Darwinism

Here.

Here’s the paper. PowerPoint here.

Here’s the news story.

Here’s Sewell’s comments.

Uncommon Descent adds its commendation to the editors of Applied Mathematical Letters for doing the right thing:

From Retraction Watch:

Math journal retracted one of our UD authors’ accepted article only because Darwinist blogger complained

A brief, lay-friendly, look at Sewell’s stifled paper is here. Comment on it’s significance here.

This just in: Granville Sewell on the controversy.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Here, John G. West reports (Evolution News & Views, June 7, 2011) that University of Texas, El Paso math professor Granville Sewell has receive an apology and $10,000 because Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just before publication, based on the say so of a Darwinist blogger:

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.  Read More ›

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency. Read More ›

Expelled’s Caroline Crocker, now executive director of AITSE, and author of Free to Think, describes how she first began to get hints that she was decidedly not free to think, in biology. She asked,

Control mechanisms in cells are like intricate circuit boards; how could something like this evolve through random mutation? Read More ›

Some were surprised when I linked Christianity Today’s new semi-simian Adam and Eve with involuntary euthanasia. But the link is much more direct than some suppose.

There is, first, the whole, huge question of adjusting our thinking from the idea that we are descended from Adam and Eve to the idea that we are ascended from them. That is essentially a different religion from Christianity, and I was indeed surprised that Christianity Today failed to observe the fact. Would they have given over their pages to the proposition that perhaps Christians should be Buddhists? It would make more sense. Buddhism is not a dishonorable creed; far from it. Christians don’t think that Buddhism reflects ultimate reality. But there is world of difference between, say, Buddhism and Darwinism. Darwinism not only doesn’t reflect ultimate reality, it defaces it.

But here I want to focus on the argument for euthanasia. It was succinctly captured in the title of a movie some years back: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I rarely meet a convinced Darwinist who does not support euthanasia (and abortion, and human embryonic stem cell research).

I rarely meet Read More ›

Pointing out that there is probably no overwhelmingly dominant way that evolution occurs (like, for example, the natural selection of the biology textbook and the Darwin lobby literature/court cases … ) materialist atheists Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini admit that that’s not the solution a Darwin culture is looking for:

Perhaps that strikes you as not much; perhaps you would prefer there to be a unified theory – natural selection – pf the evolutionary fixation of phenotypes. So be it; but we can claim something Darwinists cannot. There is no ghost in our machine; neither God, nor Mother Nature, nor Selfish Genes, nor World Spirit, nor free-floating intentions; and there are no phantom breeders either. What breeds the ghosts in Darwinism is its covert appeal to intensional biological explanations, which we hereby propose to do without. Read More ›

Here’s an intellectually respectable “Blast from the past” to understand the motives, a (August 23, 2008), “The Soviet ape-man scandal” by New Scientist’s Stephanie Pain:

When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes. “If he crossed an ape and a human and produced viable offspring then that would mean Darwin was right about how closely related we are,” says Etkind. Read More ›

From Jason Palmer at BBC News (19 May 2011), we learn, “Protein flaws responsible for complex life, study says.” This time mistakes produce more functional proteins: Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, researchers say.A comparison of proteins across 36 modern species suggests that protein flaws called “dehydrons” may have made proteins less stable in water. This would have made them more adhesive and more likely to end up working together, building up complex function. Remarkably, we read, Natural selection is a theory with no equal in terms of its power to explain how organisms and populations survive through the ages; random mutations that are helpful to an organism are maintained while Read More ›

“Seriously, aren’t atheists ashamed of P.Z. Myers, asks Reb Moshe Averick (the “maverick”rabbi and author of The Confused, Illusory World of the Atheist), for The Allgemeiner (May 29, 2011):

One of my mentors, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, (of blessed memory), made the following, rather sobering, observation about human nature: “Nobody ever allowed something as trivial as facts and logic to interfere with their agenda. If the facts and logic don’t fit, then the facts and logic will just have to fend for themselves.” Nowhere do we find more glaring examples of the human predilection for intellectual corruption than when we examine the writings and lectures of an ideologue who is driven, not by a burning desire for truth, but by a burning desire to further his or her own agenda.

