George Williams died September 8th, 2010. An evolutionist, he had insightful things to say about biology’s information problem. Commenting on the “separability of information and matter,” he wrote: “You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can’t do that with information and matter. Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise matter doesn’t have bytes. . . . This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains.” He saw that computer programmers transfer “information from one physical medium to another” and then “recover the same information in the original medium.”

This is an important event. I would encourage all UD readers to try to make it to it. I’ll be speaking on ID. For conference information, click here.

Check this out: LINK

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475-486. LINK

An interesting conference bringing together ID proponents and theistic evolutionists is coming up in Austin this October:  The Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science (http://vibrantdance.org). The organizers are hoping to bring unity to the science-faith debate: Our Mission is to inspire, educate, and unify pastors, scientists, Christian leaders, and concerned lay people, as well as seekers and skeptics, with the growing congruence of scientific discovery with our Christian faith and to explore the implications and applications of that congruence. The key word here is CONGRUENCE. The problem is that ID theorists and theistic evolutionists see such congruence in very different terms. For ID theorists who are also Christians (some are not), evidence of design in nature mirrors the faith claim that God by wisdom created Read More ›

Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s 20 most brilliant Christian professors, has a new book in which she takes on Darwinism: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. This book is based on Robinson’s Terry Lectures at Yale (see here). David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see here) begins as follows: The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets Read More ›

I posted this over a year ago. For those who missed it, enjoy.

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Yes, Johnny cash has written a song on evolution and irreducible complexity. It’s called “One Piece at a Time”:

Question: Is Darwinian evolution more or less effective than Cash’s mode of evolution?

YouTube Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1-zzJnKtDg

Here are the lyrics (thanks to my student Michael Stewart for pointing out this gem): Read More ›

Check out this video game called CellCraft: www.kongregate.com/games/CellCraft/cellcraft This will do much to get people to see the irreducible complexity inside a cell and the obstacle it poses to conventional evolutionary theory.

The following anthology, coedited by me and Mike Licona, is now available at Amazon.com: Here’s the table of contents for the science section: Section Two: The Question of Science 8. Creator and Sustainer: God’s Essential Role in the Universe — Robert Kaita 9. The Pale Blue Dot Revisited — Jay W. Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez 10. Oxygen, Water, and Light, Oh My! The Toxicity of Life’s Basic Necessities — Joe W. Francis 11. The Origin of Life — Walter Bradley 12. What Every High School Student Should Know about Science — Michael Newton Keas 13. Darwin’s Battleship: Status Report on the Leaks This Ship Has Sprung — Phillip E. Johnson 14. Debunking the Scopes “Monkey Trial” Stereotype — Edward Sisson Read More ›

Michael Yarus, an emeritus professor at UColorado,  is one of the leading experts on the RNA World hypothesis, which takes the origin of life as flowing from RNA chemistry. His recent book with Harvard UP, Life from an RNA World, contains lots of material responding to ID, though without basic understanding, to say nothing of nuance. The reason I bring the book up here, however, is to note his extensive use of Dawkins’ famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL evolutionary computing simulation. Yarus changes the target phrase to NOTHING IN BIOLOGY MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION, but the essence of Dawkins’ simulation is nonetheless there in all its glory — indeed, Yarus develops this “instance of evolution” Read More ›

Professor Andy McIntosh, an ID proponent in the UK, has a peer-reviewed paper on the thermodynamic barriers to Darwinian evolution: A. C. McIntosh, “Information and Entropy—Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 4(4) (2009): 351-385 The Editor appends the following note: Editor’s Note: This paper presents a different paradigm than the traditional view. It is, in the view of the Journal, an exploratory paper that does not give a complete justification for the alternative view. The reader should not assume that the Journal or the reviewers agree with the conclusions of the paper.  It is a valuable contribution that challenges the conventional vision that systems can design and organise themselves.  The Journal Read More ›

BEACON (Bio/computational Evolution in Action CONsortium), based at Michigan State University, has just received a $25M grant from the NSF. For details, go here. Below is the rogues gallery of BEACON consortiates (recognize anyone?): It’s gratifying to see our tax dollars being spent so well.

Critics of intelligent design often try to dismiss the theory as not worth addressing, as a question already settled, even as being too boring to countenance. Then they spend an amazing amount of energy trying to refute it. On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews David Klinghoffer, editor of the new digital book Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell, featuring essays by David Berklinski, David Klinghoffer, Casey Luskin, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, and Richard Sternberg. Listen in as Klinghoffer examines the responses of these various critics in this new volume, available as a free digital book. Click here to listen.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has never been a friend of materialistic evolution. Granville Sewell’s arguments concerning it at the following two links are worth pondering: Link 1: from the book IN THE BEGINNING Link 2: video presentation “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution”