Intelligent Design

After being denied tenure at ISU after publishing The Privileged Planet, Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez has formally accepted a position at Grove City College, PA. (Informally announced on April 4 at Biola)
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ISU Intelligent design proponent finds new job
By: William Dillon, 04/18/2008
Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who argues for the use of intelligent design in science, has accepted a new position at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Read More ›

Here is an uncommon review by Mayer – who has the courage not to bow to Darwinian orthodoxy.
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Expelled – Ben Stein’s Brilliant And Subversive Documentary

By William Mayer
April 19, 2008 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Darwin…Darwin…Darwin…you can almost hear Ben Stein muttering to himself as this subversive little documentary, “Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed,” unfolds. Having opened only yesterday it has already left the piggies that feed at the trough of big science foaming at the mouth and staggering about in near apoplexia. Read More ›

[Note: This article is an excerpt of what was originally published on Evolution News and Views as a 3-part series, linked as follows: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.  For the full article, see http://www.discovery.org/a/4689.] Scientific American has a long history of opposing intelligent design (ID), so it comes as no surprise that they have tasked their columnist Michael Shermer with the job of attacking Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Michael Shermer is the founder of Skeptic Magazine, who loves to boast about how evolution liberated him from belief in God. In fact, he does just that in his article attacking Expelled, opening it by saying: “In 1974 I matriculated at Pepperdine University as a born-again Christian who rejected Darwinism and Read More ›

I’m opening a thread for those who would like to report their impressions of seeing the movie Expelled as well the numbers of viewers and their reactions to the movie.

Here is my report:
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Research often shows no apparent effect (phenotype) of deleting most genes. Hillenmeyer et al now find that 97% of yeast genes have an important biological function. Optimal growth requires nearly all genes in absence of “rich” medium in the lab. Sounds like robust design. Read More ›

It a newly issued study in the PNAS, a species of lizard was transplanted 36 years ago from one island in the Adriatic to another. Tremendous phenotypic changes have occurred, the most dramatic, in my estimation, being the development of ‘cecal valves’ in the digestive tract to be able to digest the plant food that the transplanted species of lizards has taken to eating. Cecal valves occur in only 1% of all lizard populations, yet it developed in only 36 years—along with changes in head size, jaw size, and bite strength (needed to chew the cellulose found in plants)!

There seems to be two ways of looking at this: (1) that NS has brought all of these changes about; or (2) the environment, specifically the proteins/enzymes/chemicals of the plant life on the new Adriatic island has interacted with the genome to quickly bring about these changes. Considering Haldane’s Dilemna–much discussed here at UD–there have been simply too many changes that have occurred to the physiology of these lizards for NS to be invoked as the cause. Additionally, if NS “can” work this fast, then why aren’t we seeing the development of higher taxa of animals and plants right now? The old argument is that NS works too slowly to be seen, and that’s why we don’t see these higher taxa—nor the intermediate forms which would be required—in present day flora and fauna.

What we seem to be seeing isn’t exactly Lamarckism, but a kind of form of it: i.e., the environment produces changes in the phenotype of the lizards which is inheritable, but is doing so via genetic regulatory mechanisms; IOW, epigenetics.

The more we learn, the harder it is for RM+NS to keep up.

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Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, published :

An Intelligent Discussion about Life

in The Seattle Times, April 17, 2008
Chapman posted the following extensively footnoted version of this article at www.discovery.org/a/4522.
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He’s now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse. Read More ›

Richard Weikart summarizes his devastating research into the Darwinian foundations of Nazis – and the continuation of those themes by modern evolutionists.
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Darwin and the Nazis
By Richard Weikart Published 4/16/2008 12:07:03 AM American Spectator

Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified that the forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point, which is to expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those daring to criticize Darwinian theory.

One aspect of Expelled that troubles Dawkins and some of his colleagues is its treatment of the ethical implications of Darwinism, especially its discussion of the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism. Isn’t this a bit over-the-top, suggesting that Darwinism has something to do with Nazism? After all, Darwinists today are not Nazis, and Darwinism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Read More ›

I was watching the science channel last night, sort of in the background as I was combing gobs of winter fur out one of my dogs, and I saw or heard “Expelled” pop up on the screen. I saw a shot of Ben Stein walking out of a science classroom and going down the hall to sit on a bench outside the principle’s office. Another “kid” was sitting there too. The other kids says to Stein “So what did YOU do wrong?” Stein deadpans “I made a movie”. Premise is doing a GREAT job with this. Anyone who thinks they’re incompetents is in a state of denial. And here it is…

Today’s Human Events includes an article “Ben Stein’s ‘Expelled’: A Little Background” by me. I tried to include much more of the very interesting (old) New York Times News Service article here but it was too long for the editor’s taste.

Ben Stein’s Intelligent Adventure By Kate Wright Ben Stein’s new film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, is a documentary that appears to be about Intelligent Design and the shortcomings of Darwinism. The film is not just an exploration of the limitations of The Origin of Species, but a journey to uncover the mindset that Darwinism engendered among those with an agenda to replace traditional understandings of God with pure materialism. But far from offering a weighty discourse on theories of monism, Stein delivers a pop culture MTV-style Road Film that has already reignited the Culture Wars, with a just-issued cease and desist letter from a group at Harvard. The Harvard letter claims that a clip in the film plagiarizes an “Inner Read More ›

Ironically, in David Bolinski’s letter backing down on the lawsuit threat to Premise Media (for lack of standing I’m sure as Harvard owns the video not XVIVO) he employs CSI (complex specified information) to back his accusation that Premise ripped off the video from Harvard: Given the vast number of structures to be removed, and given the structures remaining “on camera”, whose positioning and relationships, both aesthetic and functional, needed to remain true to the function and beauty of molecular biology, it is inconceivable, mathematically, that the animator hired by EXPELLED’s producers, independently and randomly came up with the same identical actin filament mesh XVIVO depicted in one scene, which had never before been rendered anywhere in 3D! Check it Read More ›

“Richard Dawkins … and Pee Zee were tricked into appearing in Expelled. They were tricked into signing release forms. They were tricked into long unedited denouncements of Christianity which appear in the film. They were tricked into receiving generous honoraria for being interviewed. They were tricked into cashing these checks and spending the money so it could not be returned. But trickery is what you can expect from peddlers of thought porn.” Details at TheBRITES.org.

Before the ink is dry on the revision of the tree of life, giving comb jellies pride of place near the base , we now need to redraw the tree again. “ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2008) — Darwin’s tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may need to be redrawn. In research to be published in the April 13 advance online issue of Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo have joined forces to reveal that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms — an Read More ›

I watched Dawkins on the Bill Maher show last night. Among other interesting things he said was when it comes to belief in gods if you were to rate his belief on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being most belief and 10 being least he puts himself at a 6. Then he compares belief in gods with belief in fairies and pink unicorns. So I guess he’s conflicted about those too. Bill Maher then ridiculed religion in predictable trite ways which caused Dawkins to reconsider the belief rating and up it to “6 point 9”. Hilarious. Richard Dawkins is really a centrist on religious beliefs. Who’da thunk? Too bad Bill Maher didn’t ask Richard Dawkins to rate Read More ›