Intelligent Design

Recently, at the Post-Darwinist, I have received many posts from Darwinists who protested my mentioning the fact that the recent school shooting in Finland was driven by social Darwinism. Some of them have resolved never to read my blog again as a result. (Be still, my heart! Be still! How can you be sure they will keep their promise?) Anyway, I wrote, This tragedy has provoked an enormous outburst of protest from Darwinists on account of my noting that the shooter’s motive was social Darwinism. On the rare occasions when a shooter’s motive has been anti-abortion advocacy ( Rudolph) or fundamentalist madness ( Yates), I have NEVER been excoriated by an anti-abortionist or fundamentalist for openly discussing that fact. Indeed, these types Read More ›

The global warming debate has striking parallels to the evolution/intelligent design debate. James Lewis explores the pathological consequences when political correctness replaces the search for truth in science: “Trofimko Lysenko is not a household name; but it should be, because he was the model for all the Politically Correct “science” in the last hundred years. Lysenko was Stalin’s favorite agricultural “scientist,” peddling the myth that crops could be just trained into growing bigger and better. . . . Hundreds of thousands of peasants starved during Stalin’s famines, in good part because of fraudulent science. . . . The explosive spread of AIDS occurred when the known evidence about HIV transmission among Gay men was suppressed by the media. . . Read More ›

In a recent post Denyse O’Leary linked to a news story coverning Pekka Eric Auvinen, the Finnish student who killed eight in a shooting spree at his school.  Apparently Auvinen was an ardent Darwinist who considered himself to be an instrument of natural selection.  He wrote:  “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgaces of human race and failures of natural selection.” One of O’Leary’s interlocutors more or less accused her of cherry picking her data to push her personal religious agenda.  Apparently this person believes this case is an aberation, and it is unfair to suggest a connection between Darwin’s theory and a school shooter’s self understanding as an instrument of natural selection.  Not Read More ›

Here’s the press release regarding this new website: New Website, intelligentdesign.org, launched to counter misinformation from PBS Seattle – “The new website launched today, intelligentdesign.org, provides people searching for information about intelligent design (ID) online an easy way to access the leading ID websites,” says Robert Crowther, director of communications for the Center for Science & Culture at Discovery Institute. Discovery Institute is hosting the new site on its servers. According to Crowther, intelligentdesign.org is not a Discovery Institute focused website, but rather a site that highlights the websites owned and operated by a number of pro-ID organizations, scientists and scholars, such as the Intelligent Design Network, Access Research Network, and Uncommondescent.com. One of the main resources at intelligentdesign.org is Read More ›

I found the following research quite intriguing. It has far reaching implications of interest to IDists. One implication requires a front-loading IDist to appreciate. Basically what the researchers found is that there are risk assessments in the promoter regions of genes. If a gene is critical and random mutations to it would be bad news it is marked as high risk and isn’t subject to mutation. If it’s not so critical it is marked low risk and exposed to experimentation.

How does this apply to front-loading? A major problem for front-loading is no known mechanism for conservation of genomic information other than natural selection. Information stored for a distant future that isn’t used in the present is ostensibly destroyed by deep time and random mutation. Other research we’ve blogged here showed compelling evidence that a mechanism for conserving unexpressed information exists. This is even more compelling – tags saying “conserve this”. Now all we need to find is the enhanced error detection and correction mechanism that is employed to conserve information tagged for conservation and there’s our mechanism for presevation of front-loaded genomic information over deep time.

Evolution: When Are Genes ‘Adventurous’ And When Are They Conservative?

