Here. Plantinga, Alvin Plantinga, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, talks about “God and Evolution: Where the Conflict Really Lies.” (May 10 and 12, 2011) Note: Plantinga was one of the two Christian philosophers who complained about the hit job on colleague Frank Beckwith in Synthese, incorrectly tagging Beckwith as ID, and in general as one bad dude.
Recently, I made a post regarding what I thought was an encouraging moment at Biologos, where a guest writer frankly speculated about how God could work through evolution. In the comments section, some discussion was had about just how rare or common such views are among TEs. Since I’ve already made the call for non-theists and agnostics who are ID sympathetic to speak up on here (and was very happy to see the resident ID proponents respond positively to that), I’d like to introduce a similar opportunity. I’d like any theistic evolutionists who are reading this to speak up and share their views. In particular, I’m interested in… * How you think design is reflected in the natural world, in Read More ›
Here’s Discovery Institute’s trailer for the film on the life of Darwin’s forgotten/sneered at co-theorist Alfred Russel Wallace, illustrating the work of science historian Michael Flannery: “He’s been called a biological Indiana Jones. He explored the Amazon. He lived with headhunters … “ But wait. This isn’t Indiana Jones. It really happened. Next time you hear a Darwinist sneer at Wallace, ask yourself, could he do what that guy did? (Okay, she?) Darwin would never have published his atheist-happy theory, if Wallace hadn’t written to tell him about natural selection as a mechanism, and not as “the best idea anyone ever had” (key pop philosopher Daniel Dennett’s summation). Enjoy.
Here’s a piece by Michael Moseley (“Anatomical clues to human evolution from fish,” BBC News,, 5 May 2011) offering quirks of human anatomy to point to a common ancestor with fish:
The top lip along with the jaw and palate started life as gill-like structures on your neck. Your nostrils and the middle part of your lip come down from the top of your head.
Which requires great “precision.” Read More ›
… when it gets uprooted this often? From ScienceDaily (“Ancestors of Land Plants Revealed”, May 2, 2011),
It was previously thought that land plants evolved from stonewort-like algae. However, new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology shows that the closest relatives to land plants are actually conjugating green algae such as Spirogyra.[ … ]
Dr Becker explained, “It seems that Zygnematales have lost oogamy and their ability to produce sperm and egg cells, and instead, possibly due to selection pressure in the absence of free water, use conjugation for reproduction. Investigation of such a large number of genes has shown that, despite their apparent simplicity, Zygnematales have genetic traces of other complex traits also associated with green land plants. Consequently Zygnematales true place as the closest living relative to land plants has been revealed.” Yes, but … Read More ›
“Genome Duplication Encourages Rapid Adaptation of Plants” (ScienceDaily, May 4, 2011) While nearly all animals have two sets of chromosomes — one set inherited from the maternal parent and the other inherited from the paternal parent — many plants are polyploids, meaning they have four or more chromosome sets. “Some botanists have wondered if polyploids have novel features that allow them to survive environmental change or colonize new habitats,” says Assistant Professor Justin Ramsey. “But this idea had not been rigorously tested.” Forcing duplication on wild plants (instead of the centuries old practice of forcing it on tame ones) produced quick results, as it does in tame ones: Ramsey compared the performance of the transplanted yarrows and found that the Read More ›
In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›
Here is a current debate on the subject from Cassandra’s Tears and here at Intelligent Reasoning is a comment, if you’d like to weigh in. Many sources think that intelligent design is concerned principally with the plausibility of proposed mechanisms for evolution, not with denying that it occurs. Most ID theorists are skeptical – based on evidence, or in this case lack of it – that certain claimed mechanisms, such as Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation, can do all that is claimed for it, or even a tiny fraction. When pigs fly first class, maybe.
From best known early twentieth century Catholic writer and apologist [take this, current Pontifical Institute!] G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (book text here:
Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. Read More ›
I was invited to review Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’ newest book, THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE AND FAITH, at patheos.com. Below are the first few paragraphs as well as a link to the entire review. —————————– BioLogos and Theistic Evolution: Selling the Product “There’s nothing wrong with selling one’s ideas. But it needs to be done honestly, and that’s just what I don’t find in this book.” By William A. Dembski, April 27, 2011 Editor’s Note: The following is the first piece in a four-part conversation between Dr. William Dembski and Dr. Karl Giberson, concerning Giberson and Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions. Find more resources and discussion surrounding the book Read More ›
In “Pope: Humanity isn’t random product of evolution” (Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, Sat Apr 23), we learn: VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn’t a random product of evolution. Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point “in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.” “If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no Read More ›
In “A golden orb-weaver spider from the Middle Jurassic” (4/21/11), David Tyler at manchester U comments on a recent find:
The golden orb-weaver spider features in newly reported research and provides an exciting insight into past ecosystems. Today, these animals adorn tropical rainforests, with giant females of Nephila maculate (legs spanning up to 20 cm), and small males (just a few centimetres across). However, the fossil record of the Nephilidae family is meagre. The earliest example of the genus Nephila comes from the Eocene (considered to be about 34 Ma) and the earliest example of the family Nephilidae is a male from the Cretaceous (considered to be 130 Ma). The newly reported fossil golden orb-weaver spider is a giant female with a leg span of about 15 cm.
and observes
So this particular living fossil exhibits stasis at the genus level and raises again the issue of what can be learned from the phenomenon of stasis. A previous blog expressed some frustration at Neodarwinian evolutionists who file stasis in a box that says: no environmental change, no selection pressures, no evolution. The problem with Read More ›
Sources note that, while Darwin stalwart Jerry Coyne has his hands full critiquing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, his colleague Eric Davidson … dismisses Coyne’s view of macroevolution as a “lethal error” and neo-Darwinism as “erroneously” assuming things, in E. Davidson, “Evolutionary bioscience as regulatory systems biology,” Developmental Biology 2011, in press: Of the first of these approaches (e.g., Hoekstra and Coyne, 2007), I shall have nothing to say, as mechanistic developmental biology has shown that its fundamental concepts are largely irrelevant to the process by which the body plan is formed in ontogeny. In addition it gives rise to lethal errors in respect to evolutionary process.
In “Human+: forecasting our future” (New Scientist, 15 April 2011), Cormac Sheridan takes us on a tour of metro retro speculation about the human future: The premise underlying Human+, the exhibition that opens today at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is that the future is knowable – even though everyone knows it’s not. As a species, we seem to be hard-wired to speculate on what’s going to happen next. Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman and his team have tapped into this tendency to put together a fascinating array of objects, creations and schemes, each of which explores some aspect of our engineered future. Gorman’s catalogue essay aptly describes the show as “an Alice-in-Wonderland world of pills, Read More ›
“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153 This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.