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Darwinism

Templeton flirts with finding purpose in biology — but fully natural purpose!

Alan Love: "Over the past several decades, though, philosophers of biology have shown that, in fact, the language of function is deeply entangled with issues related to purpose, albeit not necessarily in an inappropriate way. Instead of an inherent taint to using the language of purpose, there are interesting, unresolved issues about how function, purpose, and allied concepts are related." Guy hasn't been Canceled yet? Read More ›

Robert Shedinger’s recent podcast on Darwinism vs. design

Luther College prof Robert F. Shedinger has two books, Jesus and Jihad: Reclaiming the Prophetic Heart of Christianity and Islam and The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology's Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. It appears that, although the intention was to talk about both books, the design controversy stole the show. Read More ›

Term “junk DNA” critiqued at journal. But now remember the history!

“The days of ‘junk DNA’ are over…”? So the house is clearly supporting this move away from the Darwinian position. Oh yes, let’s not forget that “junk DNA” was very much a Darwinian position. Most or all of the Darwinian Bigs signed onto junk DNA as part of their thesis about the unguided nature of life. The big question will doubtless be put off for now: Why does it only count if Darwinian predictions are right but never if they are wrong? Read More ›

Book from Cambridge defends ID. So readers write to say…

Of course Darwinism is nonsense. But it is profitable nonsense and easy to spout in an uncritical environment. The question of the day is, how do we get probing critiques to travel from the ivied walls to the pop science mag rack — where, it is fair to say, most writers and readers are unaware of any of the problems identified. So far as they know, Darwin brilliantly explained why men golf and women cheat and some people go to church… Read More ›

Darwinism’s legacy of confusion in biology

Miller quotes, “Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of argument. – Robert G. B. Reid, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, Pp. 37-38” That’s a devastating indictment, given that the whole point of Darwinism was to demonstrate that life could come into existence purely by random processes. Read More ›

Laszlo Bencze: Just another gratuitous use of the word “evolution” in the WSJ

Bencze: Did the arterial network sprout long before the giraffe's long neck evolved? Sadly evolution can’t look ahead to provide things that will be useful in the future, so no go. Read More ›

Another Truism Dies

A new paper can be found at Phys.Org undermining the idea that what drives evolution is the “decoupling” of DNA with phylogenic structures. This idea is implicit in the twin ideas of pseudogenes and gene duplication: both allow the DNA to become “uncoupled” from the structures they code for and so RM becomes permissible. Well, this paper shuts down this idea. Given the success of cichlids, understanding the evolution of these two jaws has become an important line of inquiry for biologists. “We’re trying to gain a better understanding of the origins and maintenance of biodiversity,” says Albertson. Researchers have long thought that the two sets of jaws are evolutionarily decoupled and can evolve independently of one another, pushing the Read More ›

Was Thomas Henry Huxley the first science journalist?

What Huxley was marketing was not a correct analysis of the cause of the plague but one that promoted materialism. Today, for example, we constantly hear similar stuff like - just for example - “science is closing in on the human mind” or “apes think like people.” They can’t help it, of course, but Huxley’s career might help us understand better how it got started. Read More ›

A new open access paper offers an approach to cancer that sees past Darwin

Researchers: Although neo-Darwinian (and less often Lamarckian) dynamics are regularly invoked to interpret cancer’s multifarious molecular profiles, they shine little light on how tumorigenesis unfolds and often fail to fully capture the frequency and breadth of resistance mechanisms. Read More ›

Larry Elder: Can somebody text Dr. Martin Luther King… ?

West: The blacks-as-apes trope is used by some on the right and left alike. In 2018, we called out actress Roseanne Barr’s loathsome comparison of Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett to an ape. Now we call out a progressive white activist in California who is trying to stigmatize a conservative black man as an ape. Read More ›

New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism

I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design, and Two Good Ones’. Koperski thinks that one good way to critique ID is to point out that it violates principles like ‘scientific conservatism’. Because there are several potential naturalistic mechanisms on the table, even if orthodox neo-Darwinism fails, ID is an unnecessary proposal. To turn to design explanations would be to adjust our theories too drastically. I argue against this claim, concluding that Read More ›

How materialism is enforced when the evidence is against it

Luskin at The Federalist: More than 1,100 scientists have signed a list agreeing they are “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” As a scientist, I’ve signed that list. But as an attorney, I can attest that many of these scientists — and others who are afraid to sign the list — face discrimination because they won’t toe the Darwinian line. Read More ›