Intelligent Design

Organisms adapt to environmental challenges. In fact, many different organisms adapt in non-homologous ways to many different, unforeseen, environments. This contradicts evolution. For we are not talking about random changes occurring by chance, occasionally getting luck enough to confer an adaptation, and then propagating throughout the population. We’re not talking about an evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. That would take a long time. What we’re talking about are adaptations that specifically address environmental challenges, and occur in a good fraction of the population, over a few generations, or perhaps within a generation. Such directed adaptation occurs quickly.  Read more

For those interested in attending the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference, we are doing a free preview session Tuesday (March 29th – today!) at 7:30 PM Central Time. Check back here tomorrow for more details. All you need is your web browser to join.

New Scientist keeps wanting me (O’Leary for News) to pay to read an article advertised as follows: Our last common ancestors It’s the original “missing link”: the extinct ape that is the common ancestor of chimps and humans. But we still don’t know what it looked like, or indeed, whether we can be sure there was a single ancestor. … We all have our uncertainties, but we don’t usually expect people to pay to share them. From what one can tell, human evolution studies are in massive flux today, principally owing to more actual information. Couple recent stories: “Extinct” human group Denisovans’ genes found in Oceania peoples The way the article is written, the authors seem to want to advance the Read More ›

From Perry Marshall’s blog, Cosmic Fingerprints: Not only has Dawkins ruined science, he’s ruined atheism too. 20 years ago, an atheist was an intellectual with whom one could have a reasonable dialogue. Today, most people experience atheists as bellicose angry males who commonly suffer from depression, who post anonymous tirades all over the internet so they can share their misery with everyone else. We have the New Atheists to thank for this. And their four horsemen. Dawkins – Dennett – Harris – Hitchens. Wanna have an intelligent discussion about atheism? Read Voltaire, Nietzche or Bertrand Russell. Agree or disagree, they will force you to think. Wanna have a pointless shouting match with a bunch of mannerless name-callers who make up just-so Read More ›

My friend Steve used to have an old Pontiac that was in shambles. Somewhere along the line the front bumper had fallen off, and somebody welded on an I-beam as a replacement. It was a rust bucket that was literally falling apart, but the funny things was, that old car just kept on running, seemingly on inertia. A hose might spring a leak or a belt might snap, but it kept on running. Steve’s Pontiac had become a fixture—for better or worse, it had been running for decades and it was unbelievable that it would ever stop. Why breakdown now, it could always run one more day.  Read more

Call it Mycoplasma mycoides lite—researchers have established what is approximately a minimal organism by removing about have of the genes from theMycoplasma mycoidesgenome. The result is a set of 473 genes which, collectively, appear to be required for any kind of reasonable performance. That is an enormous level of complexity. Furthermore, about one third of that minimal gene set is of unknown function. As J. Craig Venter put it, “We’re showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms. These findings are very humbling.”  Read more

From Winston Ewert of the Evolutionary Information Lab, writing at Evolution News & Views: Ev Ever Again — Eying an Evolutionary Simulation A writer at The Skeptical Zone, Patrick, recently contributed a post on the computer simulation ev. He takes aim at William Dembski, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab’s analysis of that simulation. However, the events he discusses actually show a history of Darwinists repeatedly misunderstanding or misrepresenting arguments for intelligent design. Patrick fundamentally mistakes the claim we are making about ev (and evolutionary simulations in general). Regarding a response to Schneider from the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, he says: He admits again that evolution does work in certain environments. Patrick treats this as an admission that undermines our Read More ›

From Matthew Davidson at The Conversation: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and was proposed in 2008 by Guilio Tononi, a US-based neuroscientist. It also has one rather surprising implication: consciousness can, in principle, be found anywhere where there is the right kind of information processing going on, whether that’s in a brain or a computer. … The theory says that a physical system can give rise to consciousness if two physical postulates are met. The first is that the physical system must be very rich in information. … This brings us to the second postulate, which is that for consciousness to emerge, the physical system must also be highly integrated. … The authors report some success in testing a related idea, Read More ›

