Intelligent Design

There has been a great deal of controversy recently regarding the theory of structuralism, which has been defended by Dr. Michael Denton in his new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis and attacked by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog (see here, here, here and here). Evolution News and Views has several articles defending Dr. Denton’s views (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Let me say at the outset that I have not yet read Dr. Denton’s latest book, which has been reviewed by Barry Arrington here. Rather than reviewing Dr. Denton’s work, my aim in today’s post is to summarize its central thesis, discuss its significance for how scientists should do biology, Read More ›

From LiveScience: Neuroscientists and many philosophers have typically planted themselves firmly on the materialist side. But a growing number of scientists now believe that materialism cannot wholly explain the sense of “I am” that undergirds consciousness, Kuhn told the audience. One of those scientists is Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. At the event, he described a relatively recent formulation of consciousness called the integrated information theory. The idea, put forward by University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, argues that consciousness resides in an as-yet-unknown space in the universe. Integrated information theory measures consciousness by a metric, called phi, which essentially translates to how much power over Read More ›

Recently a criticism was leveled against Dembski’s 2005 paper Specification: the pattern that signifies intelligence. As is often the case, if you read the criticism carefully, you will realize that, even though he says Dembski is wrong, it turns out that the more exacting answer would favor Dembski’s conclusion more strongly, not less.
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From the blurb for Intelligent Evolution: An Alternate Theory of Evolution: Intelligent design is often depicted as science versus religion but this is not always the case. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, don’t follow any specific religion, and have come to the conclusion that the complexity of life suggests intelligent design. I believe microbes were designed by an intelligent entity and then released into the cold, vastness of space. Some haphazardly landed on our warm, wet planet and went on to evolve into everything we see here today, including us. This is ‘Intelligent Evolution’ because we evolved from intelligently designed microbes. Evidence of this and how these microbes took our planet from a barren, wet rock to a Read More ›

University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke reviews Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016) for the Christian Scientific Society here: The Discovery Institute has a long history of sponsoring and collaborating with a large number of highly intelligent, fascinating scientists who stand outside traditional Christian belief as well as outside the mainstream of evolutionary science. In keeping with this tradition, they have recently published Evolution: A Theory Still in Crisis, by Michael Denton, a followup to his famous book thirty years ago, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which influenced a whole generation of scientists to question the standard paradigm of evolution. In this book, Denton is not mainly just updating his previous arguments with data from the past Read More ›

Further to Intelligent design “horrifying” Because extinctions occur in the course of nature, philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say: The article quotes the letter writer as saying: The earth has experienced five mass extinctions. What kind of designer makes a system that periodically wipes out species for no apparent reason? Are these extinctions simply an “oops” moment on the part of the creator? This boils down to the statement, “No god I can conceive of would do such a thing,” with the emphasis on “I”. It never seems to enter the minds of the many people who make such statements that god might be completely other than the “I” making the statement. Any god who was limited to Read More ›

Starting our day’s coverage off right, we note a letter to the editor of the Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), warning a disbelieving world: In his Feb. 12 letter to the Argus Leader asserting “intelligent design is evidence-based and is science,” Bill Harris tells us he is a “Ph.D., professor of medicine, Sanford School of Medicine, University of South Dakota and president of OmegaQuant Analytics.” Apparently, we mere mortals are supposed to be impressed. Goodness. Some of us would think the doc did right to tell us other mere mortals where he is coming from. As in, Hi, I’m Denyse O’Leary, a news hack from Ottawa… So we’d expect him to know something about medicine the way you’d expect Read More ›

It’s no surprise that Coyne’s book is getting hostile reviews outside the new atheist community.  Closing off our religion coverage for the week, we note that prominent Darwinian evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible is, unsurprisingly, receiving hostile reviews outside the new atheist community. But what’s curious is their focus. From Austin L. Hughes at New Atlantis: Coyne’s basic strategy is to contrast two monolithic entities that he calls “religion” and “science.” But he constructs his two monoliths in diametrically opposite ways. The “religion” monolith consists of everything that has ever been said by any person belonging to any religion whatever, lumping together official dogma, theological speculation, and popular belief… Coyne’s procedure for describing Read More ›

