Intelligent Design

Jean Claude Perez is a self-organizational theorist, he is not a creationist. He has also published papers with an occasional visitor to UD, Andras Pellionisz. If the mathematical/musical patterns Perez has found in DNA are improbable relative to laws of physics and chemistry, then he may have found yet another design feature of DNA, and this feature is found by combining coding DNA with non-coding DNA and viewing it holistically. Here is the simplest explanation I found of his work: When cells replicate, they count the total number of letters in the DNA strand of the daughter cell. If the letter counts don’t match certain exact ratios, the cell knows that an error has been made. So it abandons the Read More ›

David Filvaroff was my torts professor. Professor Filvaroff was one of those teachers who drill a mile deep and an inch wide. He really did not care whether his students understood what lawyers call the “black letter” of tort law (e.g., the elements of a negligence cause of action are A, B, C . . . ). I suppose he assumed we would pick up the black letter on our own as the occasion arose. Instead, he wanted us to understand the philosophical underpinnings of tort law, which made his class terrible for bar exam prep (the bar exam emphasizes “black letter” law) but unparalleled for increasing our understanding of the general philosophy of law. Even after all these years Read More ›

What kinds of structural, functional and behavioral complexity can the neutral theory of evolution account for, and what kinds of complexity can’t it account for? According to Professor Larry Moran, to evince confusion on these vital questions is a sure sign of being an “IDiot.” But it is the “neutralists” themselves who are confused on these issues, as I intend to show in today’s post. (I have chosen to use the term “neutralist” to describe someone who adheres to the neutral theory of evolution, as Nature magazine uses that term, although Professor Moran evidently prefers the term “mutationist.”) In a recent post titled, Sal Cordova tries, and fails, to understand evolution by Professor Larry Moran (April 22, 2014), Professor Larry Read More ›