Having said that, we are now ready to introduce one of the more zealous and outspoken (read: tiresome and obnoxious) advocates of the Darwinian/atheist worldview, P.Z. Myers. Read More ›

No evidence that there is enough time for evolution[*]

Lee M Spetner

Redoxia Israel, Ltd. 27 Hakablan St., Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract: A recent attempt was made to resolve the heretofore unaddressed issue of the estimated time for evolution, concluding that there was plenty of time. This would have been a very significant result had it been correct. It turns out, however, that the assumptions made in formulating the model of evolution were faulty and the conclusion of that attempt is therefore unsubstantiated.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 00 hours Tuesday May 31. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Read More ›

In “Evolution, sex and dinosaur necks, BBC’s Wondermonkey, Matt Walker asks (24 May 2011) whether long-necked sauropods like diplodocus evolved their necks via sexual selection:

A recent theory proposed is that sex, or more accurately sexual selection, was the main driver.The idea is that down the generations, male sauropods evolved ever longer necks to dominate rivals for the affections of females.

Dinosaurs are long dead, making it harder to test ideas about why certain traits evolved, and what they were adapted for. But evidence can still be brought to bear to analyse the different hypotheses.

Most hypotheses emphasized the practical uses of the neck, such as eating from trees, but in 2006, the idea surfaces that

… male sauropods that inherited a longer neck, caused by a chance mutation, would be more attractive to females.The length of their neck would signal their virility and suitability as a sire.

“Neck fighting” was hypothesized, with the longest neck producing the most offspring, thus fixing the trait. Great fantasy, but less imaginative researchers have pointed out Read More ›

Johnson meant that real Darwinists say what Darwinism entails (materialist atheism) and then Christian Darwinists rush in to announce that we can somehow harmonize it with Christianity by not taking seriously what Darwinists actually say. Explained in detail here. The analogy is to American football.

In The Moral Landscape, for example, new atheist and PhD neuroscientist Sam Harris tackles free will: In The Moral Landscape, for example, new atheist Sam Harris tackles free will:

Many scientists and philosophers realized log ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. Nevertheless, mny still deny this fact. … The problem is tat no account of causality leaves room for free will … Our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-mement ignorance of specific prior causes. (Pp. 103-5)

Are we clear about this yet? If not, dozens of examples from other Darwinists are available. And then
Read More ›

Forrest, a prof at Eastern Louisiana University, is considered a big expert on the intelligent design community and the dangers it poses. I put off explaining why she isn’t a  big expert, but can’t decently do so any longer. Read More ›

(This contest is now closed for judging.)

Here, Evolution News & Views struggles with what to call the practice of trashing an ID-friendly book without actually reading it. That happened recently when Forbes.com’s Farrell started to trash Jonathan Wells’s The Myth of Junk DNA and allowed as how he might read it some time. (PZ Myers has threatened to read it, however.) Discovery came up with “Ayala-ing” after the Templeton winner:

To “Ayala” a book is to attack it in review without having bothered to read or even read much about it, simply on the basis of what you think it probably says given your uninformed preconceptions about the author. The term comes from the wonderful instance where distinguished biologist Francisco Ayala pompously “reviewed” Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell for the Biologos Foundation website while giving clear evidence of not having cracked the book open or even looked at the table of contents.

Why can’t these Discovery people see that the whole point is not to read the book. Once you read it, you commit yourself to fact, and Darwinism is about fiction – publicly funded, court-ordered fiction. And we need to help them come up with a better term than Ayala-ing. Suggestions?

Yes. About Uncommon Descent’s moderation policies in detail, and it is hosted by markf, who comments here.

So, if he comments here … does that … ? No, wait, this is the confused, illusory world of the Darwinist. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Hat tip: Our Cannuckian Yankee drew our attention to the continuation of the “overlong” MathGrrl’s thread over there,  here, by citing this comment.

Now, are we such hot stuff? Come to think of it, Satan doesn’t like us either, for some reason. And the ID guys are, in the view of a Christian Darwinist, an evil and adulterous generation.

Cannuckian notes,  Read More ›