Intelligent Design

Acclaimed author John Jeremiah Sullivan has recently written an article for Lapham’s Quarterly (Spring 2013), arguing that human beings stand in a psychological continuum with other animals. Sullivan’s article, which is appropriately titled, One of us, reverently concludes that the human mind is but one of a multitude of minds on the animal spectrum: “The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver… This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally – that we possess an animal consciousness.” The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is depicted in the article as the watershed event in history that opened our eyes to this Read More ›

Palaeontologists have been developing some highly sophisticated tools for analysing fossil specimens. Of particular interest are techniques that probe the details of soft tissue preservation. In the research considered here, the 30 mm specimen was found at the Chengjiang lagerstatte locality in southwest China. It had large, claw-like appendages on its head and many jointed legs. It is assigned to the arthropods and thought to be a probable extinct chelicerate. It is referred to as one of the megacherian (meaning “great hand”) species with the genus name Alalcomenaeus. To analyse the soft tissues, a 3-D model of the specimen was produced using a CT-scanner and, at the same time, an X-ray microscope documented the distribution of selected chemical elements. In Read More ›

Here’s a question for neo-Darwinists: “If someone could prove to you that the Earth was ten or even one hundred times younger than the currently accepted figure of 4.54 billion years, would you give up your belief in evolution by natural selection? Or putting it another way, what’s the youngest age that you, as a Darwinian evolutionist, would accept for the age of the Earth? How low would you go?” In my previous post, A hypothetical question for neo-Darwinists, on the age of the earth, I challenged neo-Darwinian evolutionists to provide an estimate (to the nearest order of magnitude) of how much time it should take for evolution by natural selection to generate complex life-forms like ourselves from the earliest Read More ›

  We have been going through a rough patch lately, and this morning I had news of the passing of a friend. My heart is aching and this morning one of my friends related a story I have heard several times about Corrie ten Boom and the “fleas in the barracks.” For those who have not heard the story, Corrie’s family helped Jews escape from Nazi occupied Holland. They were exposed and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and she was the only member of her family to survive. After the war she wrote a book, The Hiding Place, about her experience in which she tells a story about how she hated the fleas in the barracks. Her sister Betsie told Read More ›