William Dembski

Socialists: Give apes human rights Tuesday, April 25, 2006 Spain Herald: http://www.spainherald.com/3438.html The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans. The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.” Read More ›

Can someone find out just how extensive some of the passages were that paralleled Megan McCafferty’s work? If we feed these parallels into the Explanatory Filter, are we entitled to draw a design inference and thus conclude that Viswanathan was plagiarizing? –WmAD Teenage Author Apologizes to Novelist Apr 26 9:29 AM US/Eastern BOSTON Teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan said Wednesday she was shocked to see so many similarities between her acclaimed first book and two novels by Megan McCafferty and maintained they were unintentional. “When I was writing, I genuinely believed each word was my own,” Viswanathan said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. She said she hopes McCafferty can forgive her. “The last thing that I ever wanted to Read More ›

I’m happy to report that I was in constant correspondence with Ann regarding her chapters on Darwinism — indeed, I take all responsibility for any errors in those chapters. 🙂 . . . Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us: **Its sacraments (abortion) **Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade) **Its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal) **Its clergy (public school teachers) **Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free) **Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the “absolute Read More ›

Go here and here for an account of a conference held last weekend by the New York Academy of Sciences entitled “Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science” (See here for the conference webpage, and here for the event flyer). With a Darwinian all-star lineup (Bruce Alberts, Ken Miller, Rob Pennock, etc.), speakers instructed the audience how to best indoctrinate students and maintain Darwinian control of the academy.

This past term (Jan – Apr 2006), the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto offered a graduate course called “HPS 1046H – Teleology, Adaptation and Design”, taught by Denis Walsh. Here is the summary: HPS1046: Special Topics: Teleology, Adaptation and Design (D. Walsh) Evolutionary biology, unlike other natural sciences, appears to deploy teleological explanations. Teleological explanations appear to be appropriate because organisms appear to be designed for specific purposes. The course discusses various attempts to naturalize, or eliminate, biological teleology. We discuss the relation of natural selection and adaptation, the adaptationist programme in evolutionary biology, normativity and function and arguments for intelligent design in biology. The relevant links: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ihpst/html/g_cour_g.html http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ihpst/html/g_cour_c.html http://philosophy.utoronto.ca/people/profile.html?id=390 Read More ›

Christianity Today, Week of April 24 The Other ID Opponents Traditional creationists see Intelligent Design as an attack on the Bible. by Rob Moll | posted 04/25/2006 09:30 a.m. This week, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary named creationist Kurt P. Wise to replace outgoing Intelligent Design proponent William Dembski. The theological and scientific differences between Dembski and Wise are deep and wide. Intelligent Design and creationism are not co-conspirators trying to overthrow Darwinian evolution. . . . MORE: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/117/22.0.html

… Or is Ebert just another clueless bonehead whose imagined expertise is in exact disproportion to his actual knowledge … Dr Dembski, Below is a letter to the editor from today’s Boulder Daily Camera (www.dailycamera.com) regarding a panel discussion at the recent University of Colorado at Boulder’s annual Conference on World Affairs. Roger Ebert has been a regular at the conference for decades, and in recent years has been serving on panels beyond his noted area of expertise (in the style of Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect”, they will toss together a mix of panelists from many backgrounds to make things interesting). Still, reading that Ebert was defending Darwinism with such confidence was a big surprise to me. (Note “Boulder High” Read More ›

An essay that employs Newcomb’s paradox to show how natural evil can be a consequence of human sin in a world where natural evil nonetheless exists before the advent of humanity: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2006.04.christian_theodicy.pdf.

Exercising a Native Intelligence Metric on an Autonomous On-Road Driving System The intelligence of artificial systems is well quantified by the amount of specified complexity inherent in the system representation, provided we have tools to measure it. Some may generally agree with this claim, but argue that it is simply intractable to successfully and accurately measure the specified complexity of any system, no matter how it was represented. We respond to this important and substantive criticism by performing a computation required by our intelligence metric on an example problem. We have chosen autonomous on-road driving, a problem that has already been solved by “systems” that are known to be both complex and specified, namely, humans. We will begin with a Read More ›

[From a colleague:] Sober is wrong in several ways. First, ID’s denial of it being religious does not rest on the fact that it does not specify the identity of the designer, but rather, the identity of the designer is irrelevant to the detection of design. Second, suppose someone in fact makes the argument that because nature cannot account for its own design, then only that which is outside of nature can do so. It seems to me that Sober’s rejection or acceptance of the argument should depend on its soundness or strength and not on its “religiosity.” Bringing in an argument’s religiosity as a reason to dismiss it seems to be a reversal of the genetic fallacy. We can Read More ›

Deciding whether the mini-ID theory has supernatural and religious implications is not as straightforward as seeing whether the word “God” appears in the statement “each irreducibly complex system found in nature was designed and produced by an intelligent being.” When independently plausible further assumptions are taken into account, the mini-ID theory entails the existence of a supernatural intelligent designer who made at least one of the minds found in nature. . . . The point I would make here is a different one – as Pennock (1999) notes, the Darwinian theory of evolution is silent on the question of whether a supernatural intelligent designer exists. This is not true of the mini-ID theory. In terms of the contents of theories, Read More ›

Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 Nature paper shows that cell division is reversible Article: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-04/omrf-rpn041006.php Paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7086/pdf/nature04652.pdf Video: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7086/extref/nature04652-s6.mov

Baylor U. Denies Tenure to Intelligent-Design ProponentBy PAULA WASLEY, THOMAS BARTLETT, and AISHA LABIFrom the issue dated April 14, 2006 TENURE DENIED: Controversy is brewing at Baylor University, where Francis J. Beckwith, a prominent and widely published Christian philosopher and legal scholar, was recently denied tenure — some say for his conservative religious views. Mr. Beckwith, 45, an associate professor and associate director of Baylor’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, joined the faculty of the Baptist university in 2003. Since his appointment, there have been rumblings on the campus about Mr. Beckwith’s affiliation with the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design think tank, and his writings promoting the teaching of intelligent design in public schools [[Beckwith’s writings argue that teaching ID Read More ›

Dr. Kenneth R. Summy attended the Texas Academy of Science speech by Professor Eric Pianka. Dr. Summy sent an unsolicited letter to the President and the Board of Directors of the Texas Academy of Science that specifically states Forrest Mims did not misrepresent Pianka’s keynote address. =-=-=-=- Subj:Petition Date:4/10/2006 Time: 1:49:37 PM CST To: President and Board of Directors of the Texas Academy of Science Attached is a response I sent to Dr. Kathryn Perez regarding the allegation that Forrest Mims misrepresented the content of the keynote address at the recent TAS meeting. A lot of the cc’s listed in Dr. Perez’s original message failed to get through, so I am resending. Forrest Mims did not misrepresent anything regarding the Read More ›

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a large percentage of research scientists admit to fabricating or manipulating data because of a sense of “being wronged.” Reporter Lila Guterman explains that The Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics will report that “perceived injustice” and scientific misbehavior are linked. From the article: Raymond G. De Vries, an associate professor of medical education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and three colleagues last year reported surveying more than 3,000 scientists about whether they had ever engaged in misbehavior, such as changing a study because of pressure from a source of funds, or failing to present data that contradict one’s own research. One-third of the scientists acknowledged they had Read More ›