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Biology

What Have Butterflies Got to Do with Darwin? Part II

Bernard d’Abrera is a world-class lepidopterist who writes books that are largely about butterflies but also provide him a springboard for critiquing the sham that is Darwinism and also for promoting intelligent design. Below is a post that appeared here at UncommonDescent in 2005 on the first book that he was kind enough to send me (please read the review of that book linked to my designinference website). Just recently I received his latest, Butterflies of the Afrotropical Regions, Part III. As with all his books, the typesetting and photography (all his own) are superb. The really fun part for me, however, is the introductory material, where he goes after Darwin, Dawkins, the Smithsonian, and other assorted villains. This newest Read More ›

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fern

Formulas and Forms

In modern mathematics fractals are complex objects generated from simple formulas. Some have found also in biology forms that seem to have fractal shapes. Before the astonishing geometric shapes of fractals one might argue something like this: as the complexity of the fractal geometries arises from simple formulas, analogously the fractal biological complexity could come from simplicity and as a consequence intelligent design is not necessary to explain it. Read More ›

Applied Intelligent Design, Part 1

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
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Dinosaurs from birds?

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

Darwinian Desperation: Petition to Re-Classify “Non-Science” Books

Not content with their virtually complete hegemony over public school science education, now the Darwinists have a new ploy to eradicate ID from scientific consideration: just re-classify it away. In a petition, some PSU science students are demanding the complete re-classification and re-shelving of ID related books to a non-science category. Apparently the instigators of this petition believe that the mere presence of an ID related book on a science shelf serves to further confuse an already confused public about what is and is not science. Citing a recent survey by the NSF that “70 percent of Americans do not understand the scientific process,” the petition claims that “further confusion surrounding what is and is not science is particularly problematic.” According to the petition, (and the NSF), the general public is just to stupid to know the difference between “real” science, and philosophy masquerading as science. Read More ›

How were RNA gene repeats, “essential” to DNA repair, formed?

RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place?

From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From engineering design, I posit a foundational ID principle to be:
“Design systems to protect their design” Read More ›

California Lawmaker demands answers over museum censorship

Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.

Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›

Editing the Tape of Evolutionary History Yet Again

The late Stephen J. Gould once wrote “Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times from a Burgess [the Burgess Shale fossils]beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.” (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University], “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,” [1989], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.289. Well, maybe we wont’ have to replay the tape, because the tape of evolutionary history is getting replayed all the time, in the sense that lately it seems that every new discovery forces a complete re-write (re-wind?) of evolutionary history. Now we have a recent fossil discovery about to be reported in Nature shows that tetrapods may have crawled out of the seas way earlier than previously thought.

According to the article Read More ›

IVP launch website to plug anti-evolution book

When I posted before to mention IVP’s new anti-Darwin book, I had no idea they’d launched a website: www.shouldchristiansembraceevolution.com It’s very comprehensive, and very impressive. IVP (UK) are obviously taking this particular publication very seriously.

Oddities Living in the Deep Blue Sea

We all know that our planet is awash with wonderful and beautiful life forms, none more so than we find in our oceans. This photo essay from the Fox News Website provides a glimpse into the strange world of creatures that inhabit the deepest parts of the seas. Truly remarkable. Here is but one example — the blind lobster:

Published Today: Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

Today, Intervarsity Press (IVP) in the UK publish a new symposium, entitled “Should Christians Embrace Evolution?” edited by leading geneticist Professor Norman Nevin. Andrew Sibley has already posted about it on UD and linked to the preface. Believers in a God-guided Darwinism are preaching that Darwinism is a fact and that the Bible can be reconciled with it. This new book comprehensively refutes both ideas. Far from necessary, theistic evolution is both bad theology and bad science. It particularly interacts with Dr. Denis Alexander and his recent work, “Creation or Evolution – do we have to choose?”.

Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

Here is the contents table from the first draft:

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The bionic antinomy of Darwinism

Do you remember when I said “when a thing is untrue, if we say it is true we get contradictions” (The Darwinism contradiction of repair systems)? Here I will deal with another contradiction of Darwinism: that we could name its “bionic antinomy”.

According to Wikipedia “Bionics (also known as biomimetics, bio-inspiration, biognosis, biomimicry, or bionical creativity engineering) is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.” In fact, whether we analyze the history of technology, we find how often technical innovations and systems take inspiration from natural models. For some of the more recent examples of biomimetics see The 15 Coolest Cases of Biomimicry. This article synthetically defines bionics as “biologically inspired engineering”. Read More ›

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Robert Wright and the Evolution of Compassion

Robert Wright is seen here in a video presentation giving a lecture about the evolution of compassion.

He begins by saying that compassion, love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool. Regardless of how any gene could “earn” it’s way into a gene pool before it is a gene (because all genes, by being genes, are in the gene pool), the question that seems taken for granted is Do we have genes for compassion, love and sympathy? These are metaphysical things, so, notice that what he’s doing is taking metaphysical reality and making it material. But in the same way logic and reason are metaphysical, that is, there are laws of logic and reason that are not reducible to laws of physics or chemistry. Do these owe their existence to genes earning their way into the gene pool also? If so, then we have ruled out logic and reason existing on their own, and are subject to an evolutionary process that constantly changes, otherwise it isn’t an evolutionary process. I cannot see how, on the premise of evolution of metaphysics, which includes all mental capacities, all of our metaphysical judgments, to talk of the evolution of compassion and at the same time understand that the ability to reason to this conclusion is just as subject to evolution.

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Freud and Darwin II

I was originally going to post this as a response to David Coppedge’s post, but it got too long. The relationship between Freud and Darwin – both intellectually and institutionally – is more complicated than has been suggested here. Although Freud had top-notch academic credentials, his career was always that of an outsider, whose main constituency was in the larger public intellectual culture and well-educated middle class people who were his client base. (Freud’s books won literary prizes, not scientific ones.) One way you can see Freud’s outsider status is that he was never granted a professorship even though he tried several times. While his theories were somewhat embraced by medical schools (peaking in the US in the 1950s), experimental Read More ›