Intelligent Design

 (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University) From ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA. Rockefeller scientists have nailed down the first complete molecular picture of this huge, 450-protein pore and their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus itself first evolved. The group gathered and analyzed massive amounts of data to come up with a rough draft of the structure of the nuclear pore. The scientists’ results have given them a peek into the early evolution of eukaryotic cells. Compartmentalization was made possible by membranes and coating complexes, which act “like Read More ›

I’ve just received the following notice from PSSI (Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity), of which I am a member. I’m taking the liberty of posting it up here in case anyone else is interested in this debate. Fresh from our What Darwin Didn’t Know events in Spain, Dr. Geoff Simmons, author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links is scheduled to debate evolutionist PZ Myers, who runs the caustic pro-Darwinism blog Pharyngula. The one hour debate will begin at 1 PM PST tomorrow (Thursday) on radio station KKMS, AM 980 in Minneapolis. You can listen to the debate live on the web by logging onto http://kkms.com/LocalHosts/15/ and clicking on the Listen Live button at the top. Read More ›

Permutations of the question “Who designed the designer?” are trite, easily addressed, and if you read the moderation rules you’ll find that comments using this and other trite arguments are deleted. There is not enough data to make any determination of who designed the designer. When and if we can identify the designer of organic life on this planet we might have some data to work with in determining the origin of that agency. Until that situation changes, maybe SETI will give us some data someday, there’s no point in asking the question over and over again.

A family friend, who is a brilliant electrical engineer, recently spent some time at our home for a holiday get-together. The topic of ID came up and he asked me how I could possibly have bought into such a silly idea. I quizzed him about what he knew about ID. I asked him about which prominent ID theorists he was familiar with, and mentioned a few, along with the titles of their books. He had never heard of any of them, and was completely unfamiliar with any ID literature or even elementary ID concepts. As it turned out, he had gotten all of his information about ID from the mainstream media, and didn’t have the slightest clue what ID is Read More ›

From Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by that same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, Read More ›

Here’s an interesting recent book, just the thing for Darwin Day, I guess: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race by Cornelius J. Troost. Here’s his publisher’s blurb, abbreviated a bit: APES or ANGELS?: It speaks the truth about Darwin’s views on human origins and race. Contrary to the beliefs of most academicians and educated readers, Darwin had two dangerous ideas instead of one. … The second idea is rarely mentioned in politically correct America- that the human races are different in sometimes significant ways. Indeed, inequality is a normal condition of nature. Darwin’s clash with Christianity is winding down because modern science is a foundation of western culture and it fully accepts the truth of natural selection Read More ›

Recently, a hoo-haw among some Darwinists vastly spiked traffic to one of my blogs, The Post-Darwinist, out of all proportion to usual interest levels. It had to do with some predictions I had made.

People who can force the taxpayer to fund their activities are generally mega rotten at understanding the point of view of people who make a living offering goods and services to a public that actually has a choice in the matter. But that is a story for another day.

Anyway, predictions, predictions. What does Darwinian evolution predict? Read More ›

Alignment is probably the most difficult and least understood component of a phylogenetic analysis from sequence data. — David L. Swofford and Gary J. Olsen, chapter on Phylogeny Reconstruction, in Molecular Systematics (Sinauer, 1990, eds. D.M. Hillis and C. Moritz), p. 417. Twenty years ago, as a 2nd-year graduate student, I attended the first Molecular Evolution Workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory-Woods Hole. (There’s a comical Expelled-type story from my two weeks there, involving the workshop director Mitchell Sogin, which I might tell here some time. I did design the workshop t-shirt, however, which most of the participants bought.) The overwhelming lesson I brought home from the workshop, aside from the pricey beauty of that part of Cape Cod, was Read More ›

Posted to give glimpses of international interest in ID. Korea appears to allow significant freedom of speech and inquiry. ———————————- Special Contribution By Babu G. Ranganathan The Seoul Times, Global Views Jan 28, 2008 Understanding Intelligent Design Theory Imagine finding a planet where robots are programmed so that they can make other robots just like themselves from raw materials. Now, imagine an alien scientist visitor coming to the planet and, after many years of studying these robots, the alien scientist visitor comes to the conclusion that since science can explain how these robots work, operate, function and reproduce there’s no reason to believe that there was an ultimate intelligent designer behind them. The analogy above certainly is not perfect but Read More ›

Thank you for your support! Dembski’s copyright infringement charges have been dismissed and, after all the shenanigans of you ID crazies, I am back in North Dakota [Details Here].

I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to test the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To accomplish this, I subject M&M’s to repeated trials of survival of the fittest. Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, Read More ›

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD”

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center – January 15, 2008
Dr. Caroline Crocker, a biologist featured in the upcoming documentary film Expelled, has been hired as the Executive Director of the IDEA Center. A trained biologist who loves working with students, she received her Ph.D. in immunopharmacology from Southampton University, U.K., and an M.Sc. in medical microbiology from Birmingham University, U.K.

Dr. Crocker taught various biology courses for five years at George Mason University (GMU) and Northern Virginia Community College. While at GMU, she won three grants, including one from the Center for Teaching Excellence, and she received commendations for high student ratings and wrote a cell biology workbook. Nonetheless, after she mentioned intelligent design in a class at George Mason in 2004, she was subsequently banned from lecturing. Her story is told as part of the upcoming documentary film about persecuted pro-ID scientists, Expelled, featuring Ben Stein.

“Having personally witnessed the hostility in the academy towards intelligent design, I am excited about helping students in IDEA Clubs to investigate intelligent design in an intellectually honest manner,” said Dr. Crocker.
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“The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions.” So says a news report. But of course the images below from this so-called Harbin “snow festival” depict merely the detritus of a snow storm. Snow festival indeed! When are people going to get over their teleocentrism and stop trying to see everything as designed?

And don’t use Google, you cheaters! That’s not guessing. Both passages — arguments about possible modes of evolutionary change — were written by the same scientist. He is offering his own view, not expounding that of others. Sample 1: In real life, major evolutionary innovations perhaps had to wait for radical mutational ‘inventions’ that fundamentally altered the basic body plan. Once such a radical change in body plan had arisen, a whole new rush of evolution became possible. An example might be the invention of segmentation early in the ancestral history of annelid worms, arthropods and vertebrates. Sample 2: My suggestion is that Scyllarus may actually present an example in the wild of a homeotic mutation, analogous to antennapedia in Read More ›

Click here to sign yourself up as a volunteer to help promote the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Not sure? Watch the movie trailer below and then decide if you should help get the message out. P.S. This YouTube trailer is a little dated. The movie is slated for April release in all major movie theaters. You can see a higher resolution version of this trailer and others by clicking here.

DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University WHAT: Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford. WHO: Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great. VS. Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place Read More ›