Intelligent Design

“Our goal is to mutate the world!” says Sloke Dunkin at Finch Foods. More…

Let me encourage readers of this blog to subscribe to SALVO, a countercultural magazine whose new website is now up and running: www.salvomag.com. SALVO is pro-ID and planning a special issue on the topic. I’m on their editorial board. The magazine effectively pushes the envelope on parody, which has become difficult in a culture that too often is a parody of itself. Here’s an example from their website:

The Blackburn fossil (left) and computer generated likeness (right) using Darwin Face software. Fossil found in Blackburn, WV by Dr. Zbyszek Wrozinkowski. MORE…

In my previous post, I cited a Miami Herald article that refers to “The National Center for Science Education, a pro-science watchdog group.” For the real pro-science watchdog group, check out the following links: www.pro-science.com www.pro-science.org www.pro-science.net That’s right. I own those domain names and they all refer back here. Let me encourage all contributors to this blog to use these domain names in referring to UD when they email Darwinists.

Check out the following story about Florida’s #2 education person who may lose out on the #1 spot because she has been tarred with ID (go here for the Miami Herald story). Apparently Wesley Elsberry, who has now moved on from the NCSE, is stirring the pot: . . . Until recently, the scientist in the picture, Wesley Elsberry, worked for the National Center for Science Education, a pro-science watchdog group. Now a visiting researcher at Michigan State University, he says the statement in question might be more controversial for Yecke than her other statements because it ”would tie her directly to advocacy of intelligent design.” But in his view, Yecke’s other words and actions already made her an advocate. Read More ›

Ruthie Blum interviewed George Gilder in the Jerusalem Post late last month. Here’s a sample from the interview: RB: How do you explain how this “incredibly improbable world could exist”? GG: Creation. I see creation in economics; I see creation in computer science. You can know everything there is to know about the physics and chemistry of a microchip, without having the slightest inkling of what function it’s performing, let alone what content it is processing. The same goes for network theory. You can know every electron or atom across a fiber-optic network, without having any idea of what contents are being transmitted. In network theory, you have seven layers of abstraction. Those same seven layers also apply, in slightly Read More ›

When you really analyze them, most of the strongest arguments against ID as an explanation for the development of life are of the form: “this just doesn’t look like the way God would have created things.” Perhaps not, but we are finding more and more that it does look very much like the way “we” design things. As far back as 1985, in my first book about PDE2D here and more recently in a Mathematical Intelligencer article here , I pointed out that life developed much the way software “develops”: minor improvements are made in small increments, but major improvements always involve one or more large irreducibly complex steps, and appear suddenly (in the fossil record, or in software releases). Read More ›

As you link to read the following by Barbara Forrest, ask yourself if ID proponents are really that big a threat to the body politic and if in fact it isn’t the dogmatic materialists, such as Barbara, who pose the bigger threat to our democratic institutions. Also ask yourself who is drawing on public funds to promote his/her point of view (hint: the notorious “Wedge Strategy” is not tax-supported). www.centerforinquiry.net…Forrest_Paper.pdf

Check out Salvo, a lively Christian popular science and culture magazine that deserves a zillion more subscribers and will reward you handsomely for your support.

Go here for a free excerpt from my book By Design or by Chance?, for example.

Hard pill as it is for me to swallow, the other columnists are all probably better than me, so be sure to just get lost in the site.  Sassy, yes. Crude, no.

And remember to feed the kitty.

You can read
The Privileged Planet
An excerpt from Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards’ groundbreaking book on the ways in which our place in the cosmos is designed for discovery
by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards
Science and the Church
What it means to question Darwinism
by Herbert London

Read More ›

Here’s how MIT describes its department of biological engineering. Does the research here fall more readily under ID or Darwinism? Biological Engineering [BE] was founded in 1998 as a new MIT departmental academic unit, with the mission of defining and establishing a new discipline fusing molecular life sciences with engineering. The goal of our biological engineering discipline, Course 20, is to advance fundamental understanding of how biological systems operate and to develop effective biology-based technologies for applications across a wide spectrum of societal needs including breakthroughs in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, in design of novel materials, devices, and processes, and in enhancing environmental health. The innovative educational programs created by BE reflect this emphasis on integrating molecular and Read More ›

Behe’s Amazon blog was noted in comments at UD, but it deserves top billing: go here. Refer to it as the negative reviews of The Edge of Evolution keep coming out from the Darwinian materialists.

Dawkins displays his formidable command of the English language in Inferior Design, a review of Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution. Of all the anti-Behe reviews I’ve read, this was the most convincing, at least on rhetorical grounds, but certainly not on evidential nor scientific grounds.

Dawkins is a master of rhetoric. Only he could take a clear example of intelligently designed evolution (dog breeding) and offer it as a convincing “proof” of Darwinian evolution. He writes:

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The Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC) is proud to present the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award, presented annually to a deserving college graduate for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design. The recipient of the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award will remain anonymous for the protection of the recipient. The many students, professors, and scientists who have been denied degrees or tenure, and removed from positions and jobs for no other reason than acceptance of—or even sympathy to—intelligent design theory is very telling of the importance of keeping these bright young minds out of the crosshairs of those opposed to open-minded investigation and critical thought. The recipient of this year’s award is a graduate earning degrees in chemistry and Read More ›

Gather ’round the fire, children, and I’ll tell you the whole sad story. Once upon a time, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson published a paper — that became a widely-cited classic — about the genetic similarity of chimps and humans. “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science 188 (1975):107-116 was, alas, cited far more for proving the genetic near-identity of chimps and humans than for its much more interesting, deeper and more disturbing message: no one really understands how macroevolution occurs. In brief: King and Wilson compared the chimp vs. human amino acid sequences of several proteins (such as cytochrome c, hemoglobin, and myoglobin), and found the sequences either identical, or very nearly so. Their conclusion? Read More ›

Richard Dawkins you know, but John Lennox, his Oxford colleague in mathematics and the philosophy of science, may require a brief introduction. Professor Lennox is the author of the forthcoming book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? and has lectured around the world on mathematics, science, and theology. I first met John in Southern California 11 years ago, have spent time with him in Istanbul and Hungary, and regard him as one of the wisest scholars I know. The Alys Stephens Center at the University of Alabama (Birmingham) will be the site of the October 3, 2007, debate between Dawkins and Lennox. This promises to be a newsworthy, well-attended event.