Intelligent Design

At Creation-Evolution Headlines, we hear that the story that bird flight evolved from “flap running” has been resurrected in the pop science media. Must be summer. (“Flap Over Flight Evolution” (June 26, 2011):

This just-so story is so lame, it should be a huge embarrassment to the Darwin Party. These guys don’t understand evolutionary theory at all. You can’t draw analogies between chick development to adult bird in a year, and say a similar transition occurs in evolutionary time over millions of years. Chick development is encoded in DNA and in numerous epigenetic regulatory codes, and is observable in the present. Are they believers in some mystical meta-Gaia belief, that the history of the life on Earth develops from embryo to adult? This hypothesis is a cross between Lamarckism and recapitulation theory, both of which have been tossed into the dustbin of history. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Here’s a pigeon flap running:

Some think flap running is a consequence of already having feathered wings. Would a penguin improve its speed on land by waving its flippers about?

In a familiar play for the popular Darwin market, the theory adds discarded ideas as a cook adds ingredients to a spoiled soup.

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The above challenge has been thrown down, in rather intemperate language accompanied by more outing misbehaviour.

It is revelatory on the depth of ignorance cultivated by the imposed dominance of evolutionary materialism via its cat’s paw, so-called methodological naturalism, in science education.

First, as was pointed out in the post on Plato’s warning on the amorality and ruthless factionism of evolutionary materialism day before yesterday,  Plato is one of the first to record the rise of evolutionary materialism as a worldview of origins and the nature of reality. In so doing, he plainly showed that the roots of such a view are philosophical rather than scientific, and in fact“evo mat” is thus shown to have the functionally equivalent status of a religion.

And yes, that means that the de facto establishment of evolutionary materialism in the public square and key institutions is tantamount to an undeclared establishment of the functional equivalent of a religion.

An issue that is already plainly of grave import.

This vid is a comic rip on the theme of Darwinian atheist Richard Dawkins framed as coward for refusing to debate Christian apologist William Lane Craig, on a United Kingdom speaking tour:

Voiceover: “It’s not often that one atheist accuses another of cowardice for refusing to debate a Christian; it’ even rarer when both are Oxford dons. Richard Dawkins is facing that accusation because he has turned down an offer to debate a man regarded by many as the world’s leading defender of Christian belief.”

The vid comes from sources partial to Craig, of course, but features many voiceovers from Dawkins, giving his reasons, as well as links below. Read More ›

The headline says it all: “Environs Prompt Advantageous Gene Mutations as Plants Grow; Changes Passed to Progeny.” It could also have read: “Lamarck Was Correct, Evolution is False.” Of course this is not new news. For the umpteenth time we hear about the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the catch phrase most often associated with the pre Darwin naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—which evolutionists desperately opposed for so many years until it could no longer be suppressed so now they say it was their idea all along. Yes there is indeed a battle against science, it’s just not the one evolutionists want you to believe.  Read more

When I was in college I studied classical piano with Istvan Nadas who was a Hungarian concert pianist and a student of Bela Bartok. Istvan was a miraculous survivor of one of Hitler’s death camps. The stories he told me still haunt me to this day. The commandant of the death camp liked to play Bach over the loudspeaker system while he had random inmates shot or hung, just for fun and entertainment. Nadas told me about the horror of listening to Bach while he watched his fellow inmates being machine-gunned to death in front of him. Nadas told me, “I knew every note of that music and could play it on the piano, but I also knew that if Read More ›

David Penny, the New Zealand evolutionary biologist at New Zealand’s Massey University who is trying to save Darwinism by claiming that Darwin attached no importance to the Tree of Life is, it must be said, one convinced Darwinist. In “20 Points on the structure and testability of Darwin’s theory” ( Biology International: Evolution in Action, September 2010), he explains,

Darwin’s theory of evolution is analyzed, firstly as the three major areas of microevolutionary processes, macroevolution, and the sufficiency of microevolutionary processes for macroevolution. The overall theory is then divided into 20 components, each of which has been thoroughly tested. A conclusion is that microevolution is simply inevitable; there is no way that we could stop, for example, the evolution of RNA viruses. Nor do we find well studied areas where microevolution is not able to account for macroevolution, though this is still an active area of research. 