From “This is how science lost God: Atheism, evolution and the long road to Richard Dawkins’ latest Twitter controversy,” a book excerpt from A Brief History of Creation at Salon: Voltaire’s views on religion, like his views on nearly everything else, were sometimes arbitrary and often contradictory. They were united in their hatred of superstition, and beyond that, little else. At times, his argument for God could appear utilitarian. He worried about whether morality could exist in a world devoid of a supreme being, a world in which good and evil were all relative. “If God did not exist,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire had a habit of quoting himself, a backhanded way of elevating Read More ›

From New Scientist: We may have a complex, scientific take on the unconscious mind, but as Eliexer Sternberg’s new book shows, explanations demand a nuance befitting the subject Actually, we don’t know very much about the mind at all, and there has been legitimate doubt whether the “unconscious mind” exists. The “unconscious mind” uually means an inner consciousness of which we are unaware: “Schmeazle unconsciously wanted to avoid marrying GerdyLou. That’s why he fell down the back stairs and broke his hip the night before the wedding.” Everyone but Schmeazle is apparently conscious of the reasoning powers of his unconscious. That sort of thing did fall into disrepute, for good reasons and bad ones. We oughtn’t to confuse such a Read More ›

From Christian Scientific Society: The annual meeting will once again be held in Pittsburgh, this coming April 15-16 (Friday night and Saturday morning). The theme for this year’s meeting is “Fine tuning in cosmology and biology.” Apart from the great talks and debates, the annual meetings are a great time to fellowship with like-minded Christians in science.The meeting will be held at the classic Twentieth Century Club in Pittsburgh, on the University of Pittsburgh Campus. Speakers include Robin Collins, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Messiah College Robert Mann, Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo Fuz Rana, Vice President of Research and Apologetics, Reasons to Believe Jerry Bergman, Adjunct Associate Professor, Medical University of Ohio Wayne Rossiter, Assistant Professor, Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Basically,  [the reearchers] claim that a single mutation “repurposed” an enzyme that made multicellularity possible. A common guanylate kinase enzyme (gk), used by all living things to regulate the supply of nucleotides for the genetic code, underwent a mutation that enabled it to learn a new function. The new GKPIDenzyme, found primarily in animals and choanoflagellates, is important for cell adhesion and spindle orientation. The mutation gave it a new shape that enabled it to bind to a different ligand. Sometime later, GKPID found a new partner in Pins, a protein on the inner membrane that (with some helper enzymes) connects to both the spindle microtubule and the complex that receives signals from neighboring cells. Read More ›

A little timeline on the second law argument, as applied to evolution (see my BioComplexity article for more detail): 1. Scientists observed that the temperature distribution in an object always tends toward more uniformity, as heat flows from hot to cold regions, and defined a quantity called “entropy” to measure this randomness, or uniformity. The first formulations of the second law of thermodynamics stated that thermal “entropy” must always increase, or at least remain constant, in an isolated system. 2. It was realized that the reason temperature tends to become more uniformly (more randomly) distributed was purely statistical: a uniform distribution is more probable than a highly non-uniform distribution. Exactly the same argument, and even the same equations, apply to Read More ›

In a recent post over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne addresses what he regards as the “main incompatibility between science and religion.” Coyne is confident that science is a legitimate arbiter of truth because “there’s only one brand of science, with most scientists agreeing on what’s true,” whereas “there are tens of thousands of brands of religion, many making conflicting and incompatible claims.” In today’s short post, I’d like to explain why Coyne’s assertion about science is fundamentally mistaken. First of all, “conflicting claims” and “conflicting brands” are two very different things. At any given moment, there are literally thousands of conflicting and incompatible claims being made within each field of science. That’s part of the way Read More ›

On Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Introduction The structuralist view, of course, has the advantage of being consistent with the fossil record. That record does not show, as Darwin suggested, a finely graduated organic chain between major Types. Instead, it shows abrupt appearance of various Types followed by stasis. Again, using the pentadactyl limb as an example, Denton has no doubt that the limb evolved from the fins of fish. Yet the fossil record simply does not support the view that the evolution of the limb from the fin occurred gradually over eons of time. The fossil record is instead conspicuous for the absence of transitional forms from fish fin to pentadactyl limb. This means one of Read More ›