This has absolutely nothing to do with intelligent design, but I just had to share it. It’s the final 45.6 seconds of Saturday’s NCAA D-II men’s basketball national championship game between The Bulldogs of Barton College and the Warriors of Winona State University. Bear in mind as you watch this that Winona State is on a D-II record 57 game winning streak. I love March!!!
A recent disagreement about the critical importance of gut flora to animal health led me to look for research into germ-free animals. GF animals have been available for research for about 50 years and initially they lived very short lives. The decrease in longevity was eventually traced to lack of critical enzymes in their diet. In order to remain GF their food was sterilized at high temperatures (essentially autoclaved) which caused the needed enzymes to break down. Once their dietary requirements were established an unexpected result emerged – GF animals live twice as long as controls receiving the same complete diet but not housed in sterile conditions. Germ Free Animals Germ-free animals were obtained by cesarean section and maintained in Read More ›
Two days ago I commented on a post at evolutionnews.org that seemed to catch Ken Miller red-handed in misrepresenting my work on specified complexity (go here for my post). Specifically, on a BBC program titled THE WAR ON SCIENCE, Miller is seen, right after I was shown speaking on probabilities, commenting on the use of probabilities by ID proponents to underwrite ID. Given what I’ve written on this topic and given what Miller said on the program, if he were commenting on my work, there’s no question it would be a blatant misrepresentation. Now Miller is claiming that he was not commenting on my work at all. Rather, this was all the BBC’s fault. Miller claims that through bad editing, Read More ›
Apparently, one of the Thumbsmen has claimed that Bill Dembski overstated/misstated (or whatever) Darwin’s contempt for the feckless* Irish, with their endless stream of brats (combined, of course, with his approval of the thrifty and allegedly cautiously procreative Scot).
Which is hilarious, because contempt for the Irish was part and parcel of Darwin’s Brit toffery – a social code everyone in those days understood. The Potato Famine, when so many thousands starved to death within easy reach of abundant food exported from Ireland, would be incomprehensible apart from it. Indeed, I heard its fell echoes a century later, as a child in a far distant land.
No, Dembski did not misquote Darwin. Darwin meant exactly what he said. The problem is that what Darwin meant is incompatible with the theory he is famed for advancing. Read More ›
SMU appears upset about the Darwin vs. Design conference taking place in April and reported here yesterday (go here). The article below in today’s Dallas Morning News says that the anthropology department at SMU wrote to the administration: “These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits…” Doesn’t the “M” in SMU refer to “Methodist” and aren’t Methodists believers in God? Is SMU’s anthropology department committed to hiring anti-God faculty?
SMU profs protest intelligent design conference
11:40 AM CDT on Saturday, March 24, 2007
By JEFFREY WEISS / The Dallas Morning News
jweiss@dallasnews.com
SOURCE: www.dallasnews.comProfessors opposed to the Bush library aren’t the only angry faculty members at Southern Methodist University this week.
Science professors upset about a presentation on “Intelligent Design” fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.
The “Darwin vs. Design†conference, co-sponsored by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society, will say that a designer with the power to shape the cosmos is the best explanation for aspects of life and the universe. The event is produced by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization that says it has scientific evidence for its claims.
The anthropology department at SMU begged to differ:
“These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits,” said the letter sent to administrators by the department. “They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask.”
Similar letters were sent by the biology and geology departments.
