Intelligent Design

Zack Kopplin is the face of rational thought. Kopplin is a bright, energetic young man opposing the forces of anti intellectualism and ignorance that deny science and the fact of evolution, and seek to inject religious beliefs into the public schools. There’s only one problem. While we are delighted to see young people get involved in public policy issues, Kopplin is feverishly promoting precisely what he claims to be opposing.  Read more

… his fight for Darwin-only schools in Louisiana. If so that’s significant, because the media party is sure backing him. Their ignorance and prejudice is his strength. Get a load of the cream puff interview at I09: We last spoke with Kopplin in early 2013. Since then, he has continued to campaign tirelessly against the act. He’s penned editorials for outlets like The Guardian, been profiled by the New York Times and Washington Post, and appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. In short, he has had an intercontinental soapbox. In late April, he testified before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill repealing the act. During his testimony, he presented evidence in support of the Read More ›

  Here. One refreshing comment for sure: So in response to your questions: 1)What is your definition of intelligent design? This is not the right question. We need to let ID theorists speak for themselves and not impose our meanings on their statements. That’s part of the problem! I’ve tried to explain above what they mean by Intelligent Design. 2) Is intelligent design something that Christians should believe in?Certainly, Christians must believe in (lower-case) intelligent design, since we believe in a provident God who has a plan for this world He has created. But belief in ID as a theory is not obligatory. One must assess the case ID theorists make and then decide whether to adopt all, some, or none Read More ›

From Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution (2014): The nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis (NREH) I am suggesting is a paradigm very different from the random mutation of the NDT. I am suggesting an evolutionary process in which individuals evolve, as opposed to the neo-Darwinian process, which purportedly acts on populations. Stress can induce epigenetic changes in an organism, changes that can activate a set of latent genes in both its somatic cells and its gametes. An organism will ooften undergo stress if its environment changes significantly. The stress may then induce genetic rearrangements, which may turn ON some hitherto latent, or cryptic, genes. These latent genes may elicit a response in the organism that is adaptive to the new environment. The response is Read More ›

And yet, will we ever come to an end of discussion and talk if we think we must always reply to replies? For replies come from those who either cannot understand what is said to them, or are so stubborn and contentious that they refuse to give in even if they do understand. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

They never predicted it, then they denied it could be heritable, and then they denied it could cause lasting change. “It” in this case is epigenetics and in spite of being wrong, wrong and wrong again, and in spite of the fact that there is no scientific explanation for how epigenetics could have evolved, evolutionists nonetheless insist that it, in fact, must have evolved. Evolution loses every battle but claims to win the war. All of this became abundantly clear this past week when the finding of a new epigenetic signal was announced:  Read  more

For some years now I have argued that when it comes to explaining the existence of consciousness (subjective self-awareness), materialists have nothing interesting to say, that their so-called explanation amounts to nothing more than “poof! It happened.” See here, here and here. I was gratified to learn in a recent exchange that Elizabeth Liddle agrees with me at least at a certain level. In various places in that exchange she wrote: Certainly an emergent property must be explained in terms of the system; and clearly an explanation must be “systematic” in the sense of specifying a cascade of mechanisms. . . . “[Emergent” is] simply a word to denote the idea that when a whole has properties of a whole Read More ›

In a paywalled Wall Street Journal story, theory of mind researcher Alison Gopnik informs us that “Young children develop the concept of free will in the short period between ages 4 and 6.” Here’s a free copy from her site: Along with Tamar Kushnir and Nadia Chernyak at Cornell University and Henry Wellman at the University of Michigan, my lab at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to see what children age 4 and 6 think about free will. The children had no difficulty understanding the first sense of free will: They said that Johnny could walk through the doorway, or not, if the door was open, but he couldn’t go through a closed door. But the 4-year-olds didn’t Read More ›

