Darwinism

Today is the closing day of “Evolution Weekend”. The weekend is promoted by The clergy letter project. This is a weekend dedicated to glorifying Darwinism in churches.

Curiously one of the scientists on call to help clergy and parishioners promote the glories of Darwinism was Amy Bishop, she is listed here:

Name: Amy Bishop, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor
Address: Department of Biological Sciences
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL 35899
Areas of Expertise: neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, evolution of the human brain
Email: ——-@uah.edu

Amy Bishop was charged in the murder of several people recently. Now, there are some very fine Darwinists like Francis Collins, and I don’t mean to say Amy Bishop is representative of all Darwinists. But I’d recommend that if the Clergy Letter Project wishes to put on a good face for Darwinism, they might consider disassociating themselves from Amy Bishop.

They may not want to promote “survival of the fittest” in their sermons today. That would be kind of poor taste in light of the fact a presumed societal degenerate (Bishop) is the “fittest” survivor while 3 (possibly 4) innocent victims are the “unfit” dead. Think I’m overstating the case against Darwinism? Consider what Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss argues in his book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill

murder is the product of evolutionary forces and that the homicidal act, in evolutionary terms, conveys advantages to the killer.

Read More ›

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 ›

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 ›

A while back, I wrote about a self-absorbed female Darwinist* who was misshelving Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution in the “religion” section of the bookstore, to make some odd personal point:

 Jerry Fodor has been a critic of Darwinism for a few years now (see this article he wrote against it). Here is his latest in book form (go here to purchase). Amazon.com includes the following description:

From Publishers Weekly
The authors of this scattershot treatise believe in evolution, but think that the Darwinian model of adaptationism—that random genetic mutations, filtered by natural selection, produce traits that enhance fitness for a particular biological niche—is fatally flawed. Philosopher Fodor and molecular-biologist-turned-cognitive-scientist Piattelli-Palmarini, at the University of Arizona, launch a three-pronged attack (which drew fire when Fodor presented their ideas in the London Review of Books in 2007). For one thing, according to the authors, natural selection contains a logical fallacy by linking two irreconcilable claims: first, that creatures with adaptive traits are selected, and second, that creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. The authors present an ill-digested assortment of scientific studies suggesting there are forces other than adaptation (some even Lamarckian) that drive changes in genes and organisms. Then they advance a densely technical argument that natural selection can’t coherently distinguish between adaptive traits and irrelevant ones. Their most persuasive, and engaging, criticism is that evolutionary theory is just tautological truisms and historical narratives of how creatures came to be. Overall, the scientific evidence and philosophical analyses the authors proffer are murky and underwhelming. Worse, their highly technical treatment renders their argument virtually incomprehensible to lay readers. (Feb.) Read More ›

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 ›

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 ›

A week ago I described here at UD my debate with atheist Lewis Wolpert. A blogger who goes by “Manic Street Preacher” sent me three unsolicited emails about his reaction to the debate, which was not positive. Denyse O’Leary briefly adverted to this blogger here. I finally had a look at what this blogger wrote. I can’t say I was impressed with the argumentation or erudition, but I do have to credit him for chutzpah. He writes (go here): //////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Dembski repeated the common straw man that scientists in Darwin’s day knew nothing about the inner workings of the cell, and thought that they were mere “blobs of protoplasm”. Well, Dembski should take a look this drawing out, which was Read More ›

In the last year and a bit I’ve done a lot of work in trying to understand and then critique the approach of Dr. Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute in Cambridge (UK). I know that many readers of UD are familiar with Alexander’s big-selling work, “Creation or Evolution – Do We Have To Choose?”. This book is probably (alongside Francis Collins) the work with the most traction by Darwinists seeking to argue from a Biblical Christian viewpoint. I’ve previously drawn attention to IVP’s “Should Christians Embrace Evolution”. In this post I want instead to draw attention to my own response, “Creation or Evolution – Why We Must Choose”. If you don’t want to read the blurb and just want Read More ›

Hoax as defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: : to trick into believing or accepting as genuine something false and often preposterous According to a recent article, Tamiflu doesn’t prevent the flu, nor does it cure the flu once someone has it. The notion that Tamiflu has any efficacy in fighting the flu is actually the result of a well orchestrated hoax, relying on faulty science and marketing schemes, it says. This sounds familiar. The “Anthropocentric-Global-Warming-Climate-Change-Greenhouse-Gas-Effect” hoax comes to mind as well. So does the Darwinian notion of an “Undirected-Evolution-Of-A-Molecule-To-Man” hoax. The fraudulent science on all fronts, just to promote a particular fancy, is really alarming. Remember Ida and Ardi and the Piltdown Man and Haeckel’s embryos? Tamiflu’s maker, Roche…claims there are Read More ›

Here’s Michael Flannery on Stephen Jay Gould’s attempt to diss Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection.

