Intelligent Design

From Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is true, on mathematician and Darwin skeptic David Berlinski. I’m not sure how David Berlinski manages to make a living, but he does live in Paris, which ain’t cheap. Although he’s a Senior Fellow with the ID Creationist Discovery Institute, that can’t pay much, and his science books, including A Tour of the Calculus (1995), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), Newton’s Gift (2000), and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005), can’t bring in that much dosh. (As Wikipedia notes, “Berlinski’s books have received mixed reviews.”) However, his 2009 book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions remains at #41 on Amazon, a remarkable spot, but explained of course Read More ›

From Tom Woodward at Themelios, in a review of Richard Weikart’s Death of Humanity: there is throughout the book a proper sense of what I call “deep-shock” to see what these secular thinkers have actually said in writing. Many of the vignettes and quotes from secular crusaders moved me, stopping me in my mental tracks. These shocks were hammer blows of reality—wake up calls that prompted me to jot my reaction and resolve on the margins of many pages. One shock, from US Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was especially stunning. Holmes, in commenting on a recently published book he had read, said, “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate Read More ›

Douglas Axe here: The Power of Common Science (Ep. 153) Guest: Dr. Douglas Axe, Author of “Undeniable” Undeniable. See also: Undeniable: Darwinians stage manage evidence against their view into near oblivion Doug Axe vs Keith Fox: Is design in nature undeniable? and Andrew McDiarmid podcast with Doug Axe, author of Undeniable, “on the Design Intuition and a New Biology” Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

Rachel Gross’ recent article about evolutionist’s public outreach contains several misconceptions that are, unfortunately, all too common. Perhaps most obvious is the mythological Warfare Thesis that Gross and her evolutionary protagonists heavily rely on. Plumbing the depths of ignorance, Gross writes:  read more

From Evolution News: Moreover, the article by Rachel Gross spills the beans about something we knew already: that the real goal of most evolution educators isn’t simply to start a conversation about evolution. Rather, the aim is conversion, that is, convincing the public to “accept” evolution. Note these unusually candid admissions about the true goals of Darwin educators: “Acceptance is my goal,” says Jamie Jensen, an associate professor who teaches undergraduate biology at Brigham Young University. Nearly all Jensen’s students identify as Mormon. “By the end of Biology 101, they can answer all the questions really well, but they don’t believe a word I say,” she says. “If they don’t accept it as being real, then they’re not willing to Read More ›

Recently, Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse spoke on this theme at the Oxford Brookes Philosophy Public Lectures: Christianity and Darwinism have very different understandings of the nature and causes of war. However, beneath the surfaces, there are some surprising similarities, not the least a debt to Saint Augustine’s claims about original sin. This talk uncovers these and other pertinent facts, arguing that we are not dealing with a religion versus science debate but more a religion versus religion debate. Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. More. The lecture follows on his 2016 book, Darwinism as Religion. Ruse has always been honest about that. For example, in 2000, he wrote: “Evolution is promoted by its Read More ›

From Josephine Livingstone at New Republic, reviewing Michael E. Hobart’s The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, In a new book called The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God. Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe, the story goes, and it eventually distanced scientists from religion. Hobart locates this great shift in the field of mathematics. Other historians have given credit to experimenters who pioneered the scientific method, or astronomers like Galileo or Kepler, but Hobart claims that Renaissance mathematics is distinct from its medieval predecessor because it reconceived numeracy as a tool for describing the quantities of things into Read More ›

Astronomer Brian Keating has a new book out, Losing the Nobel Prize, detailing the rise and fall of an apparent confirmation of cosmic inflation in 2014. From the publisher: In 2014, astronomers wielding BICEP2, the most powerful cosmology telescope ever made, revealed that they’d glimpsed the spark that ignited the Big Bang. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement broadcast live from Harvard University, immediately igniting rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. But had these cosmologists truly read the cosmic prologue or, swept up in Nobel dreams, had they been deceived by a galactic mirage? The latter, it would seem. A free excerpt is available at Nautilus: The broadcast from Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics captivated media around the Read More ›