The university is not going to cancel the event, interim provost Tom Tunks said Friday. The official response is a statement that the event to be held in McFarlin Auditorium April 13-14 is not endorsed by the school: Read More ›
A special debate between Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, author of “Dawkins’ God” and “The Dawkins Delusion” and Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, well-known atheist and supporter of Richard Dawkins. As seen on Channel 4’s “The trouble with atheism”. This event was organised jointly by The University of Edinburgh Philosophy Society and The Christian Union. It was held in George Square Lecture Theatre which seats 500, however was overwhelmed by the number of people wanting to attend, over 300 people had to be turned away. The audio echos a little at first, but improves. These two start out with cordial presentations, but it heats up about mid way through. Some humor comes into Read More ›
A bunch of people are mad at me for my “wasted life” comment, and I confess to an injudicious choice of words. Of course I don’t believe that Ken Miller’s, or anyone else’s life is a total waste just because one’s professional career might be invested in something that turns out to be wrong. But I do think there is a valid point concerning one’s professional life investment and objectivity in evaluating evidence, and I think that Darwinism has caused countless people to invest their careers in a pursuit that will turn out to have been a waste of time and effort. What paleontologist would want to admit that he invested his life’s work in looking for transitional intermediates that Read More ›
In response to the upcoming Darwin vs. Design seminar at Southern Methodist University April 13th and 14th (featuring Lee Strobel, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and Jay Richards — go here), the university is set to issue the following statement in response: Under SMU’s procedures for making appropriate campus facilities available for community events, McFarlin Auditorium has been rented by the Discovery Institute April 13-14 for a program titled “Darwin vs. Design.” SMU policy requires that groups using campus facilities must have a University organization as a co-sponsor. In this case, the Christian Legal Society, a student group in SMU’s Dedman School of Law, is co-sponsoring the event. Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support Read More ›
Below is a recent post from evolutionnews.org describing Ken Miller’s criticism of my approach to detecting design as he gave it on a recent BBC program. I was interviewed for the program, but had no idea that Richard Dawkins would be narrating it or that Ken Miller would be given the final word in assessing my contribution to the ID debate (I was not given a chance to see Miller’s response prior to the program’s release, much less the opportunity to respond to it in the program). In fact, I didn’t even know what the title of the program was until I received the DVD from the BBC. Titled “The War on Science,” it was immediately clear where this was Read More ›
Over at evolutionnews.org Casey Luskin blogs about how Ken Miller, in a BBC documentary entitled A War on Science, distorts and misrepresents Bill Dembski’s methods for inferring intelligent design. Ken’s constant distortion of ID theory is very revealing. He can’t address the real arguments, evidence, or logic, so he makes stuff up. It’s like what Judge Jones said regarding irreducible complexity, that Behe ignores co-option, as though co-option is a real phenomenon and not just a made-up story that defies evidence and logic. Miller continues this silly tradition with reference to the Type 3 secretory system, as if this should end all debate about the power of Darwinian mechanisms to produce highly complex and functionally integrated biological machinery. Personally, I Read More ›
Here is neuroscientist Mario Beauregard’s article in Progress in Neuroscience, identifying areas of progress in non-materialist neuroscience. Yes, that’s right. Beauregard is doing something that is supposed to be unthinkable for a neuroscientist. He is blowing off materialism, based on evidence. The skinny: Materialist neuroscience argues that the mind does not really exist. The mind is merely the functions of the brain or a simulacrum thereof. So you do not really have a mind, let alone a soul or free will. Materialist neuroscientists have not proven this proposition; it is a logical deduction from the materialism they have already accepted. Go here, here, and here for a few examples. Non-materialist neuroscience means neuroscience that assumes that the mind really exists. Read More ›
If you’ve been part of the ID debate, none of this is news: Here is the film’s website: www.indoctrinate-u.com.
Well, Bill sure put Darwin’s big E (eugenics) out there for everyone to see , The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. … “ … and wouldn’t you know that the squalid, unaspiring Irishman has hardly sobered up from the Feast of St. Patrick, when … The thing about human eugenics is that Read More ›
Remember those disclaimers such as “this paper in no way endorses intelligent design” or “this article in no way challenges evolutionary theory” (see here for instance). Well here’s a disclaimer that appears right at the start of a forthcoming book on evolutionary computation — one that is being published through a recognized academic outlet: Disclaimer: The Editors are not endorsing evolution as a scientific fact, in that species evolve from one kind to another. The term “evolutionary†in the evolutionary computation (EC) simply means that the characteristics of an individual changes within the population of the same species, as observed in the nature. Way to go!!
My lead author on the book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, Mario Beauregard, has an article coming out in Progress in Neurobiology which describes a number of studies in non-materialist neuroscience.
(Non-materialist neuroscience = the mind exists and uses the brain but is not the same thing as the brain. Please, nobody, write to me to ask how this is relevant to ID. Use your imagination.)
Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can now show the ways in which people reorganize their brains by changing their minds. However, their ability to do this is in direct conflict with materialist theories of mind, according to which the mind either is simply the brain at work or is a side-effect of brain processes – or perhaps does not even exist. As Beauregard writes, Read More ›