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Intelligent Design

How to Become Extinct: an oldie but goodie

This new evo devo spoof site might be a good time to revisit the charming Will Cuppy (1884-1949), author of How to Become Extinct, a similar send-up of the ponderous truisms uttered on the history of life: Some fishes become extinct, but Herrings go on forever. Herrings spawn at all times and places and nothing will induce them to change their ways. They have no fish control. Herrings congregate in schools, where they learn nothing at all. They move in vast numbers in May and October. Herrings subsist upon Copepods and Copepods subsist upon Diatoms and Diatoms just float around and reproduce. Young Herrings or Sperling or Whitebait are rather cute. They have serrated abdomens. The skull of the Common Read More ›

Pseudo Scientific Dogma

The following is taken from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/  The Marxist account of history too, Popper held, is not scientific, although it differs in certain crucial respects from psychoanalysis. For Marxism, Popper believed, had been initially scientific, in that Marx had postulated a theory which was genuinely predictive. However, when these predictions were not in fact borne out, the theory was saved from falsification by the addition of ad hoc hypotheses which made it compatible with the facts. By this means, Popper asserted, a theory which was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudo-scientific dogma. These factors combined to make Popper take falsifiability as his criterion for demarcating science from non-science: if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a Read More ›

Peer Review and PT*

Stu Harris is my once long-lost first cousin. He ferreted me out after I posted some ID-apologetic comments at ARN — Gilbert Dodgen is obviously a fairly rare name. Apparently there are some nefarious Dodgen-ID-gene-memes that have been lurking in the background of our evolutionary history, waiting to rear their ugly heads, since we are both converts from a materialistic worldview. Stu offers an interesting link on the topic of peer review: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/13/soa/peerreview.htm But wait! There’s more, at no extra charge! You too can earn your degree in postmodernist thinking (PT), without having to think at all! Stu offers this indispensable tool for those aspiring to rise to the apogee of PT: Here’s an essential tool for any postmodernist writing Read More ›

Causation, Primary and Secondary: A Response to Edward Oakes

Denyse’s post below (What did Hitler believe about evolution?) quoted Edward Oakes, a writer of great erudition for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect.  Although Oakes frequently sends me scrambling for my dictionary, I look forward to reading his articles and book reviews in First Things and his posts on First Things’ blog.  Because I respect Oakes and am in general agreement with his writings and his worldview, I am puzzled and troubled by his blithe acceptance of evolution and his vehement opposition to ID. 

For those interested in my response to Fr. Oakes’ views on whether ID proponents confuse finality and design and primary and secondary causation, read on.

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The selfish gene?: Seems to have been left out of the chromosomes in the liver

Who sucker punched this guy’s selfish genes? (a 28 year old Ontario power company employee – a complete stranger – is donating part of his liver to help a toddler in Toronto who needs a transplant.) Oh, and here and here are some other everyday “genuine altruism” stories I happen to know about from Canada, one of them from the Toronto area, involving young guys, who (as a group) are supposed to be selfish, according to feminists. Toronto is not the City of Angels, by the way; readers can likely supply instances from their own communities. As philosopher David Stove would probably have said, if Dawkins was right about the “selfish gene”, these cases would be much more rare and Read More ›

Clearly it’s Time to Revisit ID’s ‘Explanatory Filter’, even if Barbara Forrest Doesn’t Think So …

Casey Luskin has posted an interesting response (part II) to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account, Here he addresses Dr. Forrest’s usage of quotations from ID proponents: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/09/response_to_barbara_forrests_k_1.html As is typical in the Evo camp, Dr. Forrest attempts to make the usual conflation of ID and religion by quoting Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Many cite Johnson as the founder of the current ID movement. Popularizer perhaps, but founder he was NOT, nor can he authoritatively be credited with setting its parameters. Luskin notes (as does Dembski in ‘Cosmic Pursuit’, 1998) that Charles Thaxton and Dean Kenyon first wrote on the subject during the ’80s. But is concept even that new? “Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that nature exhibits features which Read More ›

What did Hitler believe about evolution?: Lines from a faroff Comments box

I’m not sure how many people read the Comments to the Post-Darwinist, but some are quite interesting, so I want to draw your attention to a pair of them: In response to the post on the Coral Ridge TV special on social Darwinism, blogger Steven Carr commented that Hitler was a creationist: Hitler, of course, believed that mankind was specially created. Hitler explicity rejected Darwinism and the evolution of man. From Hitler’s Tischgespraeche for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942 ‘Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends Read More ›

Natural Selection? Or Natural Adaptation?

This isn’t a point I would push too far, but the more I read and keep up with experimental evidence, the more I question the existence of NS. In the ID camp, most would readily accept NS, which is exactly the position I took for a long time. After all, we would admit to ‘microevolution’. But there just seems to be a lot of evidence suggesting that the interplay of genetics and the environment is much more fluid and vital than previously thought.

The following experimental findings suggest to me, at least, that in the case of Drosphila obscura DNA inversions are completely non-random, and connected directly to environmental changes.

Populations of fruit flies on three separate continents have independently evolved identical gene changes within just two decades, apparently to cope with global warming.

