One of the notorious talking points used by inveterate objectors to design theory, is that it is about stealth creationism. Closely tied, is the suggestion (or, assumption) that the claim that design inference on empirical sign only warrants inference to design as process is a dishonest stalking horse. Given a long saddening track record of […]
Design inference
Logic & First Principles, 21: Insightful intelligence vs. computationalism
One of the challenges of our day is the commonplace reduction of intelligent, insightful action to computation on a substrate. That’s not just Sci Fi, it is a challenge in the academy and on the street — especially as AI grabs more and more headlines. A good stimulus for thought is John Searle as he […]
ID Breakthrough — Syn61 marks a live case of intelligent design of a life form
Let’s read the Nature abstract: Nature (2019) Article | Published: 15 May 2019 Total synthesis of Escherichia coli with a recoded genome Julius Fredens, Kaihang Wang, Daniel de la Torre, Louise F. H. Funke, Wesley E. Robertson, Yonka Christova, Tiongsun Chia, Wolfgang H. Schmied, Daniel L. Dunkelmann, Václav Beránek, Chayasith Uttamapinant, Andres Gonzalez Llamazares, Thomas […]
Jonathan Bartlett and Robert Marks take on Elon Musk
Are Tesla’s robot taxis a phantom fleet? What’s behind Elon Musk’s sudden wild taxi adventure? Self-driving car entrepreneur Elon Musk is nothing, if not ambitious. Earlier this week, he promised to have a million robot taxis on the road by next year, taking dead aim at Uber and Lyft. But responses have changed in recent […]
Becoming: Design in action
Becoming from Aeon Video on Vimeo. Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six pulsing minutes of timelapse. A film by Jan van Ijken More about the life form portrayed.
Gull wing stability prompts talk of “design” in nature
One wonders how the proper authorities are coming with Darwinizing our language, so as to take out all suggestion of design or agency in nature and in humans. Not far, it seems. Maybe, instead of following Dawkins and insisting that design in nature is an illusion, researchers should just be agnostic about it for discussion purposes, given that that is how they routinely talk about it anyway.
“But it can’t be design, M’sieur. Design is an illusion.”
If there is no design in nature, then it is an illusion and Macron will have to settle for minimizing the influence of the people he doesn’t like, without claiming that there is some “meaning” or “design” behind their actions.
Logic & first principles, 1: Analogy, Induction and the power of the principle of identity (with application to the genetic code)
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: A kill cancer code is embedded in every cell
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
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
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”
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…
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
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
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 […]