Michael Behe is one of the original design theorists and the author of Darwin’s Black Box. The fossil was named by Gunter Bechly, as he explains at Evolution News and Science Today: It was July 2011 when I accidentally stumbled upon a photo of a beautiful fossil dragonfly on a website about fossils from Early Jurassic sediments on the English coast at Charmouth in Dorset. I immediately recognized that this specimen is not only remarkably well-preserved, but certainly represents an unknown species as well. He got permission to study the fossil. And it is a beauty. Actually, it represents worldwide one of the most beautifully preserved and most complete fossil dragonflies from the Early Jurassic period known at all. It Read More ›

What do you think of philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze’s analogy: The central theme of evolution is that tiny improvements in fitness can steadily accumulate resulting in a new species. The unstated assumption (usually) is that the original species was in need of improvement. So let’s apply these assumptions to a common educational experience. Let’s assume that a teacher has assigned to an eighth grade class the writing of an essay on the causes of the Civil War. You stand in for evolution and your task is to convert a poorly written “F” paper to an essay that can be published in Harper’s Magazine. This is reasonably analogous to fish evolving into an amphibians or a dinosaurs into a birds. Read More ›

For some time now, GP has had up a post on defending intelligent design. In following its discussion off and on (it’s budget season here), I see that the definition of design is on the table for discussion. I think I can help (and while I am at it — just noticed, contribute to BA’s dissection of the Only Human Intelligence Allowed fallacy), and I think it worthwhile to headline a comment: KF, 310: >> it seems the definition of design is up again as an issue. The simplest summary I can give is: intelligently directed configuration, or if someone does not get the force of “directed,” we may amplify slightly: intelligently, intentionally directed configuration. This phenomenon is a commonplace, Read More ›

Why are evolutionists always wrong? And why are they always so sure of themselves? With the inexorable march of science, the predictions of evolution, which evolutionists were certain of, just keep on turning out false. This week’s failure is the much celebrated notion that the eukaryote’s power plant—the mitochondria—shares a common ancestor with the alphaproteobacteria. A long time ago, as the story goes, that bacterial common ancestor merged with an early eukaryote cell. And these two entities, as luck would have it, just happened to need each other. Evolution had just happened to create that early bacterium, and that early eukaryote, in such a way that they needed, and greatly benefited from, each other. And, as luck would have it Read More ›

From Phys.org: Many bacteria are equipped with a flagellum, a helical propeller that allows bacteria to travel. The flagellum is assembled in a highly organized manner involving the stepwise addition of each of its internal parts. However, there are many open questions as to how this orderly construction is achieved. In a study published in Science Advances, a Japanese research team centered at Osaka University has uncovered new molecular details and provided a model explaining how stepwise flagellar assembly occurs. As single-celled organisms, bacteria have devised elegant methods to move around their environment. The flagellum consists of a microscopic motor, which provides torque, and a long, rigid, spiral-shaped filament that drives propulsion. The motor and filament are connected by a Read More ›

Report: NAS Launches New Report: “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science”: Today is the launch of NAS’s newest report by David Randall and Christopher Welser. The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform examines the different aspects of the reproducibility crisis of modern science. Our goal is to bring the reproducibility crisis to the forefront of public awareness and to call on policymakers to take effective steps to address it. We also include a series of policy recommendations, scientific and political, for alleviating the reproducibility crisis. NAS was founded on, and continues to be guided by the idea that the pursuit of truth is the highest purpose of scholarly work. Civil and open debate is Read More ›

From Michael Erard at Science: About 100,000 years ago, ancient humans started etching lines and hashtag patterns onto red rocks in a South African cave. Such handiwork has been cited as the first sign our species could make symbols—distinct marks that stand for some meaning—and thus evidence of a sophisticated mind. But a new study, reported here this week at Evolang, a biannual conference on the evolution of language, finds that these markings and others like them lack key characteristics of symbols. Instead, they may have been more for decoration or enjoyment. … Tylén’s team found that, in the eyes of today’s humans, younger markings had more clearly defined visual elements and were more aesthetically regular than older ones. Participants Read More ›