Intelligent Design

The links to Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab have recently changed. To simplify linking to the lab, click on www.evolutionaryinformatics.org.

Audiophiles, go here for Jason Rennie’s excellent Darwin or Design audiobook, which you can listen to on line or buy. Rennie, of Australia’s ScPhi show has done a marvellous job of assembling a cast of dozens of key contributors to the intelligent design controversy. He offers such point men as P.Z. Myers, Sean Carroll, and Nick Matzke in one corner and Mike Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Mike Gene in the other – and tons of your other faves – including top Canadian science fiction author Rob Sawyer. (Well, if he isn’t yet one of your faves, make it so.) Sal Cordova explains what ID is here. I talk about the media and ID here, predicting the past and postdicting the Read More ›

Malcolm Chisholm tells me that he has worked the bugs out of a new game called the Richard Dawkins Mutation Challenge. I’m not much good with games, so I am hoping others will try it and tell me what they think. It is especially timely in light of this.

Behe’s Edge of Evolution: A turning point in the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy Before dealing with Edge of Evolution, which I see as a turning point in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, permit me to briefly sketch the cultural landscape in which it has just appeared: … , two factors have protected Darwin as he approaches his 200th birthday – his friends and his enemies. 2. The Edge of Evolution: What exactly does Behe say about Darwinism? In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe was concerned to show that some elegant structures in life are beyond the reach of random mutation and natural selection (= Darwinism). In The Edge of Evolution , he seeks to draw up “reasonable, general Read More ›

Recently, PZ Myers accused me of lying about the views of molecular evolutionist W. Ford Doolittle in a debate on Canadian public television. Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates: All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor. I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life, you’d find that same image. Moreover, if someone asked you to summarize the arguments for the single-Tree topology, you’d say (for instance) that multiple independent originations of the same basic biochemistry — e.g., the 64 trinucleotide genetic code — are too unlikely. Read More ›

There is a Clash of the Titans going on between world renowned evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and biochemist Michael Behe. Behe is making toast out of Coyne in the recent exchanges as documented over at Amazon. Here are 4 relevant links. Enjoy: Response to Critics: Jerry Coyne Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 1 Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 2 Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 3 PS Earlier, Bill pointed out the apparent convergence of features between Jerry Coyne and Herman Munster here. I think I have also discovered yet another convergence, one between Jerry Coyne and toast.

[slight correction and update follows]
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In Intelligent Design: Strengths, Weaknesses,
and the Differences John Morris, president of ICR, writes:

The differences between Biblical creationism and the IDM should become clear. As an unashamedly Christian/creationist organization, ICR is concerned with the reputation of our God and desires to point all men back to Him. We are not in this work merely to do good science, although this is of great importance to us. We care that students and society are brainwashed away from a relationship with their Creator/Savior. While all creationists necessarily believe in intelligent design, not all ID proponents believe in God. ID is strictly a non-Christian movement, and while ICR values and supports their work, we cannot join them.

Good grief. Is thermodynamics or statistical mechanics Biblical or non-Biblical? If these disciplines can’t be shown to be Biblical, then is Morris suggesting these ideas can’t be defended or studied or promoted by the ICR? Given that Maxwell (a creationist) and Boltzmann (a Darwinist) were pioneers in the formulation of statistical mechanics and atomic theory, I suppose by John Morris’s standards, these great theories are non-Christian theories, therefore the ICR can’t join in their promotion and study.

I suppose the ICR would have issue with James Clerk Maxwell (likely a YEC himself), whose famous equations have ushered in the modern world. His famous equations require an old universe. Thus, if the ICR had it’s way, a great scientific discovery would be rejected on account that it was “unbiblical”.
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Well everyone, actually. David Tyler discusses the recent startling admission that the claim that humans share 99% of our genes with chimpanzees has long been known to be wrong: For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. “Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.” However, this “given” is about to be discarded. Apparently, it is now OK to openly acknowledge that those who are involved in this research have never been comfortable that the 1% Read More ›

Bill Dembski scooped me on the latest idiocy of Darwinism’s idiot child, evolutionary psychology:

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman’s breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

and on Fred Reed’s hilarious take on it. Reed, of course, knocks the stuffings out of the pillow. Responding to “Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not”, he notes,

I think of those millions of pitiful Chinese women, sobbing quietly in corners, “Oh, how can I let him know I’m interested when I have these horrible dark eyes? Maybe I can write him a letter….”

One thinks also of the advice Naomi gives Ruth in the Book of Ruth. I doubt Boaz knew what colour Ruth’s eyes were. It’s not clear how he could.

Still, we need to put a pin on the map for this latest outburst of evo psycho … Read More ›

I blogged once before about one of my favorite ID essayists, Roddy Bullock of idnetohio, who frequently posts at ARN.

Here is another essay that I found most insightful. Roddy is a clear thinker and a superb writer.

Let’s be honest: One of the main reasons that passions tend to run high in the ID versus Darwinism/materialism debate is that the implications are profound concerning ultimate issues and questions, especially, Is there any ultimate plan, design, meaning, or purpose in the universe and, most importantly, our lives?

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There couldn’t be a better example of the warfare between religion and science than anesthesia in childbirth. Religious folk, we are told, opposed anesthesia in childbirth because women should suffer, right? Indeed, the claim that religious folk opposed such anesthesia has become a minor but regular component of the folklore of materialism. Medical historian A. D. Farr actually went to the trouble of methodically searching the literature from Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, where modern anesthesia during childbirth was first introduced there. He found that religious opposition to the introduction of childbirth anesthesia was a figment of later propaganda. How did the idea get started, despite a lack of evidence? Well, now, that’s a story …. Read the rest Read More ›

Thumbster PvM has posted a response to a statement Robert Crowther made the other day at ID the future regarding the “Who designed the designer?” criticism espoused by ID critics.
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This of course comes as no surprise for those of us who hold that evolution was front-loaded (anatomical complexity in later animals was present but not expressed in the ancestral animals) by an intelligent designer. Nothing in macro-evolution makes sense except in the light of front loading! Excerpts with my emphasis: Surprises in sea anemone genome By Melissa Lee Phillips, The Scientist, 5/7/07 The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved. It’s surprising to find such a Read More ›

I just wanted to bring this article in Science to the attention of this blog. The results are very intriguing–“these gene “inventions” along the lineage leading to animals were likely already well integrated with preexisting eukaryotic genes in the eumetazoan progenitor.” It seems that the very primitive looking sea anenome is a very sophisticated animal. [As an aside, though Darwinists will be quick to deny this—it’s very easy to deny anything (in fact, I deny that I’m writing this right now!)—this is completely contrary to what Charles Darwin himself expected; viz., that such complex regulatory functions developed in so short a period of time. Since it is soft-bodied, it doesn’t fossilze that well; but there is a well-preserved fossil in Read More ›