Category: Design inference
Logic & first principles, 1: Analogy, Induction and the power of the principle of identity (with application to the genetic code)
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Darwinist rhetorical tactics, Design inference, Epistemology (the study of knowledge and its conditions), Logic and First Principles of right reason, The Design of Life |
One of the commonest objections we meet when we discuss design inferences — especially concerning the genetic code, is that a claim is “just an analogy” (with implied conclusion that analogies are weak or fallacious). This then extends to inductive arguments used. This common error must be corrected and (as will be shown) the principle […]
Researchers: An anti-cancer kill code is embedded in every cell
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A kill code is embedded in every cell in the body whose function may be to cause the self-destruction of cells that become cancerous, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. As soon as the cell’s inner bodyguards sense it is mutating into cancer, they punch in the kill code to extinguish the mutating […]
Caterpillar “turns into” a snake
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference |
Larva of a sphinx hawk moth (Hemeroplanes triptolemus). Hat tip: Digg Also: Has anyone done probability calculations (not rhetoric or theorizing) for purely random evolution for this, via natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism)? Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: Orchids with monkey faces and A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at […]
Theodore Dalrymple and Ken Francis on the terror of a materialist atheist’s existence
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Readers who like essays may be in for a treat. Ken Francis, often hat-tipped here, and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple have written a book as a series of essays, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd: The cultural death of God has created a conundrum for intellectuals. How could a life stripped […]
J.P. Moreland on Darwinism and “reverse intelligent design”
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only […]
If DNA were a computer program…
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genomics, Intelligent Design |
A computer programmer looks at DNA … and finds it to be “amazing” code. From 2006 through 2017, Dutch entrepreneur and software developer Bert Hubert contributed from time to time to a web page where he listed many of the ways the workings of DNA can be likened to coding decisions by programmers. Some of […]
Stephen Meyer’s approach in Darwin’s Doubt vindicated in recent fruit fly study
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, is thought to be vindicated by a paper published in 2017, “Experimental test and refutation of a classic case of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster” (Nature Ecology and Evolution). The paper “begins with a perceptive statement about what ought to be required when establishing some genetic evolutionary pathway: Identifying […]
Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Turns out we didn’t need Jurassic Park: The lungs and feathers of a bird that lived 120 million years ago had some of the same characteristics found in today’s birds, researchers reported yesterday (October 18) in PNAS… They examined a sample with scanning electron microscopy and found an extremely subdivided structure much like that enabling […]
Does information theory support design in nature?
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Computing, AI, Cybernetics and Mechatronics, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
Eric Holloway argues at Mind Matters that design theorist William Dembski makes a convincing case, using accepted information theory principles relevant to computer science: When I first began to look into intelligent design (ID) theory while I was considering becoming an atheist, I was struck by Bill Dembski’s claim that ID could be demonstrated mathematically […]
Berlinski and Denton, agnostics who doubt Darwin, offer their reasoning
| October 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Mathematics |
David Berlinski and Michael Denton feature in a podcast: For Berlinski, a mathematician and author of The Deniable Darwin, the problem is quantitative and methodological. For Denton, a geneticist and author of the new Discovery Institute Press book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Light that Make Us Possible, the problem is empirical. Don’t miss […]
Food, sex, and memory in one-celled algae, once again
| October 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
Recently, we looked at the claim that diatoms (one-celled algae with glassy shells) demonstrate the ability to make choices. That seems hard to account for in the absence of a brain (though the researchers were convinced they saw it happen). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to clarify a point about the diatoms: The […]
Researchers: Diatoms demonstrate “behavioral biology”
| October 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Cell biology, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Unicellular diatoms are able to adapt their behavior to different external stimuli based on an evaluation of their own needs. This was discovered by scientists of the Friedrich Schiller University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, together with partners from Belgium. The algae depend on nutrients in order […]
Cell behaviour can show “purposeful inefficiency”? What next?
| October 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
We thought “purposeful efficiency” was enough to get a researcher fired, but read on: From ScienceDaily: The steps cells take in response to challenges are more complex than previously thought, finds new research published in the journal eLIFE. The study investigates a system relevant to cancer, viral infection, and diabetes as well as Parkinson’s and […]
“Undeniable” author Doug Axe on the recent “directed evolution” Nobel for chemistry
| October 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Chemistry, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
Doug Axe, Intro of recalls current CalTech winner Frances Arnold: In a conversation in her office one day, I said that I wanted to do work on protein evolution. She was skeptical, for pragmatic reasons. “Is that the kind of work that people will want to fund?”, she asked. I smile recalling that, but up […]
Plants use flashes of fluorescent light to warn leaves against insects
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Ecology, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf’s edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent light washes over the other leaves, a signal that they should prepare for […]
Nathan Lents is still wrong about sinuses but is still writing about them
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Naturalism |
He is the author of a “bad design” book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Earlier this year writers for Evolution News posted responses to Dr. Lents, who teaches at John Jay College and wrote a recent book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to […]
Prime numbers are not “nearly as scattershot” as previously thought
| September 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Chemistry, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Mathematics |
From researchers at Princeton: The seemingly random digits known as prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought. A new analysis by Princeton University researchers has uncovered patterns in primes that are similar to those found in the positions of atoms inside certain crystal-like materials. The researchers found a surprising similarity between the sequence of […]
Warning: Watching this video may cause you to lose the ability to see randomness
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference |
From David Nguyen: Why Tumor Biologists Should Never See Randomness But Only Degrees of Disorder See also: What is Randomness? Part 1, with David Nguyen
The standard genetic code is “optimized” to reduce costly errors
| August 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
An interesting new paper on how the genetic code minimizes the impact of mistranslations: Statistical and biochemical studies of the standard genetic code (SGC) have found evidence that the impact of mistranslations is minimized in a way that erroneous codes are either synonymous or code for an amino acid with similar polarity as the originally […]
Decidedly unDarwinian admissions re proteins
| August 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules […]