What to make of that last sentence? Read More ›

A terrible thing happened to me some years ago.  I ached so badly I lay down on the floor and cried and cried great heaving sobs of anguish, and as I gasped for breath between my sobs I repeated one word over and over, “why? why? why?” 

Why indeed?  When terrible things happen, whether a personal tragedy such as my own or a natural disaster in which hundreds of thousands perish, we seem compelled to ask, “Why did God let this happen?”  Before answering this question let me discuss two extreme and equally erroneous answers to the question from two opposite schools of thought.  One school I will call the “sadistic maniac” school and the other I will call the “amiable bumbler” school. 

The sadistic maniac school asserts that God actually causes horrible things to happen in order to accomplish his purposes.  Read More ›

Earlier today, we were discussing Massey University (New Zealand) evolutionary biologist’s attempt to jam non-Darwinian processes into Darwinism. Because, essentially, if Darwinism means what it has meant in the last 50 years (the Tree of Life), it is not true. So Darwinism must now incorporate material that Darwinists would otherwise reject, so that at least something about it can be true.

Friends write to say that we can expect many more articles like this in the near future, for example

a new Open Access article by Maureen O’Malley and Eugene Koonin: Read More ›

Here. Why, that is, it would make more sense if it wasn’t designed. A friend has asked UD readers, on a pleasant summer evening, to count the fallacies in the video. Rube shouts in: Name one healthy body part you’re sure you’d be better off without.

OK let’s try this again. One more time, this time with pictures. In their celebrated volume  Blueprints, evolutionists Maitland Edey and Donald Johanson argued that “What God did is a matter for faith and not for scientific inquiry. The two fields are separate. If our scientific inquiry should lead eventually to God … that will be the time to stop science.” Similarly for evolutionist Niles Eldredge, the key responsibility of science—to predict—becomes impossible when a capricious Creator is entertained:  Read more

I’m generally happy to answer questions from anyone, if I think they’re interesting enough. Recently the following seven questions were brought to my attention. I thought they merited a response, so here goes. The answers given below are my own; readers are free to disagree if they wish.

1. Does a spider web, a bee hive, a mole burrow, a bird nest, a termite mound, or a beaver dam have “biological function”, and do they have “information”?
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Thanks to a kind donor, we can sponsor an essay contest this summer.

We’ve all heard what the effect would be of accepting design as a cause in nature alongside of law and chance: Science hurtles back to the dark ages, fascism wipes out democracy, Armageddon arrives, and – worst of all – people who question Darwinism keep their jobs. Change the channel, and that’s just not happening.

So let’s look at real-world consequences. Here’s the question: How would acceptance of design, alongside law and chance, as a fundamental cause in nature change the way we do science?

Eligible entrants: High school, college, or university undergrads, worldwide.

Prizes: $200 first prize, $100 second prize

And people are talking about it. In this vid and pdf from his lecture at the university’s Graham School (October 2010), he lays out his thinking:

4. The DNA record tells us that major steps in genome evolution have involved rapid genome-wide changes.5. We know of molecular processes that allow us to think scientifically about complex evolutionary events – particularly about the rapid evolution of genomic circuits
and multi-component adaptations.

As author of Evolution: A view from the 21st century, he has also said at Fermilab (2010) that arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins “lives in a world of fantasy,” stressing as above that “evolutionary theory needs mechanisms for very rapid, coordinated change.”
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In his book Evidence and Evolution Elliott Sober chastised those silly creationists for deducing that god created the species. “If this simple formula were enough to explain the observations in question,” the evolutionary philosopher warned, “there would be no need for science. Not only would Darwin’s own theory be unnecessary; there would be no need for theories in any other area of science, either.” Darwin’s theory unnecessary? Unthinkable. The “god did it” hypothesis is strictly unscientific. In fact Sober applauds Darwin’s refutation of creationism in proving evolution. In a PNAS paper Sober writes:  Read more