Intelligent Design

From “Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: ‘Humans Are Just Modified Fish’” ScienceDaily (October 7, 2011), we learn: “We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs,” said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal’s body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the Read More ›

The UK Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID) director, Dr. Alastair Noble, has published a new report on the C4ID website. He writes, I participated in a series of short interviews on Sunday 25th September on a number of BBC Local Radio stations with James Williams, a lecturer in Science Education at the University of Sussex. The theme of the interviews was the recent statement from some 30 scientists, including Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, demanding that, among other things, intelligent design (ID) be banned from discussion in schools as a scientific proposition[1]. Williams has subsequently blogged about the encounter at WordPress.com.[2] Both in the interviews and in his blog, Williams is significantly confused about ID.  The current misrepresentation of Read More ›

If the Physics Nobel went for a metaphysical theory weakly supported by data, the Chemistry Nobel went for strongly supported data that undermined a bad metaphysical theory. The two prizes could not have been more different than night and day. First let’s try to understand the metaphysics that underpins chemistry, and its subtle message about materialist reductionism. (I”m a physicist, so I’m bound to get the nuance wrong since I don’t work in a chemistry but I had organic chem in college and a course on solid state physics taught by a crystallographer in grad school, and since the topic of the Nobel is crystallography, I thought at least I’d get the physics right). Let’s start with the history. Now Read More ›

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone expects the Nobel Peace prize to be a joke. For one thing, the Norwegians who select it are elected officials,I mean what else would you expect from a professional politician? But the Nobel prize in Physics is awarded by the Swedes. It is supposed to be for lifetime achievement, which explains why the Medicine Nobel was given to a fellow who up and died two days before. (No, they aren’t taking it back from his widow.) So you would think the Physics prize would go to a whitehaired professor with baggy trousers and leather elbow patches on his jacket. I mean a whole pile of previous Nobel prize winners vote on Read More ›

UPDATE: Cf the update here.