Intelligent Design

Massimo with an as yet undetermined appendage writes Education is not about having “kids debate both sides,” since most kids would probably conclude that the earth is flat and at the center of the universe (after all, the sensorial evidence is overwhelming in favor of the flat-earth, Ptolemaic system). If Massimo doubts that the science establishment can present the evidence for a round earth, like live satellite images, well enough to let children use critical thinking skills to decide if the scientists have made a compelling case, then quite frankly Pigliucci is a worrisome character whose own critical thinking skills leave a lot to be desired.

Randy Isaac, the executive director of the ASA (i.e., the American Scientific Affiliation — an organization of evangelical Christians largely committed to theistic evolution) will give a talk titled “Science: A Misused Weapon in a Religious War” at Baylor on September 9th. I’m fifteen minutes from the school, so I’ll probably be there. For details, see below. From his talk description, Isaac seems to have things exactly backwards. For Isaac the science-faith problem is a clash of competing religious perspectives. In fact, the problem is a clash of two competing scientific conceptions of biological and cosmological origins, one that incorporates real teleology, the other that eschews it. These two scientific conceptions have radically different implications metaphysically. Hence the enormous stakes Read More ›

A very interesting programme on the problem of inbreeding with pedigree dogs has recently been shown on BBC 1 in the UK; “Pedigree dogs exposed,” Tuesday 19th August 2008 21.00 BST. Although this programme didn’t set out to be anti Darwinian, there are some very interesting observations that come out of it that are really quite damaging to neo-Darwinian explanations. In fact the programme stated that the whole concept of purebred dogs came out of the eugenics movement of the 19th century.

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This from the Faraday Institute Newsletter (No 32 | September 2008): The Faraday Course entitled “Science and Religion for Church Leaders”, also intended for those training for ministry, will take place Nov 4-6th . As usual full details are up on the Faraday web-site (www.faraday-institute.org). . . . Those in the Birmingham UK area might be interested to know that on Saturday, 27th September, at 4.0 p.m. in the George Hotel, Lichfield, the Institute Director will be in debate with Prof. Steve Fuller (Prof. of Sociology at Warwick University) at the Lichfield Literary Festival (hwww.lichfieldfestival.org) on the subject of Intelligent Design. This is a somewhat counterintuitive debate in that Prof. Fuller, an agnostic, is an ID supporter whereas the Director, Read More ›

I have no objection to origin of life research, but then I have no objection to the search for the Lost Atlantis either. To the extent, however, that a quest seems primarily religious in character, the case for public funding must be constructed on public grounds. And that must begin with an examination of the faith under discussion. 1. Origin of life – the Genesis of a new religion? 2. Was origin of life ever mainly a science quest in the first place? 3. The sacred mysteries of the prebiotic soup 4. So should the established religion seeking the origin of life be disestablished? There is an alternative …

Well, either the people behind the trade journal Genome Research are creationists or the term is used by everyone else too. Genomics and Darwinism Genome Research is now accepting submissions for a special issue, entitled Genomics and Darwinism, devoted to comparative and evolutionary genomics, including primary research reporting novel insights in large-scale quantitative and population genetics, genome evolution, and natural and sexual selection. Methinks the Darwinists doth protest too much. 😆

h/t to fBast: “Ooooh, stop the presses! New thread, somebody? See: Origin of Nerves traced to Sponges, it seems that sponges don’t have nerve cells, but they know how to grow ‘em. This smacks very loudly of front-loading.”
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Abstract:

“We are pretty confident it was after the sponges split from trunk of the tree of life and sponges went one way and animals developed from the other, that nerves started to form,” said Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. “What we found in sponges though were the building blocks for nerves, something we never expected to find.” Read More ›

“New Evidence Debunks ‘Stupid’ Neanderthal Myth” chirps the ScienceDaily release:

Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens). The research team has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.

Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years. (August 26, 2008)

Now, the obvious question is, who decided that the ‘thals were dummies? They were around long enough (conventionally, from about 250 000 to about 28 000 years ago) so they must have fed themselves using their tools.

The textbook belief was in fact based on the now-rotting Tree of Life popularized by Darwin and his modern-day followers. They assumed that modern humans (homo sapiens) were “superior” to the Neanderdumbsters, and interpreted all facts about the latter to fit that view.