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air advises us all as to what a scientist’s wife thinks God must do to kep is ratings high: I can only imagine how eager you all are to redefine God in a radically new and empowering way, and your various church and temple leaders will doubtless be looking forward to the upcoming lightening of their workload. But how exactly are we to structure this new god for the 21st century? Well, Ms. Abrams has five helpful bullet points which don’t so much involve who God is, but who He can not possibly be. These are characteristics of a God that can’t be real: God existed before the universe. God created the universe. God knows everything. Read More ›

Science, like all disciplines today, is coming under heavy demands for censorship. People who used to be called dissenters or dissidents are now “denialists.” In short there is One Right Answer, to which no research not sponsored by an Establishment can add. But the history of science progress feature a grand parade of witnesses called by Counsel for the Defense. As a matter of fact, the likely outcome of the current mood is stagnation. Most new insights that proved valid were hotly contested, along with a lot of stuff that fell by the wayside. But very often no one knows for sure.* Paul Driessen writes, Brandeis disinvited Ayan Hirsi Ali, because her views on women’s rights might offend some Muslim Read More ›

A current rhetorical tack of objections to the design inference has two facets: (a) suggesting or implying that by moving research focus to Active Information needle in haystack search-challenge linked Specified Complexity has been “dispensed with” [thus,too, related concepts such as FSCO/I]; and (b) setting out to dismiss Active Information, now considered in isolation. Both of these rhetorical gambits are in error. However, just because a rhetorical assertion or strategy is erroneous does not mean that it is unpersuasive; especially for those inclined that way in the first place. So, there is a necessity for a corrective. First, let us observe how Marks and Dembski began their 2010 paper, in its abstract: Needle-in-the-haystack problems look for small targets in large Read More ›

Just in: Through the months of May, June, and July of 2015, TheBestSchools.org is hosting an intensive dialogue on the nature of science between Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Shermer. This first month, the focus is on materialism in science. Dr. Sheldrake will defend that science needs to free itself from materialist dogma; indeed, science misunderstands nature by being wedded to purely materialist explanations. By contrast, Dr. Shermer will defend that science, properly conceived, is a materialistic enterprise; for science to look beyond materialist explanations is to betray science and engage in superstition. Animal behaviourist and former Darwinian Rupert Sheldrake vs. self-described skeptic and Darwin fan Michael Shermer. Opening statements: Rupert Sheldrake: I think the interests of the sciences are best served Read More ›

Here: For much of our existence on Earth, we humans thought of ourselves as a pretty big deal. Then along came science and taught us how utterly insignificant we are. We aren’t the centre of the universe. We aren’t special. We are just a species of ape living on a smallish planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among billions in a universe that had been around for 13.8 billion years without us. … Science also teaches us that the laws of physics are ridiculously, almost unbelievably, “fine-tuned” for you and me. One must log in or subscribe to find out how they straighten it out. Huh? Isn’t the whole basis of New Scientist’s existence that it isn’t real? How Read More ›

Devolution? From ScienceDaily: A new study offers not only a sweeping analysis of how pollination has evolved among conifers but also an illustration of how evolution — far from being a straight-ahead march of progress — sometimes allows for longstanding and advantageous functions to become irrevocably lost. Moreover, the authors show that the ongoing breakdown of the successful but ultimately fragile pollination mechanism may have led to a new diversity of traits and functions. That’s well, but it can also lead to extinction. In evolution, the research shows, selection pressure or pure chance can break a functional relationship among such loosely related traits such as the one Leslie studied, even if that relationship has been working well. In fact, once Read More ›

Recently, Aurelio Smith had a guest publication here at Uncommon Descent entitled Signal to Noise: A Critical Analysis of Active Information. Most of the post is taken up by a recounting of the history of active information. He also quotes the criticisms of Felsentein and English which have responded to at Evolution News and Views: These Critics of Intelligent Design Agree with Us More Than They Seem to Realize. Smith then does spend a few paragraphs developing his own objections to active information. Smith argues that viewing evolution as a search is incorrect, because organisms/individuals aren’t searching, they are being acted upon by the environment: Individual organisms or populations are not searching for optimal solutions to the task of survival. Organisms are passive Read More ›