Intelligent Design

Professor James M. Tour is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world. He is famous for his work on nanocars (pictured above, courtesy of Wikipedia), nanoelectronics, graphene nanostructures, carbon nanovectors in medicine, and green carbon research for enhanced oil recovery and environmentally friendly oil and gas extraction. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University. He has authored or co-authored 489 scientific publications and his name is on 36 patents. Although he does not regard himself as an Intelligent Design theorist, Professor Tour, along with over 700 other scientists, took the courageous step back in 2001 of signing the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Read More ›

In his Origin of Species Darwin quoted six times the Latin sentence “natura non facit saltus” (“nature makes no leap”, it is a maxim expressing the idea that natural things and their properties change gradually, in a continuum, rather than suddenly). All the times Darwin used such quote to justify his idea that species arose gradually, by means of small advantageous increments, contra what he called “the theory of Creation” supposed discrete: As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of “Natura non facit saltum,” which every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to make more Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne can’t seem to leave the Adam and Eve question alone. In a recent post, Professor Coyne criticizes Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, for requiring its teaching professors to sign an updated “statement of belief” which, for the first time, explicitly affirms the existence of an historical Adam and Eve. Since Bryan College describes itself as “a nondenominational evangelical Christian college named after William Jennings Bryan: statesman, orator, and renowned prosecuting attorney in the famous Scopes Evolution Trial,” this requirement should hardly occasion surprise. What would be surprising is if the college didn’t require its professors to believe in a literal Adam and Eve. In a related post published late last year, Coyne explains in detail why he Read More ›

As kairosfocus pointed out in a recent post, my 2013 article on macroevolution skeptic Professor James Tour seems to be doing the rounds on Facebook and Reddit. Some commenters have accused Professor Tour of confusing macroevolution with the scientific problem of how life originated. To make such an accusation against one the world’s leading chemists is not only extremely impertinent but also factually wrong, as the skeptics would have realized if they had read my follow-up post, Macroevolution, microevolution and chemistry: the devil is in the details. (While they’re at it, they might also like to read my post, Could the eye have evolved by natural selection in a geological blink?) On a deeper level, however, the skeptics’ attempt to Read More ›

I just checked the most popular tables and saw how VJT’s UD James Tour article got 30,000 or so hits within a few days. Why? Reddit and Facebook etc atheists are suddenly screaming (and don’t seem to know that Dr Tour DID meet with someone for private discussion and . . . by implication, has not found a satisfactory answer) — per Groovamos at 9, this was a mis-impression on my part)  but, again, why? Then Google popped up: VJT has republished the article at Science News on Feb. 18. [–> He was credited as author, it seems there has been an auto-publishing.] We are getting the back-wash of that spreading publicity. All to the good. Let those who would Read More ›

One of the powerful arguments for evolution is that the species and the various biological organs and structures fall into the expected common descent pattern. We may not understand how they could have evolved and what transitional forms led to what we observe, but if they were created would they not show discontinuities from species to species? Darwin captures all of these ideas in this famous passage from Origins:  Read more