Intelligent Design

As you read these words a frenzy of activity is taking place as the light entering your eye triggers a highly detailed sequence of actions, ultimately causing a signal to be sent to your brain. In fact, even a mere single photon can be detected in your vision system. It all starts with a photon interacting with a light-sensitive chromophore molecule known as retinal. The interaction alters the retinal molecule and this, in turn, influences the large, trans-membrane opsin protein to which the chromophore is attached. This is just the beginning of the cellular signal transduction cascade. In the next step the opsin causes the activation of hundreds of transducin molecules. These, in turn, cause the activation of cGMP phosphodiesterase Read More ›

Here, at Telic Thoughts (posted June 17, 2011) is an interview (vid) with University of Otago biochemist Michael Denton. Not an ID guy exactly, he wrote Evolution: A theory in crisis (1986) and Nature’s Destiny (2002), providing a comprehensive look at evolution without Darwinism. A floodlight at last.

Many people first became interested in the fundamental question – Darwinism and “science” vs. evidence and real science – from reading Denton – including Phillip Johnson, who first brought the ID guys together to ask the key question … and so now? Read More ›

Move over, Professor Richard Dawkins. Atheism has a new champion.

Dave Mullenix has recently come up with not one but two philosophical arguments for atheism. Mullenix’s arguments, unlike Dawkins’, aren’t based on inductive inference, but on the unassailable facts that (i) a certain minimal amount of information (usually several bits) is required to represent a proper name; and (ii) a very large amount of information is required to represent all of the rules we follow, when speaking a language. Any Being that knows your name must be able to keep your name in its mind. That means its mind must be able to store more than one bit, so it can’t be the simple God of classical theism. Moreover, any Being that knows all the rules of a language (as God does, being omniscient) must be extremely complex – much more so than the first cell, say. And if it’s very complex, then its own existence is inherently even more unlikely than that of the living creatures whose existence it is supposed to explain.

I believe in addressing arguments for atheism head-on, especially good ones, so here goes.

Commenting in response to a question which I had previously posed to Dr. Elizabeth Liddle, “Why does a mind require something brain-like?”, Dave Mullenix argued as follows:
Read More ›

To support discussion at the ongoing design inference thread, I briefly clip my briefing note, on the Trevors-Abel FSC concept, a way to visualise CSI: Read More ›

In response to onward use of the talking points that CSI is not calculable etc., I have updated the CSI Newsflash post of April 14, 2011, to explicitly incorporate the dummy variable for specificity, and by adding a 1,000 coin demonstration calculation to go with the already existing use of the Durston et al calculation of FSC that was fed into three cases of a biologically relevant Chi_500 value.

I show the clip below: Read More ›

Biologist and author Norbert Smith has never been a fan of Darwinism, and Evolution has Failed is his latest assessment. One of his areas of considerable experience is alligators, because his job included tagging them:

Having done well in electronics in the Air Force, Smith was interested in using telemetry on submerged alligators. He developed greatly improved telemetry equipment for monitoring rattlesnakes. He then acquired a large alligator at the Welder Refuge, fitted it with a collar, and released it into Big Lake.He was attempting to test the way in which alligators regulate their body heat (thermoregulation) for his MS thesis. To do this he would follow the alligator for days, observing it from a blind or, when necessary, from a boat.

A great deal was riding on the experiment because, contrary to the widely accepted “reptilian brain” theory of intelligence, the alligator is intelligent. Once escaped, it is gone … hard to recapture. Read More ›

When Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution one of the main objections was that he had no credible explanation for how biology, with its many designs and intricacies, could have arisen on its own. Darwin’s main argument, for which he presented many powerful evidences, was that biology did not appear to be designed. From its different patterns to its inefficiencies, the design perspective seemed to be badly failing. But this leaves us with evolution in name only. What were the details? How did the world of biology arise on its own? Inefficient or not, biology nonetheless was not trivial. How could it have evolved?  Read more

In “Making Stories Visible The Task for Bioethics Commissions” (Issues in Science and Technology 27/2), Meera Lee Sethi and Adam Briggle explore claims made for science finds – under the banner, “Critical skepticism is always appropriate”: blockquote> Narrative explanations can help us understand difficult scientific issues, but they can also mislead us. Critical skepticism is always appropriate. Read More ›

Jonathan Wells’ The Myth of Junk DNA, is a well-written book that manages to accomplish two separate tasks: to silence the Darwinists who had claimed that recent genomic discoveries supported their dystopic version of The Signature in the Cell; and to bring all of us up-to-date on the breath-taking mysteries being decoded from this most ancient script. He begins by picking up where Stephen Meyer left off, telling us that within each cell is this memory chip, this software program that directs everything we are and ever meant to be. When Watson and Crick decoded the DNA, there was great expectation that soon we would find the gene to every talent and attribute we had ever wished we had been Read More ›

Marvin Olasky at Townhall.com has written an essay with this title. Here are a few excerpts: Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the “Newtonian” view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government should be “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” … Evolutionary thinking influenced not only Social Darwinists but socialists like H.G. Wells who thought it was time to advance beyond competitive enterprise. (Karl Marx in Das Kapital called Darwin’s Read More ›

That’s Adam Hanft on the recent The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden, who writes at Barnes & Noble Reviews (June 27, 2011):

Disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral psychology to evolutionary biology have created a new cranial transparency that’s unleashed a gush of books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Ron Brafman; Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein; and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic and Work and at Home by Dan Ariely. (I interviewed Dan about his book for the Barnes & Noble Review.)David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, and the author of The Accidental Mind, adds to this emerging, solipsistic genre with The Compass of Pleasure, a book that focuses entirely on how our brains pursue and process pleasure.

That one word “solipsistic” is  a bullet through the forehead of a writer. More telling: Read More ›

We’ve been looking at Victor Stenger’s claim that fine-tuning is a fallacy. In part one, we looked at the two fundamental metaphysical theories of the universe–materialist and theist–recognizing how materialists have been losing ground by being forced to admit to a creation, making multiverse-theory a rear-guard action covering their retreat, which attempts to turn the unwanted creator into an impersonal force. In part two, we discussed the Widow’s Mite fallacy where Stenger uses physical units for a metaphysical property, which like Jesus’ disciples, mistakes a physical quantity for a metaphysical one. The most obvious difference between the two is that physical quantities have units, whereas metaphysical ones are unitless. But in addition, metaphysical quantities are percentages, integrals, they involve a Read More ›

Over at PhysOrg.com, there’s a new news item about a computer program that was run simulating evolutionary characteristics. What’s interesting about it are two things: (1) who the people are that are running this program, and (2) one of the results—which is being downplayed, it would seem. First, one of the people associated with this new program is Christoph Adami, who, with others, gave us the touted “Avida” evolutionary algorithm. So, this isn’t just anybody doing this simulation. Second, here’s what the lead author had to say: “These fitness landscapes simply could not be traversed with mutations that did not interact.” This wasn’t a ‘main conclusion’ of the study; however, I don’t know about you, but this sounds to me Read More ›