Intelligent Design

Rationalwiki is an online encyclopedia struggling to be born. Judging from the copy I saw August 29, 2007 (which will probably change), it appears to be written by a group of people who see themselves as the guardians of reason, progress, and enlightenment, against “the anti-science movement” and “crank ideas”. Nowadays, theirs is a pretty crowded field, in which hordes of half-educated and indifferently talented placeholders aim their resentment at anyone capable of questioning materialist dogmas. Read more here (but NOT if you are drinking milk, okay?)

I just heard from a source I think reliable that Stuart Pivar has dropped his lawsuit against PZ Myers. ‘Bout time, too. I stand by my comment of earlier today: Incidentally, I do not expect PZ to lose his pajamas to the Pivar writ. Defamation suits generally require a demonstration of harm. PZ verbally assaults people more or less on a daily basis, and who can really claim to have been harmed thereby other than himself? Had he thought of choosing his targets more carefully and aiming more accurately, he might run risks that are not foreseen in the present case. Let the Internet police itself.

Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama , was chosen the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan Buddhists as a small child in 1940. (He was believed to be the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Lama.) After a failed 1959 revolt against the 1949 Chinese takeover of Tibet, his government has been exiled at Dharamsala, India, along with tens of thousands of Tibetans. The Lama would be a theocrat if he were not in exile. However, he is not at all most people’s idea of a theocrat. He is an intensely curious man who has made friends with great philosophers of science and scientists, such as Karl Popper, Carl von Weizsäcker, and David Bohm. He also championed interreligious understanding, all the Read More ›

Rob Crowther interviews renowned pioneer of technology Walt Ruloff in Expelling Dogma: Executive Producer Walt Ruloff and Expelled(part 1). Ruloff relates how “disruptive technologies” advanced the high-tech industry and how neo-Darwinism is a science stopper because it prevents the evolution of “disruptive technologies”. He expresses the highly negative consequences of neo-Darwinism to the advancement of medical research, advancement of science, and the matriculation of large numbers of scientists through the educational system. Enjoy! I foresaw this. Recall, I was the one who described: How IDers can win the war. Ruloff said it better than I ever could.

[continued from Dr. D.A. Cook’s thread, Where Did Sea Anemones Get Human Genes?]

Michael Behe has certainly given his critics a thrashing at his Amazon weblog. When I saw Mike taking Ken Miller to task for Miller mischaracterizing Lipids as Proteins (a sophomoric mistake by Miller), I knew Mike was slamming the best the Darwinist could muster onto the floor. Behe single handedly defeated Ken Miller, Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Michael Ruse, and Richard Dawkins, and thus earned the title “Darwin Slayer”.
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Last week at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) meeting in Sweden, Michael Majerus of Cambridge University — one of world’s leading experts on the peppered moth, of textbook fame — gave a plenary lecture where he argued that his observations over the past 7 years, in his own garden in the UK, had corrected the shortcomings of Kettlewell’s classic experiments. Bottom line: peppered moths truly are “the proof of Darwinian evolution.” Really. You can read his talk for yourself, here (click on the first link, “Stop Press,” for the pdf). Majerus is unlikely to persuade skeptical evolutionary biologists that the peppered moth story, even when told with Kettlewell’s shortcomings corrected, is a good model for evolutionary theory generally. Read More ›

Another surprise for Darwinists has been found in the genome of the lowly, primitive sea anemone.

In an article published in Science and summarized here
we discover that:

The newly decoded DNA of a few-centimeter-tall sea anemone looks surprisingly similar to our own, a team led by Nicholas Putnam and Daniel Rokhsar from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, reports on page 86. This implies that even very ancient genomes were quite complex and contained most of the genes necessary to build today’s most sophisticated multicellular creatures.

The work is truly stunning for its deep evolutionary implications,” says Billie Swalla, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ill say it is. Just how the heck is the Darwinian paradigm going to explain this? Advanced genetic programs installed before there was any chance of natural selection acting on them. Yikes! Another finding in the real world not predicted by, or even possible within, the Darwiniam paradigm. Another surprise for Darwinists.
Sooner or later they’ve GOT to start questioning underlying assumptions. (Naive, ain’t I?)

One of the big surprises of the anemone genome, says Swalla, is the discovery of blocks of DNA that have the same complement of genes as in the human genome. Individual genes may have swapped places, but often they have remained linked together despite hundreds of millions of years of evolution along separate paths, Putnam, Rokhsar, and their colleagues report.

