Trillions are much in the news lately regarding the economy. Such large numbers also come up in the small probability arguments inherent in design inferences (small probabilities are reciprocals of large numbers). As a public service, I’m herewith presenting some visuals for dealing with large numbers:
Check out this video at TED. Note the phrase “finding new patterns in the information.” That’s the business of ID. Can the AlloSphere be used as an engine for detecting design? Here’s the link.
Here’s some research done 100 miles down the road from me. Note the sentence highlighted. The actual phylogenies here were experimentally known and yet standard evolutionary theory drew completely wrong conclusions. Oh, but it was a small population, small genomes, and intense selection pressure. Spare me. “Exceptional Convergent Evolution in a Virus” Bull JJ, Badgett MR, Wichman HA, Huelsenbeck JP, Hillis DM, Gulati A, Ho C, Molineux IJ. Department of Zoology, Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin 78712, USA. bull@bull.zo.utexas.edu Replicate lineages of the bacteriophage phiX 174 adapted to growth at high temperature on either of two hosts exhibited high rates of identical, independent substitutions. Typically, a dozen or more substitutions accumulated in the 5.4-kilobase genome Read More ›
After giving his famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL computer analogy to evolution in his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins remarks, “Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distant target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection.” I would dispute that there are no targets. Certainly no human has imposed biological targets on nature. But the fact that things can be alive and functional in only certain ways and not in others indicates that nature sets her own targets. The targets of biology, we might say, are “natural kinds” (to borrow a term of use from philosophy). But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection Read More ›
Check out this video. It’s amazing the confidence Alan Boss has that the primeval soup will generate life. Interesting that he sees the soup needing to simmer for billions of years for life to emerge. It seems to have emerged much faster on the Earth.
It appears we have some good news in Texas: Big Win in Texas as State Now Leads Nation in Requiring Critical Analysis of Evolution in High School Science Classes Robert Crowther In a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution, Texas today moved to the head of the class by requiring students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence” and specifically requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations. “Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can’t be questioned,” said Dr. Read More ›
I’m currently writing an essay on computational vs. biological evolution. The applicability of computational evolution to biological evolution tends to be suspect because one can cook the simulations to obtain any desired result. Still, some of these evolutionary simulations seem more faithful to biological reality than others. Christoph Adami’s AVIDA, Tom Schneider’s ev, and Tom Ray’s Tierra fall on the “less than faithful” side of this divide. On the “reasonably faithful” side I would place the following three: Mendel’s Accountant: mendelsaccount.sourceforge.net MutationWorks: www.mutationworks.com MESA: www.iscid.org/mesa
I periodically get emails from individuals who are sympathetic to ID but then read Francis Collins’ THE LANGUAGE OF GOD and find themselves wondering what to think. Thus I recently received the following email: Dear Dr. Dembski, I … have read, I think, three of your books — the most recent “The Design Revolution”. I have been thoroughly convinced of your position in these books. I was encouraged by a friend of many years, who was Professor of Science at … for 40 years … to consider the book by Francis S. Collins — “The Language of God”, which I have just read. This was in exchange for his reading “The Design Revolution.” I’ve not heard from him after reading Read More ›
Here’s a quote from THE CHRISTIAN ORDER going back more than a decade: The Pontifical Academy of Evolutionists Despite being widely accepted even at the highest level in the Church, there has never been any authoritative teaching approving of evolution. Hence the reaction of the worldwide media to the Pope’s message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 25th 1996. The ambiguous phrase that evolution is “more than just a theory” was greeted with glee by the materialistic press as an official admission of the collapse, under the weight of scientific research, of the Church’s traditional beliefs in Adam and Eve and any literal sense of Genesis.(37) Yet by no stretch of wishful thinking can the Pope’s message, arguably Read More ›
On pp. 47-48 of THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, Richard Dawkins gives two runs of his WEASEL program (note that there were typos in both initial seeds — one had 27 characters, the other 29 whereas they should have 28; I’ve corrected that). Here are the two runs using the Courier typeface, which assigns equal width to each character (spaces are represented by asterisks): WDL*MNLT*DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO*P WDLTMNLT*DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO*P MDLDMNLS*ITJISWHRZREZ*MECS*P MELDINLS*IT*ISWPRKE*Z*WECSEL METHINGS*IT*ISWLIKE*B*WECSEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*I*WEASEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL Y*YVMQKZPFJXWVHGLAWFVCHQXYPY Y*YVMQKSPFTXWSHLIKEFV*HQYSPY YETHINKSPITXISHLIKEFA*WQYSEY METHINKS*IT*ISSLIKE*A*WEFSEY METHINKS*IT*ISBLIKE*A*WEASES METHINKS*IT*ISJLIKE*A*WEASEO METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEP METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL These runs are incomplete. The first, according to Dawkins, required 43 iterations to converge, the second 64 (Dawkins omitted the other iterates to save space). As you can see, by using the Courier font, one can read up from the target sequence METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL, Read More ›
Here’s the story: oudaily.com/news/2009/mar/02/design-debate-draws-crowd-laughs-catlett
John Sullivan (of EXPELLED), John West (of Discovery), and I appeared yesterday for an hour-long radio program with Avi Davis. Go here to listen to the interview: www.blogtalkradio.com/WesternWordRadio
My newest book, co-edited with Thomas Schirrmacher, has just been published and is now available for immediate shipping from Amazon.com (go here). It is an extensive collection of essays in honor of John Warwick Montgomery. JWM’s no-nonsense brand of apologetics, in which he was willing to put everything on the table for discussion and to consider all evidence pro and con on any topic, has certainly been an inspiration to me in the ID movement. If Phillip Johnson is the father of the ID movement, then JWM is its godfather.
Southern Methodist University is doing its share to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial. Look here and note especially the offering in late September: http://smu.edu/smunews/darwin/events.asp
‘He Who Can Learn Things that are Difficult, and Not Easy for Man to Know, is Wise:’ An Address to the Students in MIT 10-250, Caltech 201 E. Bridge, and Similar Lecture Halls: Minds that are the Greatest Natural Resource in the World Edward H. Sisson papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1328666 January 15, 2009 Abstract: How human beings came to exist in this physical world is a question that has preoccupied mankind for as long as history records; every religion offers an answer, and so too have philosophers of natural history from Aristotle and before. The year 2009 will see celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, progenitor of the theory – or fact, as its adherents see it – Read More ›