Intelligent Design

Beyond the standard chicken-and-egg positions on the origin of life (i.e., ploynucleotides-first vs. proteins-first), there is now fast emerging a lipids-first position (cf. the work of Pier Luigi Luisi and coworkers). For more on the fat-first position and its potential to revolutionize origin-of-life studies, see O. Mouritsen, Life — As a Matter of Fat: The Emerging Science of Lipidomics (Springer: 2005). Question: What is the natural route to lipid membranes in the absence of other cellular machinery?

An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.

Scientists believe that the five brothers and sisters found in Turkey could hold unique insights into human evolution.

The Kurdish siblings, aged between 18 and 34 and from the rural south, ‘bear crawl’ on their feet and palms.

Study of the five has shown the astonishing behaviour is not a hoax and they are largely unable to walk otherwise.

Researchers have found a genetic condition which accounts for their extraordinary movement.
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Akron Biology Faculty Members Decry Daniel Ely

Indeed, if undergraduate majors in our biology department revealed such profound misconceptions about basic evolutionary biology we would have serious misgivings about conferring their degrees in biology.

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Salvador Cordova: Do you oppose the offering of courses on Intelligent Design and/or Creationism in the Philosophy and Religion Departments of secular universities?

Eugenie Scott: No.

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In Academic, Heal Thyself we find more evidence of what happens when truth confronts ideology in academia. While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers’s resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March. Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity Read More ›

Panda’s Thumb Steve Reuland points to this junk science article The Origin of the Nucleus to highlight his ignorance of recent discoveries in experimental biology.

Elsewhere on PT Steve implied he was too good and wouldn’t waste his valuable time participating in the Nuclear Evolution Debate. His inability to spot the junk science in the first paragraph of the article he hypes speaks to contrary reasons why he declined the invitation.

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A number of people conflate heat entropy with information entropy and then willy-nilly substitute one for the other. This is what the NeoDarwinists do when they point to the sun and say it makes the earth an open system to explain the evident way life violates information entropy. The sun is irrevelevant in this siutation as it is adding heat, not information. While heat and information entropy are closely related (they both behave according to 2LoT which was originally formulated for heat alone) they are not the same thing and cannot be exchanged. Heat diffuses in a closed system until maximum entropy is reached where the heat is uniform (everything is the same temperature). Likewise a dye will diffuse through Read More ›

Keith Burgess-Jackson at AnalPhilosopher has this to say about militant anti-religious atheists and their treatment of ID as a pernicious threat to be kept out of public school classrooms at all costs:

Leftist Hostility to Religion

Michael Ruse, like me, is (1) a philosopher, (2) a Darwinist, (3) an atheist, and (4) a respecter of religion. Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Brian Leiter, who hate religion and despise the religious, are vilifying him for it. See here and here. Leiter calls theists “theocrats,” as if, given the chance, they would impose their religious beliefs on everyone. In fact, it is Leiter and his ilk who would impose their leftist beliefs on everyone. (Read Leiter for a few days. You’ll see what a totalitarian he is.) I am far more concerned about the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Leiter acquiring power than I am about Christians (for example) acquiring power. Read More ›

Check out the following online lecture/tutorial by Granville Sewell (Texas A&M) on the connection between thermodynamics and ID: www.math.tamu.edu/~sewell/odes_pdes/thermo.html

http://www.intelligentdesign.fi

Comm 4381 This special section will address the above goals by examining four controversies connected with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species Arguments for and against Darwin’s theory Arguments for and against intelligent design (id). Can a Christian (or Jew, or Moslem, or any monotheist) be a Darwinian? Does id have a proper place in the biology classroom? The Teacher, John Angus Campbell will be visiting James Madison University as a judge in a $10,000 debate over ID

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore If you ever felt the need to play the role of the Intelligent Designer here is the game for you! I think Spore could be more aptly titled “Intelligent Design: The Game”. After all, notice in the presentation that evolution is always via design by the player and not a mechanism like the modern synthesis. Of course, that game would take forever and would likely go nowhere. 😉 Now let’s just hope our own Intelligent Designer isn’t like Will Wright and decides to take his UFO and nuke our planet. 🙂

Perhaps Miller & Co. need to cut to the chase and take out a contract on key ID players. As I recall from the three years I lived in Rhode Island (I went to a prep school there), Providence, the city in which Brown University (Miller’s employer) is located, has an effective mob presence. “Why is this a big deal?” asked Miller. The answer, according to Miller, is the future of science in America. We are raising a generation of people who are going to be suspicious of science, and that has huge implications for scientific fields. Other countries will be moving ahead in science, leaving the United States behind. “What is at stake is, literally, everything,” said Miller. MORE

“In the name of human vitality WHERE is the charm in that useless, dispiriting, discouraging fatalism which broke out so horribly in the eighteen-sixties at the word of Darwin, and persuaded people in spite of their own teeth and claws that Man is the will-less slave and victim of his environment? What is the use of writing plays?—what is the use of anything?—if there is not a Will that finally molds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment, and if that Will is not incarnated in man.…”

“CARSON CITY — Longtime Las Vegan Steve Brown does not oppose the teaching of evolutionary theory in the public schools. Nor does he support teaching alternative views such as intelligent design or creationism. But Brown, a masonry contractor who has lived in Las Vegas for more than 30 years, does want the schools to teach the theory of evolution in what he calls the right way, which means acknowledging that much of the theory is just that — theory…” More here.