Intelligent Design

And why it might not really matter in the long run As Jonathan Wells, author of author of The Myth of Junk DNA , tells it at Evolution News & Views(March 9): Berkman and Plutzer’s findings were reported in the March 6 issue of Science. The report was accompanied by a photo of a biology classroom, with the caption “Poorly prepared science teachers often leave U.S. high school students with a shaky grounding in evolution.” In the foreground of the photo are several copies of the textbook being used in the classroom: Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine’s widely used “elephant cover” book, Biology. I have a copy of the 2000 “elephant cover” textbook, which features (1) a drawing of Read More ›

Over the past day or so, following a News post, the self referential incoherences of evolutionary materialism have been coming under the microscope here at UD. In the course of such, the indefatigable (but often “misunderestimated”) BA77 has again struck gold. As in per famed eccentric and insightful mystic, William Blake, Tiger, tiger, burning bright . . . And, how could we honour BA77 without a vid? So . . (While we are at it, Eye of the Tiger, vid + lyrics.) Well worth headlining: _______________ BA77: >>I like the nuance that Dr. Pearcey draws out. It is not only that, under materialistic premises, our perceptions may be false, it is also that, under materialistic premises, free will, consciouness and Read More ›

In this post the UD News Desk quotes from Nancy Pearcey’s new book concerning evolutionary epistemology: An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. Piotr thinks he has a cogent response to this: Does she believe “the ideas in our minds” are innate, or what? At best, it could be argued that the human mind has been shaped by natural selection in such a way that it can produce ideas which help us to Read More ›

We’ve done enough science news for one afternoon, so here is a scrap of total nonsense from our fave, PZ Myers at the Free Thought blogs: Do these big name universities intentionally inculcate obtuseness, or do they select for neo-reactionary thinkers? Case in point: Steven Pinker promoting Christina Hoff Sommers. What is this? Is he hoping that the flaming bigots of #gamergate will anoint him as Based Harvard Prof? It is impossible to take that hack Sommers seriously, unless you like that she supports your anti-feminist biases. While we mop up and stock up here at UD News, you can check this spit war between Darwin’s followers for yourself. Hey, you might be paying both of their salaries, hard to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Concept of hibernation challenged: Bat species is first mammal found hibernating at constant warm temperatures (But then, as Thomas Nagel asks, What is it like to be a bat anyway?) The researchers monitored the activity of the bats during this period and found that they neither fed nor drank, even on warm nights when other bat species were active in the same caves. The researchers used heat-sensitive transmitters to measure the bats’ skin temperature in the caves. Then in the laboratory, they measured the bats’ metabolic rates and evaporative water loss at different ambient temperatures. The bats’ average skin temperature in the caves was found to be about 71.6̊F. Both bat species reached their lowest metabolic rates at Read More ›

Philosopher Edward Feser has written a thought-provoking critique of the Turing Test, titled, Accept no limitations. Professor Feser makes several substantive points in his essay. Nevertheless, I believe that the basic thrust of the Turing Test is sound, and in this post, I’d like to explain why. In his 1950 paper, Computing machinery and intelligence (Mind, 59, 433-460), computer scientist Alan Turing argued that the question, “Can machines think?”was a scientifically fruitless one, and that the question we should be asking instead was: would it be possible to construct a digital computer that was capable of fooling blind interrogators into believing that it was a human being, by giving answers to the interrogators’ questions that a human being would naturally Read More ›

Not a chance. But here hack Ben Thomas unpacks the problem it creates: The trait that distinguishes scienceyness from actual science is that it’s got nothing to do with the scientific method at all. … Sciencey headlines are pre-packaged cultural tokens that can be shared and reshared without any investment in analysis or critical thought?—?as if they were sports scores or fashion photos or poetry quotes?—?to reinforce one’s aesthetic self-identification as a “science lover.” One’s actual interest doesn’t have to extend beyond the headline itself. And that, right there, is the difference between a love of science, and a love of scienceyness. Some suggestions: First, science journalists should lose the pom poms. Covering science is no different from covering sports Read More ›

