Intelligent Design

Evolution Pundit Glenn Davidson’s Website

Rubbish like this should steel us to work doubly hard to put these people out of business.

Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism & Intelligent Design
Cambridge House Press, Inc. (release date 02.28.07)
By Barrett Brown, Jon P. Alston

Book Description

What is creationism? Is it science, theology, both, neither? Who’s behind it? What does it mean for Western Civilization? And why should you give a damn in the first place? National Lampoon veteran Barrett Brown and Professor of Sociology Jon P. Alston, Ph.D, answer these questions — and perhaps one or two others — in a superbly unorthodox, serenely offensive and splendidly hilarious look at the forces behind the most talked-about pseudo-theory in modern history.

In Flock of Dodos, the reader will discover ominous parallels between Billy Joel’s greaser anthem Uptown Girl and chief intelligent design proponent William Dembski, the wholly non-Christian origins of the United States, the goofy history of the creation science movement, secrets of a happy marriage to anti-feminist icon Phylis Schafly,stunning evidence that William Jennings Bryan might not have been all that bright, the the three interesting things that occurred in 2004, and the true nature of the millennia-old Conspiracy of Nonsense that threatens the very fiber of Western Civilization. Read More ›

Do you believe in ‘individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace’? These are some of the CATO Institute’s principles, and if you agree, then you may well agree with Andrew J. Coulson’s latest pronouncement regarding mandated school policies, not the least of which is prohibiting the mere mention of alternate scientific theories of origins, and not allowing the theory of Darwinian evolution to be questioned in the least.

CATO is a libertarian think tank that promotes individual freedoms, and favors limited government. At least to the degree that federal judges have been allowed to dictate curriculum, I agree with his critique. In a philosophical policy statement, CATO cites the Tenth Amendment, which says that the ‘people’ (or individual states) have that authority, and not the government. Coupled with a proper interpretation of the First Amendment, there just may be a basis for a legal challenge (Dover, et al) Read More ›

Some of the claims by ID proponents have not been adequately explored because of the cost issues involved in doing large-scale whole-genome sequencing of numerous individuals. Not even Warren Buffet has the trillions of dollars needed to accomplish such a massive amount of gene sequencing. At least not today, but maybe in the future!

The human genome project took 3 billion dollars and 13 years to complete. By comparison, Solexa might be able to do a comparable job for a few thousand dollars per person (ideally even less) and in a much shorter time frame. (See the UD sidebar on Solexa Genomics.) Solexa might be viewed as an unwitting research partner of the ID movement.
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Biology’s next revolution
by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese
Nature 445, 369 (25 January 2007)

For those without access to Nature click here for a copy of the article. This link added on 5/11/2007.

The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself.

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On a listserve which shall remain nameless a botanist yesterday was casting about for a good representative of a colonial protozoan. Having read up on the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum (common name “social amoeba”) a couple years ago and blogging on it then I immediately suggested it and described why it is a model for protozoan to metazoan evolution and also described its interesting display of altruism:

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An article in the February 2007 Scientific American titled Molecular Lego talks about bis-amino acids and bis-peptides. These are synthetic amino acids and peptide chains formed from them.
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The 1/29/07 issue of Time Magazine is captioned “Mind & Body Special Issue”, and starts out with a discussion of the brain’s geography, an endeavor well studied and categorized by now, but which is far overshadowed by the mystery of ‘consciousness’, often tagged as the ‘ghost within the neural machine’. Steven Pinker writes the centerpiece article, “The mystery of consciousness”, and indeed, consciousness is the centerpiece of the mystery regarding life itself.

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What are the speed limits of naturalistic evolution? We know from experience it takes time to evolve a species. Would naturalistic evolution be fast enough in geological time to turn a cow into a whale, an ape-like creature into a human? What are the speed limits of evolution?
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In the Haldane thread, DaveScot responded to a comment I made with this: On Haldane’s Dilemma, I’ve determined the evolutionist argument goes like this: Orthodox evolution theory is a fact, not a theory. Therefore Haldane’s Dilemma must be wrong. I propose a corollary to DaveScot’s proposition: Orthodox evolution theory is a fact, not a theory. Therefore the fossil record, common sense, and simple statistical reasoning must be wrong. Common sense and a little elementary arithmetic suggest that: 1) given a few million years (the proposed timeframe for the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection to evolve humans from a primitive ape-like ancestor); 2) a generous assumption about generation time (let’s say, 10 years); and 3) a generous assumption about Read More ›

Intelligent design to feature in school RE lessons

Alexandra Smith
Tuesday January 23, 2007
EducationGuardian.co.uk

Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.

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Wikipedia suppresses Haldane’s Dilemma by Walter J. Remine The key figure — a limit of 1,667 beneficial mutations to explain human evolution — was brushed aside (by falsely blaming it on creationists, instead of acknowledging that it arises solely from evolutionary theory, evolutionary genetics, and J.B.S. Haldane). This key figure was repeatedly expunged from the article, leaving readers with no idea about the severity of Haldane’s Dilemma. Evolutionists suppressed this key figure. They also suppressed their history — the fact that they never revealed any such figure to the general public. Much more at the link. Without looking I bet I can guess the names of the wiki-editor POV warriors who won’t allow balance in the article. See here. Update: Read More ›

My grandfather hunted arrowheads, and he found them, hundreds of them.  I was awed by his collection, and one of my most prized possessions is a frame containing 48 of his best specimens that I inherited from him.  Nearly two decades after his death that frame is still hanging on the wall in the room where I am typing this post. Sometimes when I was a kid I went arrowhead hunting with him, but I was not much good at it.  Many times I brought a promising specimen to papa for inspection, only to have him cast it aside and say, “Just a rock boy; shah, shah, shah.”  To this day I don’t know exactly what “shah” means, but from Read More ›

The theme of silent mutations that are not so silent has been addressed here at UD before (e.g., go here). Here’s a piece that elaborates on the significance of this recent finding:

Silent No Longer: Researchers unearth another stratum of meaning in the genetic code
By Ivan Amato

The more scientists study the genetic code, the more it reads like poetry. In a poem, every word, every line break, even every syllable can carry more than a literal meaning. So too can the molecular letters, syllables, and words of the genetic code carry more biologically relevant meanings than they appear to at first.

Now, a cadre of researchers is discovering intriguing depths of meaning in “synonyms” in the genetic code—very short wordlike sequences, or codons, that translate into exactly the same amino acids during the construction of a protein. Scientists are finding that synonymous codons influence the temporal pattern by which a messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule bearing genetic specifications from a cell’s nucleus is translated by machinelike ribosomes into protein molecules. Read More ›

In another forum, Denyse wrote: Bear with a simple lay hack here a moment: Why must we know a designer’s intentions in order to detect design? If the fire marshall’s office suspects arson, do the investigators worry much about WHY? Surely they investigate, confirm their finding, and turn the information over to other authorities and interested parties, without having the least idea why someone torched the joint. ALL they need to be sure of is that the joint did not torch itself, via natural causes. The observation Denyse makes is so obvious that one would need a Ph.D. in obfuscation not to see it. Common sense is not so common, at least among those with a foundational commitment to materialism.