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Intelligent Design

Information, Materialism and Free Will

The existence of information is a fundamental refutation of materialism. Information has no mass. It has no physical dimensions. And it can exist in multiple places at the same time. It has no physical or materialistic properties whatsoever. Put a gigabyte of information on your computer’s blank hard disk, and check out how much more the disk weighs. Back up your hard disk and that information will exist in two places at the same time. You can transmit that information at the speed of light (at which speed nothing with rest mass can travel). Life is not fundamentally based on atoms, molecules and chemistry. These represent the media and low-level mechanism in which life’s information is stored and expressed. As Read More ›

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George Coyne

Vatican Astronomer Replaced by Bruce Chapman

Chapman writes:

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George Coyne, as director the Vatican Observatory, according to Zenit News. A Jesuit with a doctorate in astronomy, Dr. Coyne in recent years made himself the public scourge of Darwin critics and scientific proponents of intelligent design. Increasingly his theology resembled that of “process theologians” who believe that God is still learning and could not have known what his world was becoming.
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Pim Van Meurs Misses the Mark Again

On Panda’s Thumb Pim Van Meurs preaches confidently to the choir that we are all biased in that we see faces in natural objects created by chance.  Evidently the take-home point Pim wishes to make is that this is equivalent to seeing machinery in natural objects created by chance.  So I guess for Pim a cloud that looks sort of like a face is the same as a robotic protein factory driven by abstract digital program code and a library of abstract digital specifications for thousands of complex proteins, where some of those proteins are parts of the factory itself.  Yeah, Pim.  It’s just my internal bias that makes me see a complex machine there and wonder how it was possibly constructed by chance.  Well, at Read More ›

Congratulations Dave Thomas!

Dave has proven beyond a doubt that intelligent agents can construct useful trial and error algorithms.  As long as the way the trials are conducted and the way the results are judged is well specified then trial and error algorithms work!  Of course we all learn to search for solutions using trial and error as children.  Or so I thought.  Maybe Dave Thomas is just discovering it now and thinks he’s stumbled onto something revolutionary.  The $64,000 question remains unanswered.  Who or what specified how trials in evolution were to be conducted?  The only answer I’ve heard  from chance worshippers is that some mystical chemical soup burped out a living cell containing a protein assembly machine called a ribosome driven by an abstract digitally encoded control Read More ›

If the evidence for Darwinian theory were so great, why keep slamming ID? Just present it!

================ Excerpt from Current biology Volume 16, Issue 16, 22 August 2006, Pages R619-R620 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.07.041 Copyright © 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Q & A: Roger Hendrix Pittsburgh Bacteriophage Institute and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA Available online 21 August 2006. ================= …. Q: Given the prominence of the evolutionary perspective in your work, can you comment on the current efforts to present ‘Intelligent Design’ as an alternative to biological evolution in public schools in America? A: It is a sorry commentary on the state of public understanding of science that a large fraction of the US population is willing to accept that Intelligent Design (ID), essentially a tarted-up version of creationism, and evolution Read More ›

Schlemiel Zuckerkandl in his dotage

Emile Zuckerkandl, an erstwhile co-author with Linus Pauling, just got accepted a very long piece attacking ID in GENE (go here): Gene Article in Press, Accepted Manuscript doi:10.1016/j.gene.2006.03.025 Copyright  © 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V. Intelligent design and biological complexity Emile Zuckerkandl Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University and Institute of Molecular Medical Sciences, P.O.Box 20452, Stanford, California 94309 Received 16 October 2005; accepted 15 March 2006. Available online 5 August 2006. ABSTRACT. Before any intelligence can appear, a world endowed with the potential for being experienced as a body of phenomena has to be existent. Indeed, if there is to be an intelligence, there first has to be something intelligible. Hence, when an intelligence is present, “creation” must already Read More ›

Dolphins — Not the supergeniuses we thought

Scientist: Dolphins are stupid
Thursday 17 August 2006 12:29 PM GMT

Dolphins are not as clever as previously thought. Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says laboratory rats and even goldfish can outwit them.

Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence.

“We equate our big brain with intelligence. Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said.

“The real flaw in this logic is that it suggests all brains are built the same… When you look at the structure of the dolphin brain, you see it is not built for complex information processing,” he said. Read More ›

Old Dogs Can Remember Old Tricks

Interestingly enough, dyed in the wool chance worshippers apply theories of chance even when it means denying things that make perfect sense in light of common descent.

Case in point is Nick Matzke’s article on Panda’s Thumb entitled You *can* teach an old dog new tricks.  In it he expresses amazement at how a dog cancer cell evidently acquired the *new* capability of becoming a free living parasite able to move from dog to dog. Read More ›

Darwinist: Now a term of reproach?

If Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years? Yes! Despite a clear history of a century and a half of acceptance, a key Darwinist actually did his best to make it sound like an insult. Read on!

Some wonder why I, a mere journalist, sense that Darwinism is doomed.

Well, I observe and interview people and study how they behave.

One curious fact is that the venerable term Darwinist now makes Darwinists uncomfortable.

This problem hit the top of my intray last year a Canadian church bureaucrat took me to task  because, she insisted that  in By Design or by Chance?, I was “following the ID lead” when I used the term “Darwinism.”

Now, in the early stages of research, I had made a careful study of the terminology used in the debate. I knew that “Darwinism” was commonly used among Darwinian evolutionists – probably only because Darwinism (and Darwinist) is easier and briefer.

So at the time, I dismissed the churchcrat summarily by pointing out the following:

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Many universes: Or many fairies?

Casey Luskin noted a while back at Evolution News that a recent article in Nature noted that many universes theory is not testable:

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10 [to the]500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

But, Luskin writes, “National Academy of Sciences member and Nobel Laureate Leonard Susskind was given print-space–in fact he had a highlighted box-quote–saying that we should not reject the multi-verse hypothesis on the grounds that it isn’t testable.”

Nature reports:

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006)

I love it! “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science …” Why so foolish? Because, while it doesn’t conform to science, it does conform to materialism? Read More ›

Shrill screeds best evidence for Darwinism?: I guess so …

Someone recently brownbagged me this: Apparently, a shrill screed has been accepted for the science journal Gene on “Intelligent design and biological complexity”, announcing that Europe so far blissfully seems to have remained relatively immune to the intellectual virus named “intelligent design”. This virus certainly is a problem in the country in which I have lived over the last thirty years, the United States, where about 40% of the people are said to believe that evolution never took place, that evolution is just a theory, not a fact, and a wrong theory at that. To give themselves an edge, the “creationists” – the dominant stripe of anti-evolutionists in the United States — have decided some years ago (Pennock, 2003) to dress Read More ›

Why Darwin (probably doesn’t) matter: part 2 more or less

“sophophile”  wonders whether I’ll reconsider my statement that Darwin doesn’t matter if Michael Shermer has to write a book on why he matters – on the basis of sophophile’s research into book titles. [sophophile: Oh, WHY don’t these people have proper names? Isn’t this “Internet handle” thing becoming a bit childish after all these years?]  At any rate, sophophile  writes: Denyse O’Leary insists: First, I find the title of Shermer’s book interesting. If Darwin really mattered, Shermer wouldn’t be writing a book insisting that he does. Let’s test that reasoning on a few other book titles taken from Amazon.com: Why Religion Matters Class Matters Why Gender Matters Science Matters Why Geography Matters Race Matters Why Sinatra Matters Culture Matters Why New Orleans Read More ›