Intelligent Design

The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. Read More>>>

By comparing successive versions of Granville Sewell’s finite element program PDE2D (video here ), NCSE scientists have uncovered overwhelming evidence (from homology, etc.) that current versions evolved from a common ancester. The evidence is so overwhelming, in fact, that the competing theory of intelligent design has been abandoned by all serious scientists. “That Sewell’s software is the product of 35 years of evolution is now beyond debate,” said an NCSE spokesperson. “Only minor issues such as the mechanism of evolution are still being debated.” (For a modest proposal on how the two competing theories might be reconciled, see this or this, or the video here.)

In “Kinky genes: Biophysics of DNA affects how it works” (New Scientist, 08 July 2011), MacGregor Campbell reports DNA is typically a long double-helical strand that can expose its sequences of base pairs. These are translated by RNA and particles called ribosomes into proteins, which do the cell’s work. When not in use, DNA wraps around structural proteins called histones to form compact chromosomes. This wrapping is poorly understood, but one thing we do know is that it plays a key role in gene expression. Histones have up to 1000 times greater attraction for some DNA subsequences than others, but why this should be was a mystery.

I write this post from a hotel room in Livermore, California, home of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where my company has sent me for advanced training in computational fluid dynamics using LS-DYNA, arguably the most advanced finite element analysis program ever devised, originally at LLNL in the 1970s for the development and analysis of variable-yield nuclear weapons. I have a particular interest in LLNL because my father worked on the Manhattan A-bomb Project during WWII, and was the founder and director of an experimental nuclear reactor at Washington State University, which has been named in his honor. Here is some info from the LLNL website: For more than half a century, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has applied cutting-edge science and Read More ›

Evolutionists say they just don’t know how to discern miracles. They might begin by looking at a protein. Proteins, according to science, are not likely to have evolved. And when I say “not likely,” I mean the chances are astronomically against such evolution. I may as well simply say: Proteins, according to science, did not evolve. To review, very briefly, here are some of the reasons:  Read more

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, offers his reason for reading Jacques “Chance alone is at the source ofevery innovation” Monod:

Some of the most useful books are written by people we don’t agree with. Francis Crick is another. After the double helix and his Nobel Prize in 1962, his position was impregnable and he could say whatever he liked without fear of losing grants. Read More ›

Here. According to a source, round the 45 minute mark, she says U.S. courts have ruled that teachers cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. Then she says:

46:29 Okay, what else can you not do? I have a little asterisk here. You cannot teach evidence against evolution. There have been some court decisions that have talked about this including Kitzmiller, but there has not been a really clean test of this idea of teaching evidence against evolution. …

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Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne is currently engaged in a very gentlemanly debate with ex-Anglican priest Eric McDonald on the meaning and existence of free will. Eric McDonald has opened with a very thoughtful article entitled, Free Will: A First, Very Tentative Step. Today, I’d like to focus on the first part of Professor Coyne’s extended reply to Eric McDonald. This post is an especially interesting one, as it not only reveals scientists’ real reasons for accepting determinism, but their reasons for accepting naturalism as well. I shall attempt to show that in both cases, scientists who accept these “isms” are not thinking rationally: they are guilty of making an illict extrapolation which is not warranted by the available evidence. Additionally, I will argue the case for scientific naturalism is built on the romantic myth that for the past 2,500 years, science has been continually enlarging the range of phenomena known to be naturally explicable, leaving fewer and fewer phenomena unexplained. I shall then put forward an alternative metric of progress in science, in place of the one proposed by Professor Coyne. Finally, I will conclude my essay by drawing a contrast between Coyne’s illicit extrapolation to scientific naturalism and another famous extrapolation in the history of science which everyone accepts as legitimate: Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.

Let’s return to Professor Coyne’s debate with Eric McDonald on free will. In his opening article, Eric McDonald highlights a critical flaw in Coyne’s scientific case against free will: scientists haven’t put forward any arguments in defence of determinism. McDonald anticipates a response that Professor Coyne might make, and then explains why he regards this response as unsatisfactory:
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I’m on vacation so I haven’t had time to watch this, but I thought it looked interesting enough to share. Apparently, this year there was a debate on whether or not a theory of everything is possible. See here:

At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski introduces her father, mathematician David Berlinski, asking Why Haven’t Our Great Expectations of the Sciences Been Met? Claire Berlinski, Ed. (Jun. 14, 2011): My father reflects upon the expectations he once held for scientific inquiry and what he imagined we would know in the year 2011. We find ourselves, he says, without the unifying, powerful theories he expected to see by now.  Instead, he suggests, we’re in “slack-jawed perplexity.” John Horgan has voiced similar ideas, especially in The End of Science, and earned his share of grief for it.

Newsweek here.

Also: Rick Mcginnis reviews the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times (Landmark Report Jul 09, 2011), recounting,

Subtitled “A Year Inside The New York Times,” Andrew Rossi’s film begins at the paper’s printing plant, the camera following huge rolls of newsprint on their way to becoming the next morning’s edition of the Times. This is the physical incarnation of institutions like the New York Times, with their insistence on remaining once daily, pulp-and-ink, top heavy, capital intensive operations in a digital age without deadlines or time zones, where a billion-dollar enterprise with lovely new offices in midtown Manhattan can be scooped by a blog published from a laptop in a coffee shop.

Like here, for example. And countless other places.  Read More ›

The standard argument against free will is that it is incoherent.  It claims that a free agent must either be determined or non-determined.  If the free agent is determined, then it cannot be responsible for its choices.  On the other hand, if it is non-determined, then its choices are random and uncontrolled.  Neither case preserves the notion of responsibility that proponents of free will wish to maintain.  Thus, since there is no sensible way to define free will, it is incoherent. [1]

Note that this is not really an argument against free will, but merely an argument that we cannot talk about free will.  So, if someone were to produce another way of talking about free will the argument is satisfied.

Does ID help us in this case?  It appears so.  If we relabel “determinism” and “non-determinism” as “necessity” and “chance”, ID shows us that there is a third way we might talk about free will. Read More ›

Cornelius Hunter just posted a wonderful blog about the “debate” between Newton and Laplace about the origin of the solar system. Newton remained a committed Deist theist to his dying day, believing that God created the planets in their orbits, but had to fix them occasionally to keep them in line. Laplace, on the other hand, “had no need for that hypothesis” and in the original “god-of-the-gaps” argument, reduced God’s job requirements by one. No, make that two, because Laplace (1796) also formulated a “Nebular Hypothesis” explanation of the creation of the solar system, so God didn’t actually have to create the planets either. Immanuel Kant really liked that nebular hypothesis, and wrote quite a long treatise on it early Read More ›

Here is a Nature News Feature that speaks volumes about the state of evolutionary theory. It explains how the Human Genome project and high throughput technologies have revealed levels of complexity evolutionists hadn’t even dreamed of. It is yet another monumental failure of evolutionary theory, even though we all know evolution is a fact.  Read more

Thomas Cudworth in his post here referenced “…being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.” My question is, What does it mean to be “competent” in the field of evolutionary biology? It seems to me that it would mean providing hard empirical evidence that the mechanism of random variation/mutation and natural selection which is known to exist (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance) can be extrapolated to explain the highly functionally integrated information-processing machinery of the cell — at a very minimum! This empirical demonstration should be a prerequisite, before we even begin to entertain speculation about how this mechanism produced body plans and the human brain. Yet, the theoretically most “highly competent” evolutionary biologists never even attempt to address this requirement. Read More ›