of the limelight wrote to a list I moderate:

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In the MSNBC interview with Richard Dawkins, titled “The Not-So-Angry Evolutionist,” Dawkins says the following:

“You can actually plot a picture of the pattern of resemblances and differences between every animal and plant and every other animal and plant, and you find out that it fits on a beautiful, hierarchical, branching tree, which can only sensibly be interpreted as a family tree. When you do the same thing with a different gene, you get the same tree. Do the same thing with a third gene, and you get the same tree. It’s overwhelmingly powerful evidence.”

It’s also overwhelmingly false. No molecular systematist would make this claim.

Now, either Dawkins knows this, and therefore is lying to his audience, or he doesn’t know, and has been cribbing from erroneous Talk.origins FAQs. Either option is bad news. One should not accuse someone of lying without solid evidence, so let’s just say that Dawkins is wildly irresponsible.

The incongruence of gene and species trees is a standing obstacle, or research problem, in molecular phylogenetics. Read More ›

Although its official release date is not until November 1, THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is now in stock and being sold at Amazon.com (go here). Even though argument in this book is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution. In particular, it resolves the problem of dysteleology and natural evil by introducing a conception of the Fall that is theologically sound and also compatible with modern science (i.e., with standard astrophysical and geological dating that places the earth and universe at billions of years old).

“Big Environment,” “Big Government,” “Big Business,” “Big Science” — all involve huge sums of money, leave a money trail, and require independent watchdogs to ask the tough questions. We noted the upcoming documentary NOT EVIL JUST WRONG here at UD last week. Here’s the latest (it made the top of Drudge): www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf-fzVH6v_U

For the original online McWhorter-Behe discussion, go here. Thanks to one of my research assistants for making the transcript. Here’s the video in lower res as it appeared online after Bloggingheads removed it:

MCWHORTER: Well, Michael Behe I am so glad to meet you, and umm thank you for agreeing to do this. This is one of the rare times when I have actually initiated a bloggingheads pairing, and it’s because I just read your book The Edge of Evolution from 2007, and I found it absolutely shattering. I mean this is a very important book. And yet I sense from, umm, the reputation or the reception of your book from 10+ years ago Darwin’s Black Box that it may be hard to get a lot of people to understand why the book is so important. So I just wanted to go back and forth with you for a little while to get a sense of what your intent with this book was and ask you a few questions and just allow this book to have the wide airing that it deserves. So umm thank you.

BEHE: Yeah sure, sounds great to me. It’s nice to be with you, I’ve never been on a bloggingheads before, so uh, it should be fun.

MCWHORTER: Yeah it’s umm, I umm, I want to start with this, umm, and this is what motivates me. Darwin is great; I’ve always been really interested in evolution. Usually on bloggingheads I talk about race issues. But, however, actually, in my actual daily life I’m interested much more in certain other things, such as I’m a massive dinosaur fan and things like that, and evolution has always fascinated me but I’ve always seen a certain kink in the whole natural selection argument. And I’ve always asked people this basic question, it’s about skunks. Read More ›

Our friend and colleague Atom tha Immortal has finished up the WEASEL GUI at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go here for the GUI). It implements every conceivable interpretation of Dawkins’s WEASEL program as outlined in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Thanks Atom for all your hard work!

This book retails for $79.95 and Amazon sells it for $57.78. But the best price online to purchase it is at the Human Events Book Service (go here), where you can get it for $34.95. I highly recommend Weikart’s latest. Darwinists continually try to deny or change the subject that Darwin’s theory deeply influenced the Nazis. Accordingly, what the Nazis did is supposed to constitute a profanation of tried-and-true pure Darwinism. But the flow of ideas from one to the other is clear. To be sure, Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for Nazism, but it certainly was a necessary one.

Jeff Shallit charges Jonathan Wells with incompetence for claiming that duplicating a gene does not increase the available genetic information. To justify this charge, Shallit notes that a symbol string X has strictly less Kolmogorov information than the symbol string XX. Shallit, as a computational number theorist, seems stuck on a single definition of information. Fine, Kolmogorov’s theory implies that duplication leads to a (slight) increase in information. But there are lots and lots of other definitions of information out there. There’s Fisher information. There’s Shannon information. There’s Jack Szostak’s functional information. Information, when quantified, typically takes the form of a complexity measure. Seth Lloyd has catalogued numerous different types of complexity measures used by mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Here Read More ›

I was just listening to Rush Limbaugh (I trust this radio preference of mine will make it quickly into my Wikipedia entry but that my work with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab will continue to be ignored there; by the way, I also enjoy reading Camille Paglia). In any case, Rush read portions of an article at The American Thinker by fellow mathematician Ron Lipsman, who has given up his senior deanship at the big University of Maryland campus so that he can speak his mind more fully. He remains on as a professor there. The article speaks at many levels to the opposition that ID faces from the cultural elite. Here’s a sample: …The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters Read More ›

YouTube URL

On this episode of ID the Future, Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman asks David Berlinski how to address the problem of dissent in science. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions is now available in paperback from Basic Books. Visit the website at www.devilsdelusion.com for more information and continuing updates from Dr. Berlinski.   Click here to listen.

As you read this, ask yourself whether this sounds like another reflexively held scientific position (hint, it begins with “D” and ends in “arwinism”): Flawed climate data Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming Ross McKitrick, Financial Post … I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its Read More ›

[Hat tip to my colleague and friend T.R. for referring me to this story and for these prefatory remarks:] The National Science Foundation are the primary gatekeepers to government funded scientific research, and in particular are the enforcers of the global warming and Darwin cults, making sure that any scientist who wishes to receive grant money toes the line on the politically correct story. The news story below describes how a good number of them spend their day. The novel excuse offered by one of the miscreants reminds us, in its inventiveness, of some of the excuses offered by Al Gore acolytes for why the earth is warming, notwithstanding that its been cooling for the past decade. EXCLUSIVE: Porn surfing Read More ›

THE END OF CHRISTIANITY: FINDING A GOOD GOD IN AN EVIL WORLD is now at the publisher’s warehouse. The official release date is November 1. I’ve received the US, UK, and international editions. They all look fantastic. I just learned from the publisher that 2,500 wholesale pre-orders are in the system (the biggest being from Costco and Wal-Mart). Of the twenty or so titles I have at Amazon.com, this one is selling the best (go here for the Amazon.com listing). So the launch is looking very very good. Stay tuned for a fun promotional website coming down the pike.

You’ve got to wonder what an organization that touts itself for critical thinking is thinking when it sponsors a BLASPHEMY CONTEST: Since Darwin is their god, it would be interesting to submit to this contest true statements about Darwin’s less than divine attributes.