Intelligent Design

Over the past few months,  The Post-Darwinist has been host to quite the little controversy over whether Hitler was a social Darwinist or a creationist. If you want to pursue that in detail, try

“Does Darwinism devalue human life?” (July 2, 2006)

What did Hitler believe abut evolution? (September 2006)

“Hitler as a Darwinist: Prof accused of academic dishonesty” (September 15, 2006)

Recent posts (October 9, 2006) (Scroll down to Coral Ridge for the Anti-Defamation League flap.)

Now, I was brought up to believe that Hitler was one sick puppy. Indeed, I have Jewish friends who will not use his name, calling him only “that man.” So I don’t know how much it matters in principle what he thought about origins. But having listened to both sides, I think that he was, for all practical purposes, a social Darwinist who doubted the creative power of natural selection alone.

Anyway, Professor Richard Weikart , an expert on Nazi ideology, has often been the target of Darwinists who need to believe that Hitler was exclusively a creationist, which Weikart can hardly confirm for them. Prof. Weikart writes me to say: Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran demanded pro-ID and pro-Creation students at universities be flunked. See Larry Moran — Will the real idiot please stand up?

Would Moran destroy the careers of aspiring scientists who make positive contributions to society — all this in the name of Moran’s dogmatism? It turns out one of the PhD alumni in biology from Moran’s school (University of Toronto), a respected scientist and pro-ID creationist recently had his letter published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. This is news in itself that creationists and ID proponents are getting airtime now in scientific journals:
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You wrote: “‘flunk all the IDiots and make room for smart students’ … is clear-cut viewpoint discrimination.” It’s more than that. The Darwinists know as well as anyone else how little good evidence exists for their current position* – which is much more far-reaching than Darwin’s original position, as their current position posits that the mind, the will, the cosmos, origin of life, you name it, is supposedly governed by Darwinian mechanisms. They are way overstretched, and my gut tells me that they do not expect to be rescued any time soon. How to make students swallow it all without protest? The simplest and surest way is to get rid of those who are not going to swallow it. It Read More ›

Richard T. Hughes (whose accomplishments other than being an ATBC poster child remain unknown) writes on religiosity and intelligence in response to Dembski:

Already been done, Bill:

http://www.answers.com/topic/religiosity-and-intelligence

http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm

Numerous studies and meta-studies show that theistic belief is negatively correlated with IQ. I am fascinated by the causation aspect. Thick because they’re fundies? Fundies ’cause they’re thick. Shallow end of the gene pool? Does anyone have a hypothesis?

Hey Dick (I trust you don’t mind if I call you that as long as I capitalize it), did you know that shoe size correlates with level of education? The larger your shoe size the more education you’ve likely had. Is that because big feet cause big brains? Or because big brains cause big feet? Duh.

Anyhow, the primary point I wanted to make wasn’t that mixing idiots and loose correlations result in loose idiotic conclusions. That was a tertiary point. Read More ›

Larry Moran has been getting some play on this blog, so I’ll throw in my two cents. I met Larry in 2002, when he attended a lecture I gave at U of Toronto and confidently explained to me and the audience how indirect Darwinian pathways explain the evolution of the flagellum from the type three secretory system. To this day it amazes me that people find so bogus an argument a slam dunk for evolutionary theory. Try explaining to an engineer that the origin of the laptop computer is the product of trial and error tinkering from a cathode ray tube. If anything, this analogy fails to capture the full measure of self-delusion that evolutionary theory has become. Below is Read More ›

University of Toronto-based Larry Moran, of textbook fame, has just informed the Post-Darwinist of that very entertaining proposal.

Scroll down to “Darwin vs. Design”: http://www.premier.org.uk/engine.cfm?i=749&bhcp=1.

Want to hobnob with Lee Strobel, Craig Hazen, Jay Richards, JP Moreland, John Bloom, William Lane Craig, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer and Michael Behe on December 7? There is no charge and attendees will be offered a free copy of the new Illustra Media DVD, The Case For A Creator. Contact: 1-888-332-4652 http://www.biola.edu/academics/scs/apologetics/events.cfm#formation I’ll be there.

Here’s an article just in from PhysOrg.com. What Professor Shepherd proposes should prove to be very enlightening. He used his algorithm on the book, Emma, by Jane Austen, and was able to break up 80% of the text–minus punctuation marks and inputted just as a string of letters–into words and sentences without any knowledge of grammar. Just think of what analogies can be drawn if they end up breaking up 80% of DNA into grammatical wholes! Here’s a quote: Professor Shepherd originally tested his computer programme on the entire text of Emma by Jane Austen after removing all the spaces and punctuation, leaving just a long impenetrable line of letters. Despite having no knowledge of the English vocabulary or syntax, Read More ›

I posted earlier the fact that 40% of freshman in UCSD’s sixth college reject Darwinism, and that this so alarmed administrators, drastic steps were taken to indoctrinate more students. UCSD is also the school where IDEA was born, and apparently wherever there are hotspots of interest in the topic of ID, money will be invested by some universities to try to extinguish it. See this post by Casey Luskin at evolutionnews.org, University of California, San Diego Forces All Freshmen To Attend Anti-ID Lecture.
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I work for an aerospace R&D company. One of our projects was functioning as a subcontractor for the recent Stardust mission. You can read about it here: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html As a result of the data collected from the Stardust mission, previous assumptions about the formation of the solar system are being overturned. Today, the Stardust program manager copied all the Stardust research contributors with a congratulatory note that included the following comment: A week and a half ago the science team met — 120 of the more than 200 scientists around the world working on the particles brought back, and they are already rewriting the texts on how the solar system formed, with the discovery of refractory minerals that require very Read More ›

Here is a piece I just put up elsewhere, in five parts, on peer review. Introduction Part One: If peer review always worked before, why doesn’t it work now? Part Two: How bad can it get? Pretty bad. Part Three: How the system is slowly becoming more open and dynamic, whether anyone wants it to or not Part Four:How will we know if a more open system works better?

Another pro-ID book rolled out: Tom Woodward’s Darwin Strikes Back with foreword by William Dembski. And don’t forget, Illustra Media debuts its DvD, Case for a Creator this Friday, November 17, 2006.

In information science, it is empirically and theoretically shown that noise destroys specified complexity, but cannot create it. Natural selection acting on noise cannot create specified complexity. Thus, information science refutes Darwinian evolution. The following is a great article that illustrates the insufficiency of natural selection to create design.

Key to zebrafish heart regeneration uncovered

“Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while even fairly closely related species do not,” Poss added. “This leads us to believe that during the course of evolution, regeneration is something that has been lost by some species, rather than an ability that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a way to ‘turn on’ this regenerative ability.”

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Discovery Institute notes the following from Douglas Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism… This is especially interesting in view of Read More ›