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Details at www.TheBrites.org

Philosopher Antony Flew used to be the most prominent atheist in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, however, that has changed. Unlike Flew, who has always been civil and insightful, a new breed of atheists, who are crass and unruly, has supplanted him, notably, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Also, Flew is no longer an atheist. Flew’s newfound belief in God and his assessment of today’s neo-atheism are both described in his delightful new book (coauthored with Roy Varghese), There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Throughout his philosophical career (going back to the late 1940s, when he rubbed shoulders with C. S. Lewis), Flew was committed to following evidence wherever it leads. Late Read More ›

Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I will be on American radio host and columnist Dennis Prager’s show today, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, to discuss the findings from our recently published book The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007). Here’s the link to listen. I will try to transcribe some of it. I will also be on Radio Maria, November 8, on Culture Watch with Tony Gosgnach, from 6:05 to 7:05 p.m. Go here and click the Listen Live icon. The show will be repeated as follows: Repeat: November 13, 11 a.m. – 12 noon Repeat: November 15, 6:05 – 7:05 p.m. The studio is sending me an .mpeg file, and I will try to transcribe some of it. P.S.: Read More ›

Or else … You haven’t read The Design of Life. But first … A friend draws my attention to “Judgment Day,” an upcoming American Public Broadcasting Service special on the Dover Trial. In this  press release, we learn that Vulcan Productions – which produced the program for PBS – has long been committed to the subject of evolution and its teaching,” remarked Vulcan Productions Executive Producer, Richard Hutton. “When we co-produced the Evolution series with the WGBH Science Unit in 2001, we set out to bring the richness of Darwin’s theory to life.” Well, sure, believers have been recruited to front Darwin. The part that intrigued me was NOVA Senior Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell’s comment: “Evolution is one of the most Read More ›

I’ll be speaking on the topic, “Does the Complexity of Life Prove Intelligent Design?” at two schools in New York this week. The first lecture will take place at the University of Buffalo’s North Campus, in Cooke Hall, Room 121, on Thursday, November 8th at 8:00 pm. For directions to this location click here. I will also be lecturing a second time on Friday, November 9th at 6:30 pm at Daemen College in the Wick Center Social Room. For directions to this location, click here. I’d love to meet you, UD reader, if you have the time to stop by.

You’ve probably heard about all the apes who have been taught to communicate using sign language in recent years. As Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, the discovery that American Sign Language could, in principle, be taught to apes spurred a number of interesting research projects – and some pretty unrealistic claims. In Dragons of Eden (1986), for example, Carl Sagan dreamed of a day when Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published Read More ›

The tired old “ID is not scientific” has reared its ugly head again in another thread. This is simply not true. Karl Popper famously stated that a hypothesis is scientific if it can be falsified. He used swans as an example. He stated a hypothesis: All swans are white. Popper said that it can never be proven that all swans are white because there is always the possibility that a black swan exists somewhere but has not yet been observed. He stated that the hypothesis is still scientific because it can be falsified – the observation of a single black swan will falsify it. The biological ID hypothesis can be stated as: All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent Read More ›

Semiotic 007 commented at Mike Behe and Bad Design that Christian researchers embrace atheistic notions of science simply as “the rules of the game”, for getting things done. He goes on to note,

Everyone wants science to explain phenomena in natural, not supernatural, terms whenever possible. Historically, there were big problems with investigators invoking the supernatural whenever it suited them. I believe it was simply easier for Christians to join Enlightenment philosophers in cutting God out of the picture than to obtain some disciplined approach to admitting the supernatural at times and excluding it at other times.

Okay, but how come they don’t see the hook sticking right out of the bait? Read More ›

Blogs for books at Amazon are great! I just wanted to draw your attention to Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution blog, where he tackles the problem of “evil design”, in connection with the writings of Christian Darwinist Ken Miller (and all kinds of other stuff):

Behe, a fellow Catholic, has the same problem I do. One of the shell games that I had to learn to detect when I first started covering this beat, while writing By Design or by Chance?, was the “Christian evolution” demand that we “Leave God out of it!”

As in “Surely no Creator would …” Hey, wait a minute! Weren’t we supposed to leave God … out … of … ?

Well, it turned out that you could drag God into it, as long as you were saying that he isn’t responsible for the way things are. It all just sort of happened, see. Nonetheless, he is the Lord of Creation?

Shell game city.

Anyway, Behe says, Read More ›