Intelligent Design

Enforcement of an orthodoxy engulfed by challenges, from what we know. Further to the book burner moving to Australian National U, from John West at Evolution News & Views we learn: Former National Center for Science Education activist Nick Matzke has just published an utterly inane article in Science about academic freedom bills. In the article, he constructs a “phylogenetic tree” to show that various academic freedom bills are related to one another. If the intention was to show that Discovery Institute has supported academic freedom legislation in various states, or that many of those bills have similar language, Matzke didn’t need to construct a phylogenetic tree. He simply could have followed the reporting here at Evolution News. If I Read More ›

From Discovery.com: All Birds Descend from One Feathered Founder … The ancestry of every bird alive today can be traced back to a single “Founding Feathered Father” that lived in South America 95 million years ago, according to a new study. The common ancestor of living birds, described in the journal Science Advances, likely lived much later than previously estimated. Prior reports suggested that the founding bird lived up to 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. Dinosaurs (that didn’t evolve into birds) were still prevalent in South America 95 million years ago, yet the Founding Feathered Father would have been a standout. So that’s less time for bird evolution? Birds Evolved In ‘Big Bang,’ New Family Tree Reveals Read More ›

One would think so, but this from : “With very few exceptions, fossils of modern birds have been found only after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction,” said Claramunt. “This has led some researchers to suggest that modern birds didn’t start to diversify until after this event, when major competitors were gone. But our new work, which agrees with previous DNA-based studies, suggests that birds began to radiate before this massive extinction.” Perhaps that proved a hedge against extinction? After the K-Pg extinction, birds used two routes to cover the globe: first, to North America across a Paleogene Central American land bridge and then to the Old World; and second, to Australia and New Zealand across Antarctica, which was relatively warm at Read More ›

From Simon Oxenham at BigThink: How to Use the Feynman Technique to Identify Pseudoscience Last week a new study made headlines worldwide by bluntly demonstrating the human capacity to be misled by “pseudo-profound bullshit” from the likes of Deepak Chopra, infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language. The researchers correlate believing pseudo-profundities will all kinds of things Clever People Aren’t Supposed to Like, and one suspects the paper wouldn’t survive replication. So why is this a job for Feynman? This is all well and good, but how are we supposed to know that we are being misled when we read a quote about quantum theory from someone like Chopra, if we don’t know the Read More ›

RDFish seems to think so.  I summarize his argument as follows: The ID explanatory filter works as follows: (a)  The explanatory filter first asks whether the phenomenon is contingent.  If it is not, then it is probably best explained as the result of a natural regularity. (b)  If the phenomenon is contingent, the filter asks whether it is complex and specified.  If it is neither complex nor specified, then chance is the most viable explanation.  While there may be false negatives, there can be no reliable design inference. (c)  But if the phenomenon is contingent, complex and specified, then an abductive inference to design is warranted. Therefore, under the explanatory filter design is inferred only after law and chance have Read More ›

Matzke’s a long-time commenter here, on behalf of the Darwin lobby. His posts may now reflect a different time zone. UD News received this message from LinkedIn: Nicholas Matzke is now Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow at The Australian National University More here. On the one hand, we collect site visits, and he helps provide them. On the other hand, they better keep an eye on their library at U Down There. He may find Wrong Thoughts. See also: Nick Matzke – Book Burner? Follow UD News at Twitter!

In Did Michael Behe say that astrology was scientific in Kitzmiller v. Dover?  Moran actually excerpts the testimony and then concludes: I mostly agree with Behe. Astrology was an attempt to explain human behaviors by relating them to the position of the Earth on the day you were born. There is no connection. So today we think of astrology as bad science. It’s not true that the stars determine your behavior and whenever we make this claim to an astologist we make sure to point out that the evidence is against it. (footnote excluded) We compliment Dr. Moran on his analysis as well as on his often-expressed willingness to buck the conventional wisdom of his “side” of the debate.   Read More ›

Highlights: Methodological naturalism is widely regarded as a cardinal rule of scientific methodology. This methodological principle excludes all references to the supernatural from scientific discourse: it says that God-talk has no place in science. In Part One of this series, after carefully distinguishing methodological naturalism from six other principles, I argue that methodological naturalism is properly defined as an injunction: when doing science, we should assume that natural causes are sufficient to account for all observed phenomena, and for precisely this reason, all talk of the supernatural is banished from science. The Intelligent Design movement makes no pronouncements about who the Designer of Nature is, but deliberately leaves open the possibility that the Designer is a supernatural Being (i.e. God). Read More ›

Or physics problems unanswerable due to a math paradox? From Nature: In 1931, Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel shook the academic world when he announced that some statements are ‘undecidable’, meaning that it is impossible to prove them either true or false. Three researchers have now found that the same principle makes it impossible to calculate an important property of a material — the gaps between the lowest energy levels of its electrons — from an idealized model of its atoms. The result also raises the possibility that a related problem in particle physics — which has a US$1-million prize attached to it — could be similarly unsolvable, says Toby Cubitt, a quantum-information theorist at University College London and one of Read More ›

Evolutionists claim their theory is a fact and one way they support this claim is by construing the relationship between religion and science according to what is known as the Warfare Thesis, a mythological retelling of history where scientific skepticism is marginalized as anti intellectual. But the Warfare Thesis is more than merely a perversion of history. When Biologos appeals to the Galileo Affair, for example, to support its evolutionary beliefs it is propagating a false history, but the misrepresentations do not stop there. The Warfare Thesis also relies on a false witness of science.  Read more

Wants to shed “simple” schtick. Introducing C. elegans, the worm that survived the space shuttle blowup. Philosopher of Biology Paul Nelson describes the amazing process by which the worm C. elegans is constructed and how it points toward intelligent design. Also: Irreducibly complex behaviour in worms? and White space in evolutionary thinking (Where thought stops) See also: Information Enigma film online Follow UD News at Twitter!

Closing our “religion” coverage for the day: From Paul Bloom at Atlantic: Why Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith It is true that scientists take certain things on faith. It is also true that religious narratives might speak to human needs that scientific theories can’t hope to satisfy. And yet, scientific practices—observation and experiment; the development of falsifiable hypotheses; the relentless questioning of established views—have proven uniquely powerful in revealing the surprising, underlying structure of the world we live in, including subatomic particles, the role of germs in the spread of disease, and the neural basis of mental life. Religion has no equivalent record of discovering hidden truths. More. Or hidden falsehoods either? Now let’s get serious. In an age Read More ›

From Northwestern prof Laurie Zoloth at Cosmos: Independently verifying research can help science regain its credibility Wow. There’s hope. Zoloth is willing to talk in terms of regaining “credibility.” In short, all those frustrated people are not the “enemies of science.” Loss of credibility is an objective problem resulting from recent events: Even in physics, reports of the discovery of gravitational waves in March 2014 were later dismissed. Drug companies conducting clinical trials neglect to publish the entire data set, potentially hiding unfavourable results. But drug companies are also victims. In 2011, drug company Bayer reported it could replicate only 25% of published findings related to drug targets for cancer, women’s health and cardiovascular medicine. In 2012 the company Amgen Read More ›

From New Scientist: Evolution has built bias into our brains – here are the best ways to overrule your instincts and make better decisions about everything … Understanding the often irrational factors that affect how we make decisions has been a key aim of psychologists over the past few decades – and we’re just getting to the stage where we can begin to apply their insights. More. We’d have to pay to read more. But why? If “evolution” causes us to have an irrational brain, what causes us to gain control of it? An unevolved entity? Maybe, but that’s hardly what one would expect to hear from New Scientist in a “subscription drive” feature’s blurb. One might just as well Read More ›

Movements need converts and evolutionists are now revealingyet another ex young Earth creationist who has seen the light. Growing up he was an enthusiastic apologist for creationism. As a teenager he spread the word on the radio and made trips to Kentucky to work with Ken Ham’s young-earth creationism (YEC) organization. He believed YEC was the only acceptable interpretation of the Bible. Without it he would lose his faith.  Read more