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Intelligent Design

Goodbye Wedge, Hello Vise

The first mention of the Vise Strategy appeared on this blog here. I devised the Vise Strategy to aid the Thomas More Law Center in interrogating the ACLU’s expert witnesses in the Dover Trial. Since all witnesses in that trial have now been called (all that remains is for Judge Jones to render his verdict), I am making available the full-blown Vise Strategy here.

American Museum of Natural History — Cruisin for a Bruisin

An Evolutionist’s Evolution By GLENN COLLINS, NYTimes, 7Nov05 It may seem that the American Museum of Natural History is cruising for controversy in presenting “Darwin,” the most comprehensive exhibition any museum has offered on the naturalist’s life and theories. It is a time, after all, when the theory of evolution by natural selection seems as newsworthy as it was back in the days of the Scopes trial 80 years ago. . . . The exhibition mentions intelligent design not as science, or as a theory to be debated, but as a form of creationism, which offers the biblical view that God created the earth and its creatures fully formed within the last 10,000 years. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled Read More ›

Cornell Panel Discussion on President Rawlings’s State of the University Address

CORNELL UNIVERSITY CHRISTIAN FACULTY/STAFF FORUM

THIS WEEK AT CORNELL:

Intelligent Design, Intelligent Discourse:
Reflections on the State of the University Address
A Panel discussion

Friday, November 4, 2:30pm – 4:00 pm
Anabel Taylor Hall Auditorium

In his recent State of the University address, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings discussed at length “the challenge to science posed by religiously-based opposition to evolution, described, in its current form, as ‘intelligent design.'” The address received national media coverage and is now serving as the basis for discussions taking place at the departmental level at Cornell.

The response to the address by the Christian community at Cornell has been mixed. Some Christians favorably disposed toward intelligent design were troubled by the talk; others have no more sympathy for intelligent design than Rawlings, and agreed with the large majority of what he said. Read More ›

Richard Smalley Dies

Rick Smalley, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Rice University, died earlier this week. You can read about his scientific contributions and passing here. I had the privilege of having lunch with Rick this summer. The meeting was arranged by his pastor at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, my friend Ben Young. Rick had in the previous year become a Christian as well as a member of Second Baptist Church, and begun to express his doubts about Darwinism publicly (see here and here). I reported on my lunch meeting with Rick here, though to spare him harrassment I did not mention him by name. Rick’s prediction at the end of his life was that ID would be mainstreamed in five years Read More ›

John Silber on ID

From “Science Versus Scientism” by John Silber (appeared in the Nov05 issue of The New Criterion):

The critical question posed for evolutionists is not about the survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutations and environmental influences over millions of years. Read More ›

“The Great Debate” — Scott & Trefil vs. Sisson & Dembski

“Should public schools teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution?” http://www.bu.edu/com/greatdebate Wednesday, November 2, 2005, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tsai Performance Center, Boston University 685 Commonwealth Avenue Visit this page to view a live webcast of the debate: http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/encoder/greatdebate.rm The Debate Participants: Affirmative Edward H. Sisson, Esq. Partner, Arnold and Porter, Washington, D.C. Mr. Sisson advised witnesses at the Kansas evolution hearings. Professor Bill Dembski, Ph.D. Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture Nick Barber Broadcast Journalism major, Boston University College of Communication +++++++++++++++++ Negative Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D. Executive Director, National Center for Science Education. Professor James Trefil, Ph.D. Robinson Professor, George Mason University; co-author, Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Neil St. Clair Broadcast Journalism and Political Science major, Boston University Read More ›

Deteriorata vs. Designorama

Deteriorata (old National Lampoon song) http://www.nationallampoon.com/flashbacks/deteriorata/default2.asp You are a fluke of the universe You have no right to be here And whether you can hear it or not The universe is laughing behind your back GIVE UP! Designorama You are the product of design Every hair on your head is numbered You are irreplacable and have every right to be here Whether you can hear it or not The designer is celebrating your existence REJOICE! [Thanks Dennis Wagner.]

The Edge of Peer Review

Robert Pennock’s Nature article with Richard Lenski on the evolutionary program AVIDA does not mention Michael Behe, irreducible complexity, or intelligent design (for a critique of that article, go here). And yet, when Pennock criticizes ID, the first thing he does is point to that article as a refutation of ID and, in particular, Michael Behe’s claim that irreducible complexity poses an obstacle to conventional evolutionary mechanisms. So, peer-reviewed articles that do not cite ID or its literature nonetheless constitute refutations of it, and yet peer-reviewed articles by ID proponents that do not explicitly mention ID (to avoid censorship) may not count as confirmations of it. The double-standard here is palpable. In this vein consider the following email I received: Read More ›

Fitness among Competitive Agents

Fitness among Competitive Agents: A Brief Note By William A. Dembski The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain its power since, clearly, it is capable of doing better than blind search? One approach is to limit the fitness functions (see Igel and Toussaint 2001). Another, illustrated in David Fogel’s work on automated checker and chess playing (see, for instance, Chellapilla and Fogel 1999 and Fogel et al. 2004) and, more recently, given a theoretical underpinning by David Wolpert and William Macready Read More ›