That’s the claim in this ScienceDaily piece: Recently released research on human evolution has revealed that species of early human ancestors had significant differences in facial features. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found that these early human species also differed throughout other parts of their skeletons and had distinct body forms. The research team found 1.9 million-year-old pelvis and femur fossils of an early human ancestor in Kenya, revealing greater diversity in the human family tree than scientists previously thought. “What these new fossils are telling us is that the early species of our genus, Homo, were more distinctive than we thought. They differed not only in their faces and jaws, but Read More ›

The 2nd law of statistical thermodynamics states that in a closed system any natural transformation goes towards the more probable states. The states of organization are those more improbable, then transformations spontaneously go towards non-organization, so to speak. Since evolution would be spontaneous organization, evolution disagrees with the 2nd law. The tendency expressed in the 2nd law rules all physical phenomena and is clearly evident in our everyday life, where e.g. systems that were ok yesterday, today are ko, while systems that are ko, do not self repair and remain ko until an intelligent intervention. In short, things break down and do not self-repair, to greater reason they do not self-organize. All that can be related to the trend of Read More ›

The more that evolutionists claim nature is full of junk, the more that science finds uses for the junk. An intriguing example are the retroviruses which, for several years, have been found to have various functions. Yet another retrovirus function was published last fall in a study out of Canada. This retrovirus works with several proteins in human embryonic stem cells and without it the stem cells lose their key functionalities.  Read more

From The Evolution Revolution by Lee Spetner: Much has been learned in the life sciences in the last several decades about how an organism can alter its genome to enable it to adapt to new environmental conditions. Transposable genetic elements were discovered some seventy years ago by Barbara McClintock (McClintock 1941, 1950, 1955, 1956, 1983), but they were initially dismissed by mainstream geneticists as spurious phenomena. McClintock pursued her research despite it being considered a backwater area, and eventually the importance of her work was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee in awarding her the Prize in Medicine in 1983. The transposable genetic elements she discovered have been subsequently revealed to be members of a class of genetic rearrangements that do Read More ›

IMO, an entailment of the scientific theory of ID as it pertains to biological evolution, is that at least one of the following occurs: (1) directed variation, and/or  (2) artificial selection/maintenance, and that such processes produce outcomes that are detectable as the product of directed/artificial input.  (Note: these are posited as entailments of ID theory as it relates to biological evoloution, not origin-of-life or cosmological fine-tuning.  If ID is involved in biological evolution, it seems to me it must be involved in either the variation or selection process in some way; otherwise, we’re talking about the origin of a life form.) Directed variation may include the insertion of extra-species genes or other systemic instructions, the application of a system to Read More ›

Fights back. Well, that seems to be what’s happening. Further to: New York Times science writer defends junk DNA (Old concepts die hard, especially when they are value-laden as “junk DNA” has been—it has been a key argument for Darwinism), one of the conundrums on which the junk DNA folk rely heavily is the “onion test” (why does the onion have such a large genome?). Without waiting to answer the question, the junk DNA folk assume that that’s because most of it is junk. But let’s face it, when even Francis Collins, the original Christian Nobelist for Darwin, is abandoning ship, they really need to double down on that junk. From Evolution News & Views: What’s so striking about Zimmer’s Read More ›

Suzan Mazur’s The Origin of Life Circus continues with an interview with David Deamer, a serious origin of life researcher. One gets the sense that previous interviewee chemist Harry Lonsdale, founder and funder of the eponymous origin of life prize, was wedded to the idea that life must come about via Darwinian means. And that the second interviewee, physicist Larry Krauss— the go-to man for the Lonsdale origin of life prize—is something of a showman, though Darwin’s man at heart. In Mazur’s third chapter, we meet a genuine origin of life research scientist in UCal Santa Cruz David Deamer, president of ISSOL (origin of life society): Suzan Mazur: Freeman Dyson told me that the garbage bag world scenario probably went Read More ›

Further to: If atheism is not a religion, in a meaningful sense, why are there atheist chaplains at U.S. colleges now?, Gray had commented at the Guardian, It has often been observed that Christianity follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned religion. The racial theories promoted by atheists in Read More ›