However, enterprising researchers from the University of Exeter, Southern Methodist University, Texas State University, and the Think Computer Corporation decided to do some investigation, so they themselves spent three years making both Neanderthal tools and Homo sapiens tools.

And guess what:

… when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes favoured by Neanderthals were more efficient than the blades adopted by Homo sapiens.

 One researcher offers various speculations about why Homo sapiens preferred tools that didn’t work as well, but the inferior intelligence of homo sapiens (hereafter saps) is not one of the options offered.

The researchers already done enough damage to the official materialist narrative for one decade.

I suggest that the next step should be this: Read More ›

Michael Dickinson reports on “a marvelous machine”: ——————-

Flies In Danger Escape With Safety Dance

” . . .Dickinson used superslow-motion video cameras to study how a fly avoids getting swatted.. . .Dickinson says a fly will typically jump off the surface and then begin to fly away from the swatter. But the high-speed cameras revealed something amazing about what happened before the fly jumped.

“They perform an elegant little ballet with their legs,” says Dickinson. “They move their legs around to reposition their bodies so that when they do jump, they will push themselves away from the looming threat.” Read More ›

Last week I posted about issues with the production of variation that Darwinists often overlook. So then, the question becomes, what is the mechanism for variation production? In a recent book, called Eight-Legged Marvels: Beauty and Design in the World of Spiders, Chad Arment invites us to examine that very question. In the introduction, Arment says:
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“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Burt, n.d.), pp. 38-39.

Hiram Caton,  the retired Aussie political science prof who enjoys sending up the currently raging Darwin cult, writes to say that he has now drunk deep from the “clear-thinking oasis” available at Richard Dawkins’s site.

And he sends back this message to the peoples who still sit in darkness and have not yet seen the great light:

I just completed my pilgrimage to the ‘clear-thinking oasis’, as the shrine is called, the RichardDawkins.net. An inspiring, edifying experience that filled my cup with a rosary of blessings.

Marvellous portraits of Mr. Dawkins etched him indelibly on my mind. And the fulsome library of DVDs: The Enemies of Reason, the Root of All Evil, the Four Horsemen, and the most recent, The Genius of Charles Darwin, which takes novitiates into the inner sanctum–Richard Dawkins’ splendid library.

He shows us his first edition copy of The Origin of Species and whispers that it’s ‘not just the most precious book in my library, but the most precious book in the library of our species’.

I suddenly realized that it’s the TRUE holy book and that my Darwin doubts exploit the shadows between Reason and the Root of Evil, Superstition. I cleansed my mind by accepting that it’s Either/Or: Dawkins and Reason or THEM. The reward was immediate sense of exalted freedom!!

In addition to DVDs, the site offers novitiates a variety of charms and amulets that express the conversion to clear-thinking: T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs which convey the message of Dawkins’ outreach, the ‘Out campaign’ (copied from the gay/lesbian outing).

The message is simple: Look at me, I am a proud ATHEIST. Lots of potential here, like ‘I’m a SELFISH GENE’, or, ‘ABOLISH the Archbishop’. And the Four Horsemen? What or who could they be? Why none other than the Four Evangels–Dawkins, Dennett, Chris Hutchins, and Sam Harris, chatting about the evils of religion and the blessings of clear-thinking.

But wait: which one is Pestilence? which is Famine? Death? The acolyte’s acquired clear thinking is left to figure it out. Read More ›

Professor Antony Flew writes:

The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).

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http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v9/n9/pdf/nrm2472.pdf “MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are known to regulate gene expression at the level of translation, but how does this affect what proteins are produced? Two recent papers have shown that individual miRNAs can affect the expression of hundreds of proteins. One known as miR-223 seems to function as a rheostat to finely adjust protein output. Another miRNA let-7b is can fine-tune protein production from thousands of genes. Individual miRNAs can have an effect on global protein expression, and protein repression is likely to be mediated by a specific complementary sequence target region in the corresponding messenger RNA. The emerging picture is that miRNAs do not have just a small number of mRNA targets — they function at the transcriptional and translational level Read More ›

I made the following response in the commentary on another thread. Because some people thought it deserved to become an article in its own right… here it is.

Also with an apology to Jonathan Wells for calling him a “Moonie”. I had no idea it was considered by many to be derogatory. I thought it was merely a neutral descriptive like “Jehovah” or “Mormon” or “Amish”.

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