Intelligent Design

In an excellent essay in NATURE, Kevin Padian gives his views and concludes (some editing) …  “Has any single individual made so many lasting contributions to a broad area of science as Darwin did to biology? Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences Read More ›

  Portraits of Darwin created by a computer model of evolution acting on the painting top left. NATURE today published a piece by Kevin Padian entitled “Darwin’s enduring legacy”. The title page of the essay has this picture. I think the computer simulation of evolution has grossly degraded the CSI contained in the original picture in an irreversible manner. This is the type of thing that evolution is good at doing, and it is hardly a process I would let loose on biological systems if I were seeking improvements!

Dennis Wagner posted the following at ARN (go here). I post it at UD with his permission. He offers useful advice on how to get EXPELLED (www.expelledthemovie.com) into the local theaters this April. Get Expelled Now!!! The Expelled Challenge By Dennis Wagner ARN Executive Director Several of you have inquired if Expelled will be showing at your local theater when it is released in April. The answer is only YOU can know for sure. The producers don’t have a lot of say about which theaters pick up their movie. Theaters chains and local theater managers schedule their movies based on perceived demand and interest in their community. So if you want to see this powerful documentary in your favorite theater, Read More ›

One of my favorite sources for “just so” stories in organic evolution is metamorphosis. Consider: when a caterpillar matures and forms a chrysalis, the caterpillar’s body almost completely dissolves into a yellow mush which then serves as a source for raw materials to reform into a butterfly. I wonder how that scenario came about through mutation and selection. How would destroying almost the entire body and reforming into something that, by morphology alone would be a very different species, come about by Darwinian gradualism? Where’s the selection value in a partially decomposed body? Surely the process could not have evolved in one fell swoop. What series of gradual transitions make sense in light of chance & necessity?

This is something I’d pay to see. John Davison received his PhD in biology before Myers was born. Ironically he received it from the same university Myers teaches at today. Unless one counts the decades more experience Davison has as a professor of biology (University of Vermont) then they appear to be evenly matched. We’ll understand if Myers is intimidated by Davison’s greater experience and chickens out. Davison makes the challenge here at the bottom of the page. I would love to confront him anywhere, with or without his equally deranged cronies – Dawkins and Hitchens. It would be a rout! I can’t even goad them into recognizing my existence. Myers is a cowardly victim, a “prescribed” vendor of hate, Read More ›

Recently, I posted an interview with Expelled producer Mark Mathis at The Design of Life blog, in which we discussed the claim that the film misrepresented the Darwinists: DESIGN OF LIFE: You interviewed 150 scientists for your film. I wonder if that’s a record. I gather an effort has been made to discredit the film on the grounds that the anti-ID folk were misrepresented, basically that you tricked them into taking part. MATHIS: It’s not surprising. When you’re used to a situation where everything that is talked about in books and films fits your dogmatic view – and that’s what they’ve had – and then a film comes along that applies some actual skepticism, naturally they’re unhappy. They had the Read More ›

I’ve been informed that the peanut gallery (Panda’s Thumb) is accusing me of covering something up for deleting my very brief post about the Simmons/Myers debate. I made the posting a few hours before the debate and included a hotlink so people could listen to it live. I’d intended at the time of writing to remove it after the debate was over as the live link would no longer be working. UD author Doctor David A. Cook had a more in depth article that included the same live link. No coverup. Here’s the link to the archived debate. A link to the archive is also in DA Cook’s orginal post. Simmons vs. Myers Debate

Looking at the big picture over the past seven years (when I first started to take the intelligent design controversy seriously), one item stands out: The behaviour of the promoters of Darwinian evolution.

It is exactly what one might predict of people who think they don’t have a good case.

First, they suppress alternative cases, as I wrote earlier, as follows: Read More ›

Two interesting articles in the Southern Baptist Texan about Ben Stein’s EXPELLED:

Baptist Professors Featured in New Film
Written by Jerry Pierce | Managing Editor
Posted Monday, January 28, 2008

DALLAS­ — Two professors with ties to Baptist higher education are featured in an upcoming big-screen documentary that aims to expose the scientific establishment’s scorn toward academics who question Darwinian evolution.

