Intelligent Design

Douglas and Dine and their co-workers have taken the first steps in finding the statistical rules governing different string vacua. I can’t comment usefully on this, except to say that it wouldn’t hurt in this work if we knew what string theory is. – Nobelist Steven Weinberg, The Nature of Nature , p. 550 A second step? In the same book (which you can win in our most recent contest), ID-friendly cosmologist Bruce Gordon offers a brief explanation, which shows that he doesn’t think much of string theory, any more than anti-ID Weinberg does. Enter the contest or buy the book. Really.

[Contest closed for judging.] Contest judged here.

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ … ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: Read More ›

In “Answering the Dreaded ‘Evolution’ Question” (The American Spectator 6.24.11), Jay Richards and David Klinghoffer explain how politicians can avoid the “speed trap” of the “evolution” question:

Though a president doesn’t have much influence over state and local science education policy, reporters lie in wait for the unwary candidate, ready to pounce with a question he’s poorly prepared to answer yet that is important to millions of voters. Fortunately, there’s a reply that not only avoids the trap but helps advance public understanding.

Oh yes? They suggest:  Read More ›

Granville Sewell’s sin is pointing out the obvious that anyone can understand. This represents a tremendous threat. As David Berlinski has observed, Darwinists — who have invested their worldview and even their careers in Darwinian storytelling — react with understandable hostility when told that their “theory” is simply not credible. It’s really easy to figure out that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection cannot possibly do that with which it is credited. Life is fundamentally based on information and information processing — a software computer program and its associated, highly functionally integrated execution hardware. Computer programs don’t write themselves, and they especially don’t write themselves when random errors are thrown into the code. The fact that biological Read More ›

In 2006, Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer wrote: “We have to wonder why the Intelligent Designer added to our genome junk DNA, repeated copies of useless DNA, orphan genes, tandem repeats, and pseudogenes, none of which are involved directly in the making of a human being. In fact, of the entire human genome, it appears that only a tiny percentage is actively involved in useful protein production, It looks as though Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution.”- Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA, p. 23 Incidentally, at Amazon it’s (10:00 Read More ›

And that’s what matters. Every Darwin myth you’ve ever heard is crammed into David Brooks’ recent happy face novel., The Social Animal (Even so, P.Z. Myers didn’t like it.) But, the curious thing is, notes John Gray in “Mr. Brooks’s Miracle Elixir”, is who did like it: DAVID BROOKS is not the first contributor to the airport book stand to whom our leaders have turned for enlightenment and instruction. In the search for insight on the issues of the day, the politicians who are meant to be guiding us toward a better world have nudged, blinked, pirouetted on tipping points and anxiously pondered the wisdom of crowds. Yet none of these brightly packaged manuals has proved to have the practical Read More ›

(Part 1 here) The Widow’s Mite Fallacy In his debunking of fine-tuning, Stenger has fallen for the “Widow’s Mite Fallacy”. (I know, we all like to name things so we can use a stigma to beat a dogma.) It is explained in Mk 12:42, where Jesus is standing with his disciples near the entrance to the temple and the collection box. It’s one of those trumpet-shaped devices they have in the grocery store that makes the coins fall for a long time, so a good handful of shekels makes a marvellous racket. The donors are being ostentatious with their shekels, when in comes a poor widow–no husband, black outfit, worn sandals–and drops in two copper coins that barely make a Read More ›

In “Evolution to the Rescue: Species May Adapt Quickly to Rapid Environmental Change, Yeast Study Shows” (ScienceDaily, June 23, 2011), we learn:

… according to McGill biology professor, Andrew Gonzalez, the question arises, “Can evolution happen quickly enough to help a species survive?” The answer, according to his most recent study, published in Science, is a resounding yes.
By using a long-armed robot working 24/7 over a period of several of months, McGill Professors Graham Bell and Gonzalez were able to track the fate of over 2000 populations of baker’s yeast for many generations. Yeast was chosen for the experiment because a lot is known about the genetic makeup of this model organism and because it can reproduce in a matter of hours.

[ … ]

What they observed was that the likelihood of evolutionary rescue depended on the severity and rate of change of the environment and the degree of prior exposure of populations to the environmental stressor (salt). The degree of isolation from neighboring populations also affected the capacity of the yeast populations to adapt through the accumulation of beneficial mutations.
Gonzalez and his team were in effect watching evolution at work. And what they discovered is that it can happen surprisingly fast, within 50 to 100 generations.

Then the wheels fell off. Read More ›

They want people to send donations in order to buy the rights to the film from the public auction. The reason given is so they can then release unpublished material, but equally they could prevent future sales of the film. No indicated price is available. http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2011/06/help-talkorigin.html

Here: The conspiracy theorists were busy last month when the Cleveland Cavaliers — spurned by Lebron, desperate for some good fortune, represented by a endearing teenager afflicted with a rare disease — landed the top pick in the NBA Draft. It seemed too perfect for some (not least, Minnesota Timberwolves executive David Kahn) but the odds of that happening were 2.8 percent, almost a lock compared to the odds of Isner-Mahut II. Question: How come it’s legitimate to reason this way in tennis but not in biology? Oh wait, if we start asking those kinds of questions, we’ll be right back in the Middle Ages when they were so ignorant that …

In “Breeding with Neanderthals helped humans go global,” ( New Scientist, 16 June 2011), Michael Marshall tells us, When the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet. The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil. The authors say that half of European HLA-A alleles come from other hominins, as do 72 per cent for Read More ›

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and “multiverses”, and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides no control, it produces no technology, it advances no mathematics, it is a science in name only, because it is Read More ›

Ice man’s last meal: Deer, apparently: Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. – Heather Pringle, “The Iceman’s Last Meal”( ScienceNOW, 20 June 2011)  What if it had been wild goat instead? That’s the frustrating problem with studies of human evolution. Before the literate period, it’s hard to find out what you really want to know. Dying words that give us some sense of the people who spoke them. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

It is best to acknowledge one’s mistakes as promptly as possible, when one makes them. In a recent post, I exposed the identity of one of our more intelligent critics, who was writing under the pseudonym of Mathgrrl. (Update: The next two sentences have been removed, as they mistakenly identified Mathgrrl with another anonymous contributor to Uncommon Descent, on the basis of a remark by the latter contributor which was intended as a joke. Evidently the joke went over my head. My apology to Mathgrrl can be found here.) Some readers were pleased with my outing the individual who was writing under the pseudonym of Mathgrrl. A few others, though, made remarks that forced me to reconsider the wisdom of Read More ›