Finch and Knuther each received an award check for $15,000 plus a gold plated medallion for their evolution of “a man walks into a bar” jokes. Read their paper at TheBRITES.org.
Just plain big? How do animals get that way? Why the exploding palm tree explodes – or why it doesn’t Frog from hell? Well, that’s how Nature News is telling it. Apollyon, check your e-mail. The frog is loose again.
February 19, 2008 K.D. Kalinsky (Note from Denyse: An ID theorist asked me to publish this essay on detecting design in nature. It is exactly as the scientist gave it to me except that – I have linked the sections for easier Web handling – all the notes have been moved to the end. – I don’t see a font choice for superscripts or subscripts in Blogger, so have decided to enclose the element that would be super or subscripted in two periods. In the number 10.-64. assume that .-64. Is a superscript. In the equation, P.f. = M(E.x.)/N, assume that .f. and .x. are subscripts. A .pdf version of his paper exists but is not on line as of Read More ›
In another thread talking about engineers’ perspectives on the machinery of life the topic of entropy came up. Engineers have to deal with entropy in all their designs and the very best efforts at dealing with it only serve to slow it down and never stop it.
So one of my big questions isn’t why most cell lines sooner or later go extinct as that’s easily explained by entropy. Rather my big question is how a rare few of them have managed to persist for hundreds of millions or billions of years.
A simpler cheaper system has been developed to code in DNA. This implicitly recognizes the more complex coding in native DNA. (The news article also assumes the evolutionary doctrine of “junk DNA”.) The contrast with hard drives, this low density coding method and natural DNA shows the very high coding density in DNA.
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. . .the researchers discovered a system to encode digital information within DNA. This method relies on the length of the fragments obtained by the partial restriction digest rather than the actual content of the nucleotide sequence. As a result, the technology eliminates the need to use expensive sequencing machinery.
“Evolution” is defined so broadly as to prevent refutation. That requires that the whale of “macroevolution” (simple organism to human beings) must be swallowed along with the gnat of “microevolution” – any mutation or change = “evolution”.
Now Kenneth Miller is attempting to transform the Design vs Evolution argument, by claiming nature reveals “evolutionary design” – purely based on “nature” – without an intelligent cause.
Will the public recognize this as an oxymoron?
OR
Will it welcomed as the Trojan horse that undermines Intelligent Design?
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There Is ‘Design’ In Nature, Biologist Argues
“ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2008) — Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller has to hand one victory to the “intelligent design” crowd. They know how to frame an issue. “The idea that there is ‘design’ in nature is very appealing,” Miller said. “People want to believe that life isn’t purposeless and random. That’s why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support.”
“To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of ‘design’ and the sense of purpose and value inherent in a scientific understanding of nature,” he said.
In a Feb. 17, 2008 symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston,* Miller will argue that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. . . “
Jonathan Wells reflects on how almost everything Darwin believed is being disconfirmed: There was a time when I would half-heartedly join in the chorus that praises Darwin as a great scientist, even though some of his ideas were mistaken. Now, when I look for Darwin’s positive contributions to biology, I see only that he made a persuasive case that something analogous to artificial selection operates in natural populations (a case also made by others, including A.R. Wallace). That and a few minor studies on barnacles, orchids, and such. But natural selection has never been shown to accomplish anything more than its artificial counterpart — which is to say minor changes within existing species. All of Darwin’s Big Ideas — universal Read More ›
Recently I wrote an article about where disbelief in Darwin leads. It generated a lot of good discussion. Now I’d like to pose the question where does the pursuit of science, in particular the quest for material explanations of life, lead?
The cover story of the current (March 2008)issue of National Geographic is “Inside Animal Minds.”
It is an interesting, persuasive, and I’m sure quite unintentional argument against the Darwinist position that mind is an illusory epiphenomenon of the material brain.
The article presents truly interesting examples of studies involving dogs, elephants, fish, primates, sheep, octopus, dolphins, and birds purportedly showing that these animals have real minds and are not just behavioristic, deterministic biological machines.
