Intelligent Design

La Mirada, Calif. — Ben Stein, known for his lead role in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and his Comedy Central show Win Ben Stein’s Money, believes in liberty and truth. In recognition of this, Biola University’s masters in science and religion program will present him with the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth on March 27, a month before the release of his major controversial motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In his new movie Expelled, Stein wonders whether humans were designed by an intelligent being or whether we were simply the result of an ancient natural accident. In his search for an answer, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents Read More ›

In the thread I deleted “A Sterling Example of Anti-Religionists” one of the commenters noted that the URL linking to the offensive article had undergone a point mutation. One letter in it changed that made the link go somewhere else. He implied that this didn’t happen at random and that someone purposely changed it. Guilty as charged. I changed that one letter – a k to an h to make it difficult to see at a casual glance. But let’s look at how my design was detected. We all know that bits can flip at random in computer data from various causes just like they can flip at random in DNA from various causes. This wasn’t a complex mutation. A Read More ›

UD member Timothy in another thread writes

But in principle it is possible to arrive at this particular unique combination of symbols using a simple brute force algorithm (like, for example, an elementary counting algorithm) that works through all the possible combinations of symbols. Thus, given such a systematic algorithm, all the books of the world, those written and those yet to be written, are implied by it.

I thought this was important enough to deserve a thread of its own. Read More ›

The best argument for Intelligent Design is to clearly state the opposing view, which is that physics explains all of chemistry (probably true), chemistry explains all of biology, biology explains intelligence, and intelligence explains computers, science textbooks and the Internet; ergo, physics explains computers, ergo, my little parable “My Failed Simulation”, which has now appeared at Human Events here . They re-titled it and added a subtitle that I don’t like, but otherwise I’ll take responsibility for the content. I added the adjective “imaginary” to “friend” in the third paragraph to make sure no one took this parable too literally, but it looks like that may not have been sufficient, to judge by the first comment.

For me, the importance of this piece in Nature is not so much that, by assuming what is to be proven, it is possible to demonstrate the obvious (that heavily spined fish will not have an advantage where there are no predators). The significance is that this trivial example of existing trait filtering and selection is then touted as a major discovery of Natural Selection at work in the fossil record. Is this not an admission that microevolution is the best that the fossil record ever shows? Evolutionary biology: Darwin in the fossils Andrew P. Hendry (heavily edited excerpts) “Although adaptation by natural selection is thought to drive evolution, it has been difficult to confirm this process in the fossil record. The evidence has been there Read More ›

Or are we just connecting to the universe, as the Design of Life authors think.I’ve always found the connection between soft math and useful information easy (like, you get charged for a side of fries you never ordered, and never would have ordered). But HARD math? That’s about something else for sure. Go here for more about why hard math matters. Also: Today at the Post-Darwinist Christianity Today features news item on young astronomer denied tenure Catholic Darwinists to congregate in Rome? Also: Today at The Mindful Hack: The myth of the Christian Right: What happens when you ask Democrats if they too are born again? God must exist, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to enjoy this debate.

A commenter to my article about John McCain supporting the teaching of ID in public schools replies that he won’t vote for McCain because of it. The stated reason is the United States is falling behind other industrialized countries in science literacy. Piffle! The notion that science literacy in the U.S. is substandard is rooted in the results of science surveys that include questions about evolution. Without doubt a much larger fraction of the US populace doesn’t believe in mud to man evolution than compared to any other industrialized nation. So in those surveys they give the “incorrect” answer to questions about the origin of life. In all other category of science questions Americans score as well as or better Read More ›

Clandestine meeting of skeptics with strange deists & theists. Details at TheBRITES.