After explaining the limitations of natural selection it is good to see the feature article in this week’s NewScientist admit that “current ways of thinking about evolution give a less-than-complete picture of how that [the spontaneous evolution of ‘all living things’] works.” Less-than-complete? That is evolution-speak for a theoretical meltdown. It’s no secret that the idea that the biosphere arose spontaneously is contradicted by the science. For evolutionists, that means their theory is “less-than-complete.” Well I suppose, technically, that is true. A theory that makes no sense is “less-than-complete.” Evolutionists are masters of the euphemism. They are also masters of the epicycle.  Read more

Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offers thoughts on Saturday’s debate in Toronto: Lamoureux’s role in the debate was largely to offer a robotic rolodex of tired cliché’s (e.g., “I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, there is no debate on that,” and “biology only makes sense in light of evolution”). Among them was the classic, “show me one tooth in the Cambrian, and we’ll turn all the science upside-down.” Of course, we have good reason to doubt that he would be true to his ultimatum. After all, we didn’t think evolution could account for the massive diversification of animal life seen in a 5-8 million year sliver of the Cambrian period, Read More ›

From New Scientist: … That brings to the fore areas that are not part of the canon of evolutionary theory: epigenetics, for example, which studies how organisms are affected by changes in the ways in which genes are expressed, rather than in the genes themselves. Attempts to incorporate such elements into evolutionary theory have not always been welcomed, however. That is understandable, given how successful the theory has been without them. Occam’s razor applies: do not add complications unless they are absolutely necessary. But another motivating factor is undoubtedly the fear that if scientists themselves are seen to suggest that even small details of the theory of evolution could be improved upon, its detractors will seize upon them with avidity. Read More ›

But then we would need to replace a lot of science journalists. From Michael Schulson at Pacific Standard: Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America’s most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. “Our original story was based on what was known at the time,” host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. “Obviously the facts have changed.” It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don’t say that “facts change”; it is a journalist’s job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has Read More ›

John Farrell’s article, It’s Time To Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’ (Forbes magazine, March 19, 2016), cites three prominent Catholic thinkers who reject the term “theistic evolution.” But what Farrell overlooks is that these Catholics hold wildly divergent views on the simple question of whether living things were designed by God. Edward Feser insists that they were, and Stacy Trasancos apparently agrees; Ken Miller says they were not – which puts him in the same camp as Jesuit astronomer George Coyne and Catholic theologian John Haught, two outspoken defenders of evolution who were not cited in Farrell’s article. However, the clear teaching of the Catholic Church is that humans and other living things were designed by God. What I find astonishing is Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers discover sophisticated alarm signaling in a primitive insect Many insect species respond to danger by producing chemical alarm signals, or alarm pheromones, to inform others. In a recent study, investigators found that their alarm may be even be context dependent. The researchers discovered that larvae of the Western Flower Thrips produce an alarm pheromone whose composition of 2 chemicals, decyl acetate and dodecyl acetate, varies with the level of danger they face. When pheromone is excreted with a predator present but not attacking, the percentage of dodecyl acetate increases, whereas when a predator does attack, the percentage of dodecyl acetate is low. “This type of communication was so far only known from vocal alarm calling in mammals, Read More ›

Quite expectedly, the Krauss vs Meyer debate got off to a poor start. Krauss has a few go-to moves during a debate and most of them were on full display in his opening remarks (one can hardly call them arguments). He opened with an ill-informed and misrepresentative attack on the Discovery Institute and on the person, character and honesty of Stephen Meyer himself. During his diatribe, Krauss informed the audience that Meyer and his ideas are not worth debating and that Meyer himself is something of a dishonest marketing man for Intelligent Design. And what exactly is Krauss’ justification for this claim? Well, you see, several years ago, at a school board hearing in Ohio, Krauss, having failed to inform Read More ›