Intelligent Design

These interviews were originally conducted by Mario A. Lopez, with collaboration from Eduardo Arroyo Pardo for the Pro-ID Spanish website, Ciencia Alternativa. http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1438 http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1451 http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1449   These also appear in El Manifiesto from Madrid, Spain: http://elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=808 http://elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=1396 Enjoy!

The BRITES joins Nature and the The National Academy of Sciences calling for all science organisations to preach the word of evolution by natural selection. MORE

In the “Hail Darwin” link under “Additional Descent” we are told that the National Academy of Sciences’  “Science, Evolution and Creationism” gives  the following epistemological definition of “fact”:

“In science, a ‘fact’ typically refers to an observation, measurement, or other form of evidence that can be expected to occur the same way under similar circumstances. ”

 So far so good.  This is pretty much the same way I defined “fact” just a few days ago in Epistemology.  It’s What You Know. 

The NAS then says this:

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The Bill Greene Show Bill rips Wikipedia for about 5 minutes straight about how its liberal editors censor stuff they don’t personally agree with. He says anything remotely positive related to Intelligent Design is quickly and completely censored. Bill then goes on to interview Mark Mathis, the producer of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.

Two blind fish can make sighted offspring. “The offspring of crossbred blind cave fish see like their surface-dwelling cousins. The results in Current Biology 1, show that the two populations took different evolutionary paths to blindness. “We’ve basically shown that these different populations have converged upon the same outward appearance independently, and that they use different genes to do it”, says Richard Borowsky of New York University.” This is the type of thing that RM and NS can do. I would say that they lose different genes to become blind, not use different genes.

In the comment thread to my last post there was a lot of discussion about computers and their relation to intelligence.  This is my understanding about computers.  They are just very powerful calculators, but they do not “think” in any meaningful sense.  By this I mean that computer hardware is nothing but an electro-mechanical device for operating computer software.  Computer software in turn is nothing but a series of “if then” propositions.  These “if then” propositions may be massively complex, but software never rises above an utterly determined “if then” level.    This is a basic Turing Machine analysis.  This does not necessarily mean that the output of computer software is predictable.  For example, the “then” in response to a particular”if” Read More ›

We often hear that ID is an argument from incredulity. At this point I would tend to agree. That said, arguments from incredulity aren’t necessarily wrong but in fact are rather reliable and employed constantly and consistently by everyone every day. Let’s take the example that Granville Sewell offered in his most recent post here. He described Schrodinger’s equation and showed us that it’s theoretically possible for a pitched baseball to stop and hover in mid-air. A commenter who appeared to have a reasonable understanding of Schrodinger’s equation at first protested then ended up agreeing that it’s possible but the odds against it are long and for all practical purposes incalculable. They went on to agree that the quantum uncertainty Read More ›

Nature wants all science organisations to preach the word of evolution by natural selection. “Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why. Three cheers for the US National Academy of Sciences for publishing an updated version of its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (see www.nap.edu/sec). The document succinctly summarizes what is and isn’t science, provides an overview of evidence for evolution by natural selection, and highlights how, time and again, leading religious figures have upheld evolution as consistent with their view of the world. For a more specific and also entertaining account of evolutionary knowledge, see palaeontologist Kevin Padian’s evidence given at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (see http://tinyurl.com/2nlgar). Padian destroys the Read More ›

The goal of materialists is to reduce mind to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics; they have obviously made considerable progress. At the very bottom of this chain, however, lies quite a surprise–the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics. A mathematics text I am reading states that the Schrodinger partial differential equation explains, in theory, all of chemistry, but must be viewed as “an axiom…rather than as an equation that can be derived from simpler principles.” In an n-particle system, whose potential energy (due to the electromagnetic, gravitational, and strong and weak nuclear forces between these particles) is given by V(x1,y1,z1,…,xn,yn,zn), the probability (per unit volume) of finding particle 1, of mass m_1, at (x1,y1,z1) and Read More ›

Similar to the Cambrian explosion of animal life, it appears there was an earlier similar explosion for plants, at least the Ediacaran variety.
In what the ScienceNOW Daily News is calling Another Big Bang for Biology, the oldest assemblage of macroscopic life forms on earth, Ediacaran plants, appeared suddenly and fully diversified.
This plant life “explosion” coincides exactly with a sudden rise in ocean oxygenation.
The study authors, paleontologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, call their findings The Avalon Explosion.
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Now and then I am assailed by people who insist that “intelligent design is not falsifiable.”

Well, put that way, it isn’t, right?

Politics, economics, and religion are not falsifiable either. Anything can escape falsification if it is put in broad enough terms. That’s because we all have overlapping – but not identical – definitions of what these abstractions mean.

However, specific ID hypotheses such as Mike Behe’s irreducible complexity, Bill Dembski’s specified complexity, and Guillermo Gonzalez’s privileged planet hypothesis can all be falsified by showing that the condition that cannot exist according to the theorist’s postulates does in fact exist.

So a specific hypothesis is – of course – falsifiable. That’s a key part of what a hypothesis is: A statement so specific that its contrary would falsify it.

But now here is something I would really like to know: Do people who claim to have falsified various intelligent design hypotheses ever get angry with the people who claim that intelligent design hypotheses are not falsifiable? Read More ›

BarryA’s definition of a philosopher:  A bearded guy in a tweed jacket and Birkenstocks who writes long books explaining how it is impossible to communicate through language without apparently realizing the irony of expressing that idea through, well, language. 

Seriously, I have read a lot of philosophy, and I find some of the philosophers’ ideas valuable (that is, when I can decipher them though the almost impenetrable thicket of jargon in which they are usually expressed).  In particular, epistemology (the theory of what we know and how we know it) is one of the most useful philosophical ideas for the ID – Darwinism debate.  Indeed, many of the discussions on this blog turn on questions of epistemology.  So I thought it would be helpful to give a brief overview of the subject in the ID context.  So here goes – 

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Plant study reveals a “deeply hidden” layer of transcriptome regulation. “Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome – all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Before RNA transcripts can guide protein synthesis or take on regulatory functions, they have to undergo a strict mRNA surveillance system that degrades defective, obsolete, and surplus transcripts. By stopping the function of the exosome, a multi-unit complex molecular machine in charge of controlled RNA degradation, researchers found evidence for widespread exosome-mediated RNA quality control in plants and a ‘deeply hidden’ layer of the transcriptome that is tightly regulated by exosome activity. The common notion was that the exosome plays a central role in bulk Read More ›

“Creationist” Perspectives p37-45 selections from Science Evolution and Creationism NAP 2008  “A creationist is someone who rejects natural scientific explanations of the known universe in favour of special creation by a supernatural entity. Many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. (Creationists) want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion’s supernatural accounts of physical phenomena. Views of creationists typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth. Old Earth creationists accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings Read More ›

On December 9, 2004, an Associated Press story story went out on the wires, “Famous Atheist Now Believes in God: One of World’s Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence.”

More? Or less? As it turns out, neither. He believes in God simply on the scientific evidence. Many might consider that thin gruel, but he is entitled to cite the evidence in his defense. And there is a lot of it.

Go here for more:

Introduction: Antony Flew, God, and the Evidence: A review of There IS a God Read More ›