Intelligent Design

Here’s a piece about ID in the UK that came out a few days ago. Note especially the comments after the article. The Ego and the ID Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 30/01/2007 Why I hate this intelligent design story. It’s simply IDiotic, writes Richard Fortey Scientists have found themselves trapped into appearing to be unreasonable in their pursuit of rationality. A snare has been cleverly set by the proponents of Intelligent Design in their quest to prove that Charles Darwin got it wrong. The vast majority of scientists feel nothing but distress that the teaching of Intelligent Design has been promoted in a number of our schools, particularly the faith schools apparently beloved by Tony Blair. Fundamentalists of both Islamic Read More ›

The blurb for a book review from Physics Web, copied in the Weekend Edition of Arts and Letters Daily (February 3-4, 2007 ) reads, “String theory and intelligent design belong in the same category as speculative and unproveable. They cannot be falsified.” One would think, at first, that this was just another yawner denouncing ID. The sort of thing that trips unbidden to the lips of any third rate lecturer who has never considered the possibility that the grade school tales he was told about the  the Viceroy butterflies proving Darwinism by mimicking the Monarchs might not actually be true. About the falsifiability of intelligent design: A specific hypothesis must be proposed for falsification. I remember replying, more or less as follows, a while Read More ›

In case anyone was wondering, the international patent application for DCA as a cancer cure is available for anyone to read. DCA is an inexpensive, uncontrolled chemical hailed as a potential cure for cancer that anyone can buy. This is not an endorsement or encouragement for anyone to self-medicate. It is intended solely to get the attention of established clinicians with experience in orphan drug testing.

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I recently posted on Irreducible Complexity in Mathematics, Physics and Biology. That thread generated interest in a well-written article by ID proponents in Italy. The article touches on the work of Turing, Chaitin, von Neumann and relates it to ID-sympathetic literature by Dembski, Behe, Voie, Trevors and Abel. The article was so well written and informative, that I felt it deserved its own thread. Our readers can learn much about ID through this article!

Mathematics and the origin-of-life problem

Here are some excerpts:

The works of Gödel, Turing, Chaitin and Von Neumann even from different points of view, show basic limits of the reasoning power. Someone said that these results got the fall of the platonistic conceptions about mathematics. This conclusion is fully wrong. The truth is exactly the inverse of that. Plato never said the total truth could be derived from few axioms. Instead what was fallen on 1931 is the positivistic utopia that reason may get more from less! In nuce reason cannot get Infinity from finite. In short that is the moral we can learn from the theorems about information irreducibility. These are particular cases only of a more general ascertainment: total truth cannot be axiomatizable. We cannot close the Unlimited into a limited system. The Total Possibility, i.e. the Infinite, is not reducible to a system. In all fields one can find the effects of this universal truth. Gödel found them in metamathematics, Turing found them in informatics, Chaitin found them in AIT. In the following we will show as also the fundamental problem of biology – the origin of life – is unsolvable without an intelligent source indeed due to the same reasons.
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The sharp spike in hits and files (green and dark blue) are mostly due to the new layout. The key statistic is daily average number of visits. Total visits are shown in yellow but that varies by number of days in the month so the daily average is the better metric. The daily average number of visits was 5828 for January 2007 compared to the previous record of 5311 for December 2006 representing a gain of 10% month over month. For those who haven’t been following UD very long the decline between August and October was was the result of being delisted from Google in the middle of September.

… what about Dolly the sheep? New vaccines? The chess computer? New antibiotics? Alternative energy sources? Yes, all these discoveries are exciting, but, as Horgan notes, they depend on existing science. They do not forge new frontiers in our understanding of our world. Science journalist John Horgan created a minor stir a decade ago with his book, The End of Science, arguing that the major science discoveries are all behind us. Now that was hardly a popular thesis. The rest of my column on John Horgan and the “End of Science” is here.

There is a new paper on Irreducible Complexity by renowned mathematician Gregory Chaitin: The Halting Probability Omega: Irreducible Complexity in Pure Mathematics Milan Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 75, 2007.

Ω is an extreme case of total lawlessness; in effect, it shows that God plays dice in pure mathematics.

