William Dembski

Having been a sounding board for Ann Coulter on chapters 8-10 of GODLESS, I’m happy to see the entire book now that it is out. Ann is taking Phillip Johnson’s message as developed in DARWIN ON TRIAL and REASON IN THE BALANCE and bringing it home to the masses. Critics will dismiss it for its hyperbole, lack of nuance, and in-your-face attitude. But she has the gist just right, which is that materialism (she calls it liberalism) dominates our culture despite being held by only a minority of the populace and has become an agenda among our elites (academy, scientists, media) for total worldview reprogramming. Close to half the book is devoted to science and evolution. I cannot help but Read More ›

Here is an article about a new SETI telescope that searches light waves rather than radio waves. What kind of light are they looking for? Today’s laser technology makes it possible for petawatt (10^15W) lasers to emit highly collimated nanosecond optical pulses that briefly outshine the Sun by a factor of 10000. Because no known astrophysical source could put out a bright nanosecond optical pulse, some SETI searchers have concluded that looking for signals from technologically advanced aliens is more promising with optical telescopes than with radio telescopes. If we find nanosecond pulses, we can’t lose,” says Horowitz. “If it’s not from an alien civilization, at least we will have discovered an astrophysical phenomenon that no one anticipated. Not a Read More ›

In the very first post for this blog, I noted that Mike Gene is someone you should know (go here). Mike has a new book coming out, THE DESIGN MATRIX. For a little video presentation on the book, go here. I’m eagerly awaiting its release.

Check out the transcript of Simon Conway Morris’s 2005 Boyle Lecture: http://www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?Boyle_Lectures:2005. He just can’t seem to leave ID alone: Rather it seems to me that Intelligent Design has a more interesting failing, a theological failing. Consider a possible analogy, that of Gnosticism. Where did this claptrap come from? Who knows, but could it be an attempt to reconcile orphic and mithraic mysteries with a new, and to many in the Ancient World a very dangerous, Christianity? So too in our culture, those given over to being worshippers of the machine and the computer model, those admirers of organized efficiency, such would not expect the Creator – that is the one identified as the engineer of the bacterial flagellar motor Read More ›

Marc Kirschner’s idea of “bias toward useful variations” sure sounds teleological. I personally am biased to score well on standardized tests. And the reason for this bias is that I’m an intelligent agent who knows how to take these tests and score high. So perhaps Marc Kirschner’s theory of facilitated variation is a form of ID? You think he would warm to that idea? Probably not.

Answers to Darwin’s dilemma
Evolution is biased toward useful variations that emerge from genetic similarities shared by all living organisms
By Marc Kirschner
(June 9, 2006)

Biologist Marc W. Kirschner is founding chairman of the systems biology department at Harvard Medical School where he and his colleagues study the temporal and spatial cues that affect embryonic development. With co-author John Gerhart of the University of California, Berkeley, he explores natural selection in the face of biology’s most recent discoveries in The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, which was reviewed by University of California, Irvine evolutionary biologist Francisco J. Ayala in the April issue of Science & Theology News.

With the release of the genome sequence in 2000, biologists finally realized that 22,500 is the magic number of genes needed to produce each person. That number is only one-and-a-half times that of a fruit fly and only six times the number in a bacterium — the simplest organism living on this planet. Looking at those genes, it was found that 15 percent were quite similar to those of bacteria, 50 percent were similar to those of a fruit fly, and 70 percent of flies were similar to those of a frog.

Humans are incredibly complex. Each person’s body contains about a hundred trillion cells and has probably thousands of cell types. So the question naturally arises: How do you get variety out of so few genes? How can animals be so different when many of the genes are the same? In short, where does novelty come from? Read More ›

Steve Rissing is a biology professor at Ohio State University involved in attempting to deny a Ph.D. student, Mr. Bryan Leonard, his degree. The trigger for Leonard’s problems began when Rissing (a well known active opponent of anyone who questions Darwin), and a math and anthropology professor wrote a letter claiming that “There is evidence that Mr. Leonard’s dissertation committee has been improperly constituted and that his research may have involved unethical human-subject experimentation.” The letter was sent to Carole Anderson, interim dean of Ohio State’s graduate school, in a clear effort to prevent Leonard from earning his doctorate at OSU (Hall, 2005). The “experimentation” the letter refers to is actually Leonard’s normal state approved high-school student instruction! The objectors Read More ›

Journalism and the Debate Over Origins: Newspaper Coverage of Intelligent Design Martin JD, Trammell KD, Landers D, Valois JM, Bailey T Journal of Media and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 1. (January 2006), pp. 49-61. http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15328415jmr0501_3 ABSTRACT: In light of increasing media coverage and national debate of a discipline called Intelligent Design (ID), this study content analyzed 575 articles from major newspapers on this topic. Researchers drew articles from the LexisNexis. database and coded them for the presence of certain portrayal, and scientifically certain versus uncertain portrayal, and these variables were analyzed across news type. Researchers also measured the presence of several frames and the dominant frame within each article. Results suggest that ID was largely portrayed as a religious – Read More ›

It’s the Jihad, Stupid
By Michelle Malkin
Townhall.com | June 8, 2006

Canadian law enforcement officials should be proud of busting a reputed Islamic terrorist network that may span seven nations. Instead, our northern neighbors are trying their damnedest to whitewash the jihadi ties that bind the accused plotters and their murder-minded peers around the world.

