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Darwinism

Gertrude Himmelfarb on ID

HOW THE DEBATE OVER DARWIN HASN’T EVOLVED by Gertrude Himmelfarb The New Republic Online Post date: 12.03.05, Issue date: 12.12.05 . . . Many Victorian clerics found it possible to reconcile not only evolution but natural selection as well with religion, while many secularists had reservations not about evolution but about natural selection. John Stuart Mill, for example, was impressed by the “knowledge and ingenuity” that Darwin brought to bear upon his thesis, but finally decided (as late as 1870) that it “is still and will probably long remain problematical.” Moreover, he added, even if it were proved, it would not be inconsistent with creation. He himself, he said, on the state of the evidence, believed in “creation by intelligence.” Read More ›

Does Darwin Need Defending?

In the U.S., Darwin still needs defending By MICHAEL RUSE Saturday, December 3, 2005 Page D6 Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life By Niles Eldredge Norton, 256 pages, $49 I am an English-born Canadian who now lives in Florida. I am here because Ontario universities still fire people for being old. The United States regards ageism as a moral wrong, on a par with sexism and racism. This is one of the many things I find right about the United States, along with Saturday mail delivery and good-quality Sunday newspapers. Yet after a lifetime of studying Americans — I have gone to school with them, I have argued with them, I have had sex with them, and now I live Read More ›

Darwinism and the Culture of Contempt

Here’s a quick note from a regular PT/talk.origins contributor. Let me encourage commenters on this blog to add to this thread their favorite contemptuous remarks by Darwinists. Look to the Brits for the best examples of snootiness. Read More ›

Meyer on ID, Dawkins on EV

Watch this 11 minute PBS interview with Dr Stephen C. Meyer explaining Intelligent Design Theory: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=545 Watch this 2 minute BBC interview with Dr. Richard Dawkins explaining Darwin’s Theory: http://www.arn.org/docs/dawkins.mpg

Molecular Motors at the Limits of Nanotechnology

Ask yourself, Why do biological systems exhibit molecular machines at the smallest level permissible by the properties of matter? “Evolution” provides less and less a convincing answer.

Molecular motors
9 November 2005

http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=1009

A new special issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter edited by Joseph Klafter and Michael Urbakh contains invited papers from some of the world’s greatest experts on molecular motors.

Macro-scale thermodynamic engines convert the random motion of fuel-produced heat into directed motion. Such engines cannot be downsized to the nanometre scale, because thermodynamics does not apply to single atoms or molecules, only large assemblies of them. A great challenge for the field of nanotechnology is the design and construction of microscopic motors that can transform input energy into directed motion and perform useful functions such as transporting of cargo. Today’s nanotechnologists can only look in envy at the biological world, where molecular motors of various kinds (linear, rotary) are very common and fulfil essential roles. Read More ›

The Former President of Cornell — Also a Darwinophile

I’ve reported on this blog about the current president of Cornell, Hunter Rawlings, and his recent diatribe against ID (search under “Rawlings” on this blog). Interestingly, the past president of Cornell, Frank Rhodes was very much in the same mold. I heard him speak at a C. S. Lewis Foundation event at Cambridge in 1994 (“Cosmos and Creation: Chance or Dance”). Rhodes is a classic theistic evolutionist, whose theism means absolutely nothing with regard to this scientific understanding of biological evolution. To see this, check out the following note by him, which is now twenty years old: go here. Given the power of Darwinism to delude otherwise worthy intellects, it is unsurprising that even a world renowned scholar at the Read More ›

Corporate America Not Taking Sides in ID-Evo Debate

The Darwin exhibition frightening off corporate sponsors By Nicholas Wapshott in New York (Filed: 20/11/2005) An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin has failed to find a corporate sponsor because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution. The entire $3 million (£1.7 million) cost of Darwin, which opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York yesterday, is instead being borne by wealthy individuals and private charitable donations. MORE

Noam Chomsky — If your taste for iconoclasm extends only so far

The following conflation of intelligent design and global warming is unworthy of Chomsky the scholar (as opposed to Chomsky the activist). Chomsky uncritically takes as the definition of ID what he has read in the popular press. It might interest readers of this blog to know that I hold in my files a note (dated February 26, 1997) from Chomsky on MIT stationery commeting favorably on one of my early papers on information and ID (namely, “Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information” — which ultimately became chapters 3 and 4 of No Free Lunch). Chomsky in his private moments has in fact been a critic of evolutionary theory, a fact reflected in Daniel Dennett’s criticisms of Chomsky in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Evolution, ecology and `malignant design’

Noam Chomsky says the Bush administration’s hostility toward scientific inquiry puts the world at risk of global-warming disaster

NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Nov. 13, 2005

President George W. Bush favours teaching both evolution and “intelligent design” in schools, “so people can know what the debate is about.”

To proponents, intelligent design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection. Read More ›

“Unlocking the Mystery of Life” in Australia

Science friction: God’s defenders target 3000 schools
By Linda Doherty and Deborah Smith

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/13/1131816809073.html
November 14, 2005

Up to 3000 schools have been targeted in a DVD blitz aimed at challenging Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favour of an “intelligent designer”.

The right to teach intelligent design in science classes is being tested in US courts and a fiery debate has erupted in Australia that has pitted scientists against advocates for the “alternative theory” to evolution.
Proponents of intelligent design say some forms of life are so complex they can be explained only by the action of an unspecified “intelligent designer”, who some say is God. Read More ›

The Darwinian Trilemma

The Epicurean trilemma (see Hume’s Dialogues) tries to reconcile: (1) God is good, (2) God is all-powerful, (3) Evil exists. Ian Bibby just sent me this Darwinian trilemma: Science cannot test the proposition that biological features are designed. Darwinism explains the appearance of design in biology not as actual design but as the product of natural selection and random variation. Darwinism is science.

Fitness among Competitive Agents

Fitness among Competitive Agents: A Brief Note By William A. Dembski The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain its power since, clearly, it is capable of doing better than blind search? One approach is to limit the fitness functions (see Igel and Toussaint 2001). Another, illustrated in David Fogel’s work on automated checker and chess playing (see, for instance, Chellapilla and Fogel 1999 and Fogel et al. 2004) and, more recently, given a theoretical underpinning by David Wolpert and William Macready Read More ›

The Five Ds of Dodgeball Darwinism

Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge deny. http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/dodgeball-script-transcript-ben-stiller.htm

Stephen Jay Gould — Master of Equivocation

Denyse O’Leary on her blog is arguing that Stephen Jay Gould would never have signed on with the National Center for Science Education’s Selling Evolution’s Project Steve, whose signatories agree that “there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence” (go here for the NCSE’s announcement of Project Steve, and go here for O’Leary’s blog entry disputing that Stephen Jay would ever have signed on to this project). Read More ›