On the surface Chaitin’s notion of Irreducible Complexity (IC) in math may seem totally irrelevant to Irreducible Complexity (IC) in ID literature. But let me argue that notion of IC in math relates to IC in physics which may point to some IC in biology…

First, of consider this article archived at Access Research Network (ARN) by George Johnson in the NY Times on IC in physics:

Challenging Particle Physics as Path to Truth

Many complex systems — the very ones the solid-staters study — appear to be irreducible.

The concept of “irreducible complexity” has been used by Alan Turing, Michael Behe, and perhaps now by physicists. Behe’s sense of irreducible is not too far from the sense of irreducible in the context of this physics. If biological systems take advantage of irreducible phenomena in physics (for example, what if we discover the brain uses irreducible physical phenomena ) we will have a strong proof by contradiction that there are no Darwinian pathways for biolgoical systems to incorporate that phenomena.

The possibility of IC in physics may be tied to IC in math and this may have relevance to IC in biology.
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Click here first, then click on the javascript link: Click here to view your video, “‘Blasphemy Challenge’” Check it out. Gil

In 1981 Dennett and Hofstadter edited a compilation of essays entitled The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul . The book is a compilation of essays by Dawkins, Morowitz, Searle, Alan Turing, and several other big names on the nature of mind and intelligence. Since ID implies a mind of some sort, it is appropriate to ponder what a mind really is, and this is a surprisingly good book on the topic.

Dennett’s co-author, Hofstadter, makes an interesting remark about the ultimate mind:

one way to think of the universal wave function [of quantum physics] is as the mind– or brain, if you prefer–of the great novelist in the sky, God.

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I just pulled out my 1972 edition of Jacques Monod’s “classic” work, Chance and Necessity, subtitled A Philosophy for a Universe without Causality. From the back cover: The outstanding French biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize, here explains to the layman his revolutionary approach to genetics and its far-reaching ethical and philosophical implications. For some time now, the unpleasant idea has been dawning on mankind that it may owe its existence to nothing but a roll of some cosmological set of dice. But until recently hard proof has been missing and the larger philosophical implications have remained obscure. What Jacques Monod is here to say in his difficult but important book is that the proof is now available and the Read More ›

The ‘POINT OF VIEW’ article on p. B20 of the 19Jan07 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is entitled, “Why Can’t We Discuss Intelligent Design?” The author is J. Scott Turner, Associate Professor of Biology at SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The by-line states, “His latest book, The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges From Life Itself, was published by Harvard University Press this month.” (Go here for the Amazon.com listing.) Turner’s thesis is that academics should stop trying to silence those who broach the subject of intelligent design, but rather be willing to discuss what Turner feels is “a wrongheaded idea.” His reasoning is straightforward: calling intelligent design “the latest eruption of a longstanding strain of anti-Darwinist Read More ›

On another forum I wrote:

It seems to me that the arts, and music in particular, present a real problem for Darwinism. How would such an ability come about in a step-by-tiny-step fashion and what would be the survival value of the transitional intermediates, or even the end product? (Never mind what mutations would be required to rewire the central nervous system for musical ability, and the probability of those mutations occurring.) Of course, for Darwinists, Darwinism must explain everything, so they will invent stories about how ancient jungle drummers got the girls, just like rock stars get the groupies. But everyone enjoys music with absolutely no evidence that it offers any survival or reproductive advantage. It just seems to be programmed into us at a very fundamental level.

It turns out that my comment about jungle drums and rock stars was prophetic.

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Just recently, I had occasion to write to a Christian university student who is sympathetic to the idea that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design, but afraid to defend that view for fear of ruining his academic career. So he wants to do Christian evangelism instead, on the theory that evangelism will help in the long run. Read More ›

The big publishers of scientific journals are, not surprisingly, concerned about how open access to information on the internet is cutting into their profits. Apparently they are now hiring PR people to try to keep their market share, and the PR people are counseling that the very concept of open access needs to be undermined. With regard to our issues, who do you think stands to benefit more from such an anti-open-access campaign, the Darwinists whose propaganda engines are entrenched in the big publishing houses, or the ID proponents who are systematically excluded? Here is an indicator of where things appear to be going (I would like to see some independent confirmation): … [A] strategy for the publishers provides some Read More ›

Irreducible Complicity: Disappointing Darwin by Roddy Bullock

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches outer space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A scientist.

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches inner space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A religious nut.

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