We live on a doomed continent of ostriches. Read More ›

Coulter Does NYT a Favor; Reviews Own Book
by Ann Coulter

HIGHLIGHT: Students are actually required to wear “Creationism Is Shameful” T-shirts in Dover, Pa., where — thanks to a lawsuit by the ACLU — the liberal clergy have declared Darwinism the only true church, immunized from argument. Ye shall put no other God before it. Not one.

Liberals believe in Darwinism as a matter of faith, despite the fact that, at this point, the only thing that can be said for certain about Darwinism is that it would take less time for (1) a single-celled organism to evolve into a human being through mutation and natural selection than for (2) Darwinists to admit they have no proof of (1).

If only Darwinism were true, someday we might evolve public schools with the ability to entertain opposable ideas about the creation of man.

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The long-anticipated book Godless: The Church of Liberalism was finally released this week. If the New York Times reviews it at all, they’ll only talk about the Ann Coulter action-figure doll, so I think I’ll write my own review. Read More ›

New mathematical method provides better way to analyze noise http://www.physorg.com/news69001445.html Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory system is the fastest of the five senses. Researchers credit this discrepancy to a series of lightning-fast calculations in the brain that translate minimal input into maximal understanding. And whatever those calculations are, they’re far more precise than any sound-analysis program that exists today. In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a Read More ›

Gold Strike in Science World, June 06, 2006
Source: University of Adelaide
URL: http://www.physorg.com/news68816511.html

A University of Adelaide PhD physiology researcher has discovered a world first: a diving insect that can regulate its buoyancy in water, just like a scuba diver.

The findings of Phil Matthews, 24, in relation to the backswimmer (Anisops deanei) were published in the prestigious international science journal, Nature, last month.

When Mr Matthews submitted the findings of his research in January, he was convinced “it would trickle down the tree and get buried under hundreds of other submissions.”

Instead, his paper was accepted by Nature and published on 9 May, immeasurably boosting the young physiologist’s career prospects on an international scale.

The paper discusses a significant finding in the physiology world relating to the backswimmer. It appears that these bugs use haemoglobin-containing cells in their abdomen to supply oxygen and regulate their buoyancy, a quirk of nature unique to backswimmers. Read More ›

Definition: The amount of energy exerted by an average-sized Darwinist (5′ 5″, 200 lbs) freaking out for 60 seconds at 70 degrees Fahrenheit on visiting the Discovery Institute website. Exercise: Convert this unit to proper SI metric units. Exam question: What mean rate of darwins over what length of time is required for Darwinism to implode and be a thing of the past? Justify your answer.

In my previous post, I attributed a deliberate misquote to the author of a PT blog posting. The PT author gave no citation for the quote (why was that??), so I took it to come from my book NO FREE LUNCH, which it did, though the quote as given at PT left out some crucial portions of text. As it turns out, the quote in question appeared in an earlier paper of mine (unpublished except on the web, portions of which were then incorporated into NFL) exactly as it appeared at PT (see http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idcomingclean.htm). I therefore withdraw the charge of egregious quotemining. On the other hand, I don’t at all withdraw charge of needless crowing about a nonexistent physics error. Read More ›

In still another post at PT (go here), I’m charged with committing a basic physics error in my book No Free Lunch, much to the delight of the gallery that comments there (based, by the way, on a deliberate misquote — see below). Too bad that Freeman Dyson agrees with me and not with them. Here, then, is the pearl: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt. Go trample on it. And having trampled on it, go email Freeman and get him to distance himself from my views even though the section of NFL cited merely expands on his and Frank Tipler’s ideas.

The light from the distant galaxies will be strongly red-shifted. But the sky will never become empty and dark, if we can tune our eyes to longer and longer wavelengths as time goes on. –Freeman Dyson

In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence):

What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).

And now here is the full text with the two passages marked in bold. Note that the PT post simply kludges those passages together (you’ll have to scroll down quite a ways to see the connection). By the way, I’ve saved the page at PT just so that they don’t insert ellipses and say there never was a problem:

How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.

Limits, however, are tricky things. To be sure, an embodied designer could impart information by employing arbitrarily small amounts of energy. But an arbitrarily small amount of energy is still a positive amount of energy, and any designer employing positive amounts of energy to impart information is still, in Paul Davies’s phrase, “moving the particles.” [[In contrast to the PT post, the possibility of infinite wavelength, zero energy, and zero bandwidth therefore never arises. –WmAD]]. The question remains how can an unembodied designer influence the natural world without imparting any energy whatsoever. It is here that an indeterministic universe comes to the rescue. Although we can thank quantum mechanics for the widespread recognition that the universe is indeterministic, indeterminism has a long philosophical history, and appears in such diverse places as the atomism of Lucretius and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. Read More ›

A post at PT (go here) claims that recent work supporting a naturalistic origin of single chiral forms for amino acids (as exist in extant organisms and presumably had to occur under prebiotic conditions) constitutes a false positive for the design inference. The post also cites a case of someone using my design inference apparatus to argue for design from homochirality, but I personally have never done so (to the best of my knowledge, you won’t find any mention of “chirality” in the papers on my designinference.com website). Even if this research were entirely successful at showing how to get high concentrations of single chiral forms (at this point the research merely shows a statistically significant bias), it would not Read More ›