Intelligent Design

Here at UD we have been discussing first principles over the last several weeks, and those discussions came to mind when I read about the recent paper After-birth Abortion:  Why Should the Baby Live?, in which Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue in good Nazi fashion that some newborn babies have Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”). In this article Gabby Speach makes all kinds of philosophical arguments against the Giubilini/Minerva thesis.  Unfortunately, while in the main I agree with Ms. Speach, her article is all but useless and will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.  Why?  Because she is trying to argue for first principles and that is a losing proposition.  First principles must be accepted as self-evident.  They are the foundation upon Read More ›

The BSC4 gene inSaccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker’s yeast, was interesting to researchers because of its leaky stop codon but then it became more interesting because it only showed up in that one particular organism. The BSC4 gene is yet another example of a species-specific, orde novo, protein-coding gene. In this case, the protein appears to be involved in DNA repair and helping the organisms cope with nutrient-poor environments. And if this protein is anything like a typical protein, then evolution, even by the evolutionist’s own reckoning, would not be able to construct such low-probability designs. The BSC4 gene must have been constructed in only the past 10 million years or so. And evolutionists cannot appeal to speculative mechanisms. No exon shuffling, Read More ›

Remember all those unique human hearing genes that evolutionists said must have undergone “accelerated” evolution because of human language, but then similar genes showed up in the gorilla too? Evolutionists had to conclude that not only was there accelerated evolution, but amazingly it must have occurred in parallel, in both the human and gorilla lineages. So if human language was the reason for the accelerated evolution in the human lineage, the cause in the gorilla lineage was “entirely different, but as-yet-unknown.”  Read more