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is scheduled for theaters in April and stars comedic actor and conservative activist Ben Stein as he travels the world interviewing intelligent design (ID) proponents whose careers have been threatened, as well as prominent neo-Darwinists who hold ID in contempt, including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion.”

A rough cut of the film, screened Jan. 10 in Dallas, featured interviews with William Dembski, a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading ID proponent whose books include “The Design Inference” and “No Free Lunch,” and Robert Marks, who holds the title of distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University.

Marks is a co-laborer of Dembski’s whose ID research raised the ire of Baylor’s administration last year.

Dembski’s trials at Baylor from 1999-2005 are not documented in the film­among other things, he drew the wrath of the science, philosophy and religion departments early in his tenure there when it was learned that he was heading up an ID think tank on campus­but Dembski appears several times on screen as an ID apologist.

Dembski told the Southern Baptist TEXAN that those who most need to see the movie are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.” Read More ›

NASA, the NY Times and most intelligent human beings apparently believe that it is possible to communicate across space – i.e., to detect signals that can be distinguished from natural causes and “noise”, which give evidence of other intelligent beings! e.g., Beatles songs vs quasar pulses and lightning pulses. ——————– NASA Says, ‘Hello, Universe. Meet the Beatles.’ By Patrick J. Lyons NY Times February 1, 2008, 4:47 pm . . . NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as Read More ›

Here’s an addendum, dated 2.1.08, to Ian Musgrave’s challenge (go here for the original challenge): Dear Dr. Dembski There has been some confusion about the wording of the original challenge. I’ve re-written the contest rules slightly as some people were confused as to what designer they were supposed to detect. A reminder, to win, you have to: 1) Identify which sequences have been produced by a human designer 2) Describe how you identified the sequence as being designed (eg. I used PKZip to compress the sequences and ordered the output according to the following criteria) 3) Describe what the sequence does (eg. “This is the active site of a triose phosphate isomerise engineered into a riboprotein — this due to Read More ›

I have a challenge for Ian Musgrave. The sequences provided code for 80 amino acids. That’s almost certainly not a whole protein and not enough information to determine design/non-design. Indeed, none of the six sequences begin with a start codon which means we aren’t given enough information to even frame the sequence into codons. Ian states: Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. If this were for real we would know the species in which the Read More ›

I received the following email dated 1.31.08 from Ian Musgrave: Dear Dr. Dembski Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. For example the engineered mouse pox virus that turned lethal (Nature. 2001 May 17;411(6835):232-5 see also Nat Genet. 2001 Nov;29(3):253-6) and limits on the sequencing of the 1918 strain of the flu to stop flu from being weaponised (Fed Regist. 2005 Oct 20;70(202):61047-9,). A method that could reliably detect the action of human intelligent design in Read More ›

Here’s an article from PhysOrg saying something that has been said on this blog for years. The experimenters were working with gold crystals, trying to build different structures. Here’s some of what they write in this summary article: “He likens the process to building a house. Starting with basic materials such as bricks, wood, siding, stone and shingles, a construction team can build many different types of houses out of the same building blocks. In the Northwestern work, the DNA controls where the building blocks (the gold nanoparticles) are positioned in the final crystal structure, arranging the particles in a functional way. The DNA does all the heavy lifting so the researchers don’t have to.”

I was reading an exchange on anthropogenic global warming between Dr. George Somero, the David & Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at the Hopkins Marine Station (pro) and Dr. Roy Spencer, recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and principle research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (con) where the usual points were exchanged. I was struck by Spencer’s closing statement as being particularly applicable to the design vs. chance controversy regarding organic evolution. Spencer closed his response to the question of scientific consensus in anthropogenic global warming thusly: “Scientific ‘consensus’ is only resorted to when uncertainty exists.” Next time someone brings up the appeal to authority fallacy regarding evolution this is a great response to Read More ›