The article further credits Darwin with the original insight that “earthworms are cognitive beings”
The examples they cite do make a good case that animals have real minds, not just a set of biologically and environmentally encoded behavior, and argues against “behaviorism, which regards animals as little more than machines.”
It asks the really excellent question: “But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained?” (page 48)
Read More ›
Okay, I have probably got myself into a peck of trouble by deciding to just say what I think about Darwinism and Evolution Sunday and all that. I used to be tremendously polite to senior clergy, teachers, and opinion leaders who know that you must obey the system and say nice things about Darwin, whether or not it follows traditional religion or otherwise makes any sense. But I cannot even pretend to make excuses for them any more. I have decided to stop being a dhimmi for Darwin. I will no longer support or promote any excuse whatever about the havoc that the Darwinists have wrecked on our society, which they are celebrating this year and next year. I’ve explained Read More ›
One of the grand engineering challenges issued by The National Academy of Engineering is to Reverse-engineer the brain.
If the NAE considers it possible to Reverse-engineer the brain, does not that imply that the brain may have been engineered in the first place? i.e., as in designed by an intelligent agent? As you read through these materials, compare the close parallels with engineering design methods and what researchers are discovering about the brain, (compared to chance processes.) (Hmm. Is that why brain neurons were used for The Design of Life cover!) Perhaps we can see productive reverse engineering research supported by grants from the National Academy of Engineering. with true scientific freedom to pursue where the data leads.
Reverse-engineer the brain
Why should you reverse-engineer the brain?
The intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.
. . . the secrets about how living brains work may offer the best guide to engineering the artificial variety. Discovering those secrets by reverse-engineering the brain promises enormous opportunities for reproducing intelligence the way assembly lines spit out cars or computers. . . .
Darwin’s theory of evolution – essentially, that life, including human life, occurs without purpose and perishes without consequence – popularized points of view that would have been considered unacceptable to most Westerners in earlier times. Indeed, that has always been its greatest appeal, to judge from the thousands of editorials on how Darwin’s great feat was to show that man is just a two-legged animal – a biped who affects trousers. Excerpt: West quotes political philosopher Leo Strauss, explaining that scientific materialism triesto understand the higher in terms of the lower: the human in terms of the subhuman, the rational in terms of the subrational (p. 4). To test his assumption, take a pop science mag and make a mental Read More ›
No Intelligence Allowed! By Tom Bethell Published 2/19/2008 12:07:57 AM It’s not often that I attend private screenings, so when I was invited to see the director’s cut of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring our own Ben Stein, I jumped at the chance. It was shown in downtown Washington, D.C. at the Goethe Institute. I didn’t even know that such a place existed, but then downtown Washington has been rebuilt in recent years, with whole neighborhoods reconstructed. It’s actually beginning to resemble a real city. The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result. In a word, they Read More ›
Could Florida’s Darwinian regulations be “evolving” from “fact” to free inquiry? In More on the vote on evolution and Florida’s new science standards Leslie Postal reports that teaching Evolution in schools is now mandated, but officially as the “scientific theory of” Evolution.
Will students now be able to seriously study evolution as “a scientific theory” – with all the testing, probing, and skepticism required by the scientific method? Or will they be Expelled for exercising their unalienable rights to free speech? – that founded the Declaration of Independence (which heads the US Codes Organic Laws) and are preserved by the First Amendment.
In a Special Report on the American Spectator Ben Stein writes::
Michael Ruse on Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” (heavily edited) “God is getting a bit of a bashing these days. Above all, there is the smash-hit best seller The God Delusion, by the brilliant science writer Richard Dawkins. Why this sudden enthusiasm for atheism? The new skeptics are writing brilliant works, bringing reason and evidence to bear on the God question, and showing in altogether new ways why religion is false and dangerous to boot. Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science). Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer – has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief. John Henry Newman wrote: “I believe Read More ›