Discussions of evolution (theistic and materialistic) have too often been cast within a Darwinian framework.  From M. A. Corey’s special pleading for deistic evolution (see his Back to Darwinism [1994]) to the recent sparring match between Robert A. Larmer and Denis O. Lamoureux in a series of exchanges in Christian Scholar’s Review (see issues for fall 2oo6 and fall 2007), discussions are invariably cast within a framework of how much or how little theism Darwinism will admit.  Seldom is Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) ever brought up.  But, in fact, Wallace completely revised the theory he independently founded.  I suggest he did so within a much older Hermetic tradition in science.  What, you ask, does Wallace have to do with Hermeticism?  I’ll admit on its face it appears unlikely. But such a seemingly strained connection is relaxed considerably by seeing Wallace less as an evolutionist-turned-crackpot and more as a prescient thinker himself evolving a teleological view of nature on the one hand and seeing Hermeticism as less a curious exercise in medieval and early modern superstition and more as a viable metaphor for a more integrated worldview on the other.  By re-visioning both we may indeed find the foundation for a historically coherent — certainly a more historically rooted — ID paradigm.

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Help this guy. He wants to know when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.Here are his numbers so far: A question very simply crafted poll I’m asking a few friends to gain a better perspective on the time-frame for when we may see greater-than-human level AI. Results posted below… if you wish to participate, email me (bruce-at-novamente.net) an answer for the following: [ ] 2010-20 [ ] 2020-30 [ ] 2030-50 [ ] 2050-70 [ ] 2070-2100 [ ] Beyond 2100 [ ] Never [ ] Prefer not to make predictions [ ] Other: __ He recounts, “Many people have replied Never, so I’ve separated this answer from the replies and have added it to the survey results (above). – Read More ›

Evolution of anatomy and gene control  Evo-devo meets systems biology. Georgy Koentges Nature Vol 451|7 February 2008  (excerpts only)

Since Darwin we know that we must explain organisms not only in mechanistic terms (of mutation, selection and adaptation on the population level) but also in historical terms, as ‘descent with modification’, evolution in phylogeny. All heritable morphological changes derive from developmental changes in molecular control hierarchies and networks.

Genetic control networks must have changed to create phenotypic diversity. Historians of life are interested in the specific succession of changes over evolutionary time.

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A commenter on my previous article asked whether John McCain supports intelligent design or not. After a quick google I can happily say the answer is yes. McCain sounds like presidential hopeful By C.J. Karamargin ARIZONA DAILY STAR Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.24.2005 As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans. On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement. McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be Read More ›

In the wake of the fact that Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal has been dismissed by the Iowa Board of Regents (this was expected, actually, and more later), Discovery Institute has launched an Academic Freedom petition: Across America, the freedom of scientists, teachers, and students to question Darwin is coming under increasing attack by self-appointed defenders of the theory of evolution who are waging a malicious campaign to demonize and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them. You can help by signing the Academic Freedom Petition If you are an American, you can go here to sign. By the way, academic freedom is under severe attack in many forums, not just the study of design in the universe. Go to The Fire to Read More ›

For those following this thread at the Panda’s Thumb, I’m providing here (as a pdf) the slides from my talk at the Wistar Retrospective meeting, held this past June in Woburn, Massachusetts. Pay attention to the puzzle described in slides 14-21. Here’s a brief outline of the problem: 1. To establish cellular differentiation in a metazoan (i.e., an animal), instructions must be provided to the starting cell. 2. Natural selection is one possible process by which this occurred, when the metazoan in question first appeared. 3. A necessary condition for natural selection is reproductive capability. 4. But reproductive capability (in an animal) requires cellular differentiation. 5. Thus, a necessary condition for natural selection lies causally downstream from the phenotypic outcome Read More ›

I’ve been meaning to catch up with the Catholic side of the controversy over Darwinian evolution, and now at last I have a moment: Recently, Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk in which he said explicitly: “Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions,” he told a meeting of academics of different disciplines sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This sort of language explains why Catholic Darwinist Ken Miller got so upset with Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn, a close B16 associate, over his famous 2005 op-ed in the New York Times. Miller was upset because he knows as well as anyone that this and other Read More ›