Intelligent Design

A friend pointed out that over at the Khan Academy, Salman Khan, while assuring his students he is not taking sides, seems to have been channeling such luminaries as John Ray and Alfred Wallace as he informs them that god would never design or create the particulars of this world. Khan—who has four degrees from MIT and Harvard and is certain that evolution and its natural selection created the entire biological world—assures the viewer that “You can ask any engineer” and they will tell you that simple laws underlying a complex design, as exemplified by the Mandelbrot set, is the better way. Of course non of this comes directly from Ray or Wallace—what this illustrates is not a homologous doctrine, Read More ›

It’s 1859 and Charles Darwin has just discovered a modern computer, transported back in time to his era. He turns it on. With a microscope he discovers a Core i7 920 CPU. Upon more investigation he discovers that it has approximately 781 million transistors. The computer has a terabyte drive, with an operating system that was compiled from more than 50 million lines of intelligently designed computer code. In my time-travel thought experiment, Darwin is transported into our contemporary era. Much to his amazement, he discovers that modern science has revealed that the simplest living cell is far more complex and sophisticated than the computer he discovered in 1859. What would Darwin do?

When I explained how astronomically unlikely protein evolution is, a professor complained that I had it all wrong. When he saw evolution’s ridiculously long odds he figured I must be assuming that the entire protein sequence space must be randomly sampled to yield functional proteins.  Read more

This post is my personal attempt to reconcile recent statements made by Barry Arrington and Eric Holloway, regarding whether or not a supernatural Designer is required in order to produce a living thing. The claim I am putting forward here is that there are four levels of inquiry in Intelligent Design: (1) Which patterns in Nature can be identified, through a process of scientific investigation, as the work of intelligent agents? That is, which patterns in Nature can be shown to have intelligent agents as their proximate causes? (2) Which of the patterns identified in (1) can be shown to have been caused by intelligent agents outside the observable universe? (3) For which of the patterns identified in (2) as Read More ›

There seems to be a lot of chatter on the news and the Internet about the candidates’ beliefs about origins. While many in the media are using this as a test of scientific savvy (and a way to discredit people they don’t like), I think there are deeper reasons why the question of origins is important to an election.
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Although for many years I was a classical concert pianist, I was raised by a wonderful father, who is the most brilliant scientist I have ever known, and he imparted to me a love of science. My love of mathematics and science never left me, and my superb education in these disciplines has benefited me well, since I now earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace R&D. The first experience I had with computational search algorithms involved AI games theory, which you can read about here. Brute (but intelligently designed) computational force can do some interesting things (and even elegant things, as you can discover from my perfect-play endgame databases), but only in domains with restricted search horizons, Read More ›

At the turn of the 19th century, Darwinism was dealt a harsh blow due to the discovery of Mendel’s work on genetics. The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium, among other such consequences, flowing from this newly minted science, dramatically pointed to the limitations that Mendel’s theory represented vis-a-vis Darwinism.

Darwinists, ever religiously motivated to come up with rationalizations, found a cudgel—through the work of neo-Darwinists—with which to fight back against the discovery of genes.

A new century. New discoveries. New challenges.

In a paper just published in Science, the authors present the findings of their work on the ‘lab-rat’ of plant studies, Arabidopsis thaliana which show the profound, if not defining, influence that epigenetics can have on “evolution”.

Here’s the link.

One quote that I love:

Ecker said the results of the study provide some of the first evidence that the epigenetic code can be rewritten quickly and to dramatic effect. “This means that genes are not destiny,” he said. “If we are anything like these plants, our epigenome may also undergo relatively rapid spontaneous change that could have a powerful influence on our biological traits.”

I have been arguing here for years that the environment has to be involved in some kind of triggering event for gene ‘turn-ons/turn-offs’. How else to explain “cecal valves” developing in a lizard living alone on an island in the Adriatic in only thirty or so years. (Here’s the link)

But there’s more.
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While evolutionists consistently state that evolution is a fact beyond all reasonable doubt, the empirical evidence consistently states otherwise. One can see examples of this in the scientific journals, where articles assume evolution is true from the beginning, but then also present the scientific evidence which point in the other direction. It is interesting to see this manifestation of science versus religion buried in the depths of research papers. Here is one paper that tries to explain how evolution works, but must admit that “we know little about the fundamental principles of phenotypic variability that permit new phenotypes to arise.”  Read more

Denis Venema wants to explain evolution to evangelical Christians because he doesn’t think it is understand sufficiently. But he asks us to use our imagination and avoids a carefully modelled defence of evolution. If that is the best Darwinists can do then is it any wonder that many of us reject it? See: Venema Understanding Evolution: An Introduction to Populations and Speciation Firstly, Venema follows the common evolutionary practice of presenting evidence for evolution by focussing upon the micro changes and then extrapolating without evidence to the macro evolutionary scale by assuming it happens by similar means. But the micro changes, such as that of his exampled stickleback fish, are simply uncontested even by young earth creationists, but what is Read More ›

The point of UD’s contest (“UD Puts up $1,000 Prize“) is to demonstrate in a practical way that design theory does not depend upon a suspension of natural law (i.e., supernatural miracles). Once again, here is the contest: “UD hereby offers a $1,000 prize to anyone who is able to demonstrate that the design of a living thing by an intelligent agent necessarily requires a supernatural act (i.e., the suspension of the laws of nature).” Now it should be obvious that a materialist cannot win the contest. Materialists believe that living things “appear” to be designed. As Richard Dawkins wrote, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” However, materialists Read More ›