Design inference

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

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Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

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The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

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There was an interesting debate among friends regarding the recent BioEssays editorial lamenting purpose-based language in science (teleology): “…It is that innocent little word ‘to’ that transforms the meaning, giving enzyme Y the essence of ‘will’ – ‘to’ being short for ‘in order to’, or ‘with the purpose of’. Purpose can only be exercised by a supernatural entity in this situation.”

A sampling of comments: Read More ›

Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.

Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›

Back in 2004, a well-known philosopher appeared in an interview and appeared to make a startling concession – that there was evidence that evolution itself was in some sense designed, and perhaps even directed towards a goal. This let to a lot of buzz on the internet, eventually resulting in back and forth between the philosopher and interviewer – the philosopher backed away from his previous statements and insisted he made no such concession, while the interviewer (himself a self-declared agnostic, even materialist) held to his guns and (armed with the actual interview) argued the philosopher had made this concession and was now changing his story and backing off.

So, who was this philosopher who stood accused of conceding evidence for design and purpose in nature?

Some Theistic Evolutionist, perhaps? A reasonable guess, but no. Besides, many TEs are too good at the fine art of saying nothing noteworthy to find themselves making such a concession.

Maybe Anthony Flew? Again, a good guess, but still no. Besides, when Flew went deist he no longer regarded ‘design’ as a dirty word.

No, the philosopher in question was none other than (once upon a time) fourth horseman of the Atheist Apocalypse Dan Dennett, being interviewed by Robert Wright.

And there’s a lesson to be learned from the whole affair.

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Recently at Prosblogion, philosopher Alexander Pruss started a conversation off with the following:

Classic Paley-style design arguments go like this: There is some complex biological feature C which is such that

I shall suggest that the story is not so simple, and that, in fact, a very powerful Paley-style design argument may continue to go through.

Pruss later mentions that he thinks there’s a possible flaw in the argument, but not one due to Darwin. More on that below.

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Greetings all. Since I’m going to be contributing some posts here at Uncommon Descent, it’s been suggested I explain to everyone just where I’m coming from intellectually and in the context of the Intelligent Design discussion. Before I do that, I just want to express my thanks to the powers that be on this site for allowing me this opportunity – with luck it may lead to some interesting conversations on a topic I’ve enjoyed following over the years.

So if you’re at all curious of where I stand on the questions of ID, evolution, and so on… Well, just read on.

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The thesis expressed in the title of this “opening bat” post is plainly controversial, and doubtless will be hotly contested and/or pointedly ignored. However, when all is said and done, it will be quite evident that it has the merit that it just happens to be both true and well-warranted. So, let us begin. Noted Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag in his well-known January 1997 New York Review of Books article, “Billions and Billions of Demons”: . . . to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out . . .   the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural Read More ›

Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs for the Discovery Institute, has recently published an article entitled ZEAL FOR DARWIN’S HOUSE CONSUMES THEM:HOW SUPPORTERS OF EVOLUTION ENCOURAGE VIOLATIONS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE in the Liberty University Law Review. Luskin continues to be a favorite target of the anti-ID crowd over at The Panda’s Thumb, and this article is no exception. The task of misrepresenting Luskin fell to attorney Timothy Sandefur, who frequently contributes to the Panda’s Thumb blog site.

Luskin clearly lays out the intent of the article in the very first paragraph and writes:

The common stereotype in the controversy over teaching evolution holds that it is the opponents of evolution who are constantly trying to “sneak religious dogma back into science education.”1 While perhaps in some
instances this caricature is not entirely undeserved,2 the mainstream media and legal community pay scant attention to incidents where proponents of Darwinian evolution transgress the boundary between church and state erected by the Establishment Clause. By documenting ways that evolution advocates encourage violations of the Establishment Clause—in some instances, explicitly advocating state endorsement of pro-evolution religious viewpoints in the science classroom—this Article will show the impropriety of the common “Inherit the Wind stereotype.”3

Apparently this clear of a statement isn’t good enough for Sandefur who sniffs:

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Luskin’s argument is flimsy, his evidence illusory, his readings of the case law distorted, and the overall effect essentially a fun-house mirror version of First Amendment law.

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Bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, Ph.D., has an interesting take on the recently announced synthetic cell created by a team of researchers led by J. Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Instititute (JVCI). In a recent article in The Scientist entitled Is the “Synthetic Cell” about Life?, Kaebnick writes:

…the technical accomplishment is not quite what the JCVI press release claimed. It’s hard to see this as a synthetic species, or a synthetic organism, or a synthetic cell; it’s a synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, which is familiar enough. David Baltimore was closer to the truth when he told the New York Times that the researchers had not created life so much as mimicked it. It might be still more accurate to say that the researchers mimicked one part and borrowed the rest.

The explanation from the Venter camp is that the genome took over the cell, and since the genome is synthetic, therefore the cell is synthetic. But this assumes a strictly top-down control structure that some biologists now question. Why not say instead that the genome and the cell managed to work out their differences and collaborate, or even that the cell adopted the genome (and its identity)? Do we know enough to say which metaphor is most accurate?

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World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says “science will win” in a recent interview with ABC news’ Diane Sawyer. From the interview:

But exploring the origins of time inevitably leads to questions about the ultimate origins of everything and what, if anything, is behind it all.

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

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A new measure of information has been invented – the Zettabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10^21 bytes.
Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement Heidi Blake, 4 May 2010, The Telegraph UK “The size of the “digital universe” will swell so rapidly this year that a new unit – the zettabyte – has been invented to measure it.”

Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes – which each represent a million gigabytes – but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year. Read More ›

Judge Robert W. Sweet has turned the biotech patent industry into turmoil.

See: After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, Taking Stock By ANDREW POLLACK, March 30, 2010

Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature.

But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” . . . Read More ›