To repeat the obvious question, where the heck did these codes come from?
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I just heard from a contact who knows his way around that studio who saw my recent post about the anonymous warning that Darwinists might sue the makers of the Ben Stein Expelled film. The film does not flatter them, and perhaps they’d want to at least stop it from opening on Darwin’s birthday next February. Said studio rat writes, Read More ›

Canadian science fiction writer Rob Sawyer, author of The Calculating God, which explores the idea of intelligent design, has won China’s top science fiction prize. CHENGDU, CHINA, 26 AUGUST 2007: Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, today won China’s top science-fiction award, the Galaxy Award, in the category “Most Popular Foreign Author of the Year.” The award, voted on by Chinese readers, was presented at the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the largest science-fiction conference ever held in China. (The last international SF&F conference in China was held ten years ago, in 1997.) Chinese translations of Sawyer’s novels are published by Science Fiction World, headquartered in Chengdu, and his short stories have appeared in SCIENCE FICTION WORLD Read More ›

A few days ago Sal posted the following quote from Darwin: From Letter 3154 — Darwin, C. R. to Herschel, J. F. W., 23 May [1861] One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed As Jack Krebs pointed out (and Sal freely admited, which was why he posted under “humor”), this was a quote mine, and Saint Charles went on to distance himself from this view.   Nevertheless, as Darwin’s son Francis made clear in his book, Darwin was haunted by thoughts of design to the end of his life.  In a July 3, 1881 letter to W. Grahm Darwin wrote:  “Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far Read More ›

Yesterday a friend and I rode our bikes up to the top of Vail Pass, and when we got back down we stopped in Breckenridge for lunch.  After lunch we decided to walk around Breckenridge for a while, and we soon found ourselves in a wonderful little art gallery on Main Street.  One large bronze in particular caught my attention.  It was a comic piece of a bear standing beside a tree looking at a squirrel on a branch even with the bear’s face.  The squirrel was holding out an acorn as if he were offering it to the bear in exchange for not eating him.   I loved it.  As I looked at the piece the word “whimsy” came to mind.  I inquired about the price and Read More ›

That’s the warning I received from an anonymous “wellwisher” (?) here at the Post-Darwinist: I do hopw that the makers of “Expelled” are aware of the lawsuits launched against the makers of “What the Bleep…”, given that they obtained their interviews with several biologists unders false pretenses. I asked a contact at the studio, and he tapped back, No worries. Reality is, in the U.S. you can sue a baloney sandwich if you want. Well, I guess that Bleeps all. Note: An incident similar to this one may be what the anonymous correspondent has in mind. Also Here’s my review of What the Bleep …? I hadn’t realized that famous former atheist Antony Flew was one of the people saying Read More ›

I can only speak for myself, and not the rest of those at UD, but in my opinion, voting against any mandate to teach ID or creation science in the public schools is the right thing to do. As much as I advocate that ID is correct, it is not the time to teach it in the public schools. Creationist Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas School board, agrees.

McLeroy’s position is to be applauded by everyone. He might be the one guy that Darwinists, Creationists, and ID proponents will support with respect to not mandating ID or creation science in the public school.
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Reading reviews of a book one wrote is one of the best ways to study popular cultural assumptions about who you are and what you are trying to say:

From the Booklist review

Neuroscientist Beauregard is no flighty New-Ager or Creationist but, he says, one of a minority of neuroscientists who don’t adhere to strictly materialist interpretation of the human mind. … That is, it is too limiting to strictly confine the origin of all human thought to material or chemical interactions. In this complex tome, he …

I am glad that the Booklist reviewer explained the key point a non-materialist neuroscientist would want to make. But for the record, Mario Beauregard – no New-Ager or Creationist – is a perennialist. And The Spiritual Brain is not a complex tome. As psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz says,

It clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader, while building on and extending work that Sharon Begley and I began in The Mind and The Brain, and work that Mario and I collaborated on in academic publications.

[other links to much Mindful Hack fun below] Read More ›

[photo of Eugenie Scott from www.ExpelledTheMovie.com serving as one of the Class Officers of The Big Science Academy. She will have a starring role in the best pro-ID movie yet.]

ID is a lineal descendent of William Paley’s Argument from Design (Paley 1803,)

Eugenie Scott
NCSE

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