There was a lot of such dissing as far back as the 1860s, when it first became clear that Wallace was not a materialist atheist. As Flannery recounts, Gould joined in, in this case.

Gould was an interesting character because, while gifted, he never seems to have had the courage of his convictions. Read More ›

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 ›

I just received this email from the Templeton Foundation. It is fascinating for what it includes and leaves out. On the one hand, it admits that evolutionary theory is incomplete and it even tacitly consents to evolution being a telic process (evolution is a “search mechanism” — Bob Marks and I have been arguing that evolution is a search right along at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab — www.evoinfo.org). And there’s even an admission that there might be limits to evolvability (a dominant theme in ID research). At the same time, intelligent design is given no mention and the solution to evolution’s incompleteness is said to lie in “cooperation,” which is supposed to complement the competition usually associated with Darwinism. I tried to find this announcement on the web, but it appears not to be up yet, so I’m reprinting the newsletter here without a link.

——————————–

The Next Revolution in Biology [from “Templeton Report” newsletter, 6jan10]

“In every field of science, when it’s successful, you think you understand all of it,” says Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. “In classical mechanics,” he explains, “there was a time when physicists thought, “‘Well, that’s all there is. If I know the place of the particles in the universe, I can predict the future.’ But then came quantum mechanics and relativity theory. There was a total revolution.” Nowak is hard at work trying to launch another revolution, this time in evolutionary biology. “Our understanding of evolution,” he says, “is very incomplete.”

Thanks to a five-year, multipart grant of more than $10 million from the John Templeton Foundation, researchers will be able explore some of the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology (FQEB) that have yet to be answered. For instance, Nowak explains, “evolution does not explain the origin of life because evolution presupposes populations of reproducing individuals.” The origin of life, what he calls “prevolution,” needs more research. This would include examining the transition in which chemistry finally gave rise to biology.

Established in 2009 to mark the Darwin double anniversary (Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species), FQEB is offering fellowships of up to $75,000 for up to two consecutive years of research for both junior and senior scholars in a variety of fields. The deadline for applications for the first round of fellowships is February 1, and the fellows will begin work in September.

The scholars who win fellowships will do research at Harvard or other academic institutions in the Boston area. They will be expected to participate in the creation of new research networks, to attend regular meetings, and to work across disciplinary boundaries. Priority will be given to work that has significant philosophical implications for evolutionary biology and scientific understanding more broadly.

What kind of research meets that standard? Nowak offers another example. Evolution, he says, is a kind of “search mechanism.” “It searches for constructions, for solutions, for particular cell shapes, particular organs. Evolution is always searching, but there is a space of possibilities that is being searched.” He asks, “What is that space of possibilities? How can we describe a theory of that space that is being searched?” Read More ›

Can someone explain?

A friend directs me to this example, but you needn’t doubt I’d find more.

Who would want this individual managing their stock portfolio?:

If you crunch the numbers in relation to your own birth (i.e. the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg multiplied by the probability that your parents met and repeated the calculation back until the beginning of time), you will get a fantastically low probability.

And so? Look – I cannot bring my parents into this (O’Leary, b 1950), because they are still alive.

But Read More ›

I had a chapter in the recently published (IVP UK) “Should Christians Embrace Evolution?”, a negative response to those – in particular Dr. Denis Alexander – who say that we must. Well, Dr. Alexander has now read that response. The question going forward  is whether he wants to interact with it. My own personal opinion is that his books and writings show more interest in a propaganda effort to win a PR battle amongst the masses than they do in serious and responsible interaction with “the other side”. Dr. Alexander and I both whole-heartedly profess our own love to Jesus Christ and belief that an evangelical position is the only one that does justice to reality. That shared basis gives Read More ›