“What we’re showing is that global warming is leaving its imprint on genes,” says Raymond Huey at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who made the discovery with colleagues. “For this to happen in such a short time-frame in so many parts of the world is rather disturbing,” he says.

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$50,000 creationist essay contest

Here is a press release from Answers in Genesis (AiG), second only to the Institute for Creation Research in influence among young earth creationists. It describes a $50,000 essay contest for a creationist paper by high-school and college students. Further down are the stated rules for the contest.

Although those rules seem to allow for a straight ID paper, in fact they do not. Liberty University, which is administering the award in the form of a scholarship, holds to a strict 6-day creation view, even requiring a semester course on creation-evolution from a young earth perspective. In consequence, the essays are expected to explicitly adopt this perspective.

For all the talk about intelligent design being “incredibly well funded,” we have nowhere near the resources of these creationist organizations. Moreover, they seem to be making sure to exclude ID’s distinctive contributions to the origins debate by requiring work that is not merely independent of the age of the earth but instead argues postively for a young earth.

This contest demonstrates that creationism and ID are charting separate paths.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, August 29, 2006
Contact: Cindy Malott, (859) 727-2222 ext. 461

$50,000 grand prize announced for “Research Paper Challenge 2007”

PETERSBURG, Kentucky. ­In a bold move sure to catch the eyes of students, Answers in Genesis today announces “Research Paper Challenge 2007.” The contest will encourage students to defend biblical authority in an unbiblical world. The grand prize is a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University, a premier Christian institution in Virginia with 10,000 students. Read More ›

A. N. Wilson skewered — it couldn’t happen to a nicer credulous moron!

A. N. Wilson, the epitomy of English snootiness, recently fell for an elaborate prank that he could have avoided if he had drawn a design inference. Note that “Eve de Harben” doesn’t exist either, and the letters in “her” name are an anagram for “Ever been had?”

Why am I being so hard on Wilson? Here’s what he wrote back in 1999 about the good people of Kansas: “Their simple, idiotic credulity as a populace would have been the envy of Lenin. That is the tragic paradox. The Land of the Free, telly and burgerfed, has become the Land of the Credulous Moron.” (go here and scroll down) What goes around comes around.

The Sunday Times August 27, 2006

Betjeman love letter is horrid hoax
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

HIS one regret, Sir John Betjeman once said, was that he had not had enough sex. So the late poet laureate’s biographer could be forgiven the thrill of discovery he felt when someone sent him a passionate love letter supposedly written by Betjeman to a mistress.

Now, however, it turns out that the poet, born 100 years ago tomorrow, never wrote the letter. Instead, AN Wilson, the biographer, admitted this weekend he had fallen victim to an elaborate hoax.

The trick was so successful that the letter has been published in Wilson’s new book Betjeman as evidence of the poet’s previously unknown “fling”.

The giveaway — and a clue that a bitter rival of Wilson’s may be behind the trick — is that the capital letters at the beginning of the sentences in the letter spell out a vivid personal insult to the biographer. Read More ›

[quote mine] if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits

….if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.

Jerry Coyne

This quote appeared in this article : Jerry Coyne Attacks Evolution-Skeptic With Namecalling in Nature by Casey Luskin. Luskin was writing in response to Jerry Coyne’s article in Nature Selling Darwin.

Coyne is also quoted as saying:

After lecturing this spring to the Alaska Bar Association on the debate over intelligent design and evolution, I was approached at the podium by a young lawyer. The tight-lipped smile, close-cropped hair and maniacal gleam in his eyes told me that he was probably a creationist out for blood. I was not wrong.

Incidentally, a creationist lawyer does not necessarily look like that. As proof of my assertion, here is a picture of a creationist lawyer and molecular biologist, Dr. Kelly Hollowell, PhD, JD:
Kelly Hollowell Read More ›

Is a materialistic approach to teaching the origin of life inherently atheistic and therefore religious?

[There’s] a new 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that approaches the issue of teaching origin-of-life theories in public schools from a new angle . . . Few are aware that the courts have ruled atheism is a religion for the purposes of the First Amendment in 2005 and thought about its implications on the teaching of origin-of-life theories in public schools. In brief, evolution becomes both a religious and scientifc theory (using the court’s definition of scientific theory), and abiogenesis becomes purely a religious theory. That being the case, these atheist origin-of-life theories should be treated the same as any other origin-of-life theory. Anything less is unconstitutional. Visit the website at http://originoflifefairness.org for much more information and the links/facts to back it Read More ›

What I would tell the Catholic Church: re intelligent design and evolution

Apparently, there is a big confab right now at the Vatican to decide what to say about intelligent design vs. evolution. A friend insisted, for some reason, that I offer an opinion. Heck, everyone is doing that, it seems. Ever since Pope Benedict XVI said, in his inaugural mass, that we are not “some casual and meaningless product of evolution,” the Catholic Church has found itself in the spotlight, asserting, against the adminbots and pundits of a materialist society, the we are purposeful and meaningful. The fact that I am a Catholic myself makes me less willing, not more willing, to butt in, but  how about this: Recover your heritage! Recover the traditional Catholic idea of evolution, which is not a Darwinian Read More ›