Intelligent Design

A couple of weeks ago, an interesting article appeared in Scientific American, titled “Evolution Of The Eye.” The subheading of the article makes the bold claim, “Scientists now have a clear vision of how our notoriously complex eye came to be.” Read More>>>

An earlier post yesterday underscored Michele Bachmann’s support of ID. That she supports ID is fine and well. Back in 2005 George W. Bush supported ID in the same terms as Bachmann. But Bush also had as his science adviser “company man” John Marburger (the “company” being Darwinian naturalists).

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Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mathgrrl. Mathgrrl is a New Yorker named _______ ___. He has a chemical engineering degree from M.I.T. Here is an excerpt from his Web page: “As a father, I want my children to get the best education possible and to grow up in a world of opportunity. These goals are being threatened by right-wing fundamentalist creationists, including supporters of Intelligent Design, and by the typically left-wing ‘woo masters’ with their crystals, chakras, and gross abuse of the concepts of quantum mechanics. Both are anti-science and both pose a significant threat to the quality of education in the U.S. Some of the material I provide here is intended to help in some small way to counter these Read More ›

I thought I would pull together all of the links pertinent to my exchange with PZ Myers into one article for ease of navigation: Round 1 I post a series of questions for PZ Myers. PZ Myers responds. Round 2 PZ Myers and I collide in Glasgow (part 1; part 2). PZ Myers (and a guest writer) blogs about our collision (first post; second post). Round 3 I review PZ Myers’ lecture and respond to its scientific content. PZ Myers responds. Round 4 David Klinghoffer weighs in. I respond to PZ Myers’ rebuttal to my review of his lecture.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) got a big boost from obscure nerddom by the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster. Based on real life, the world’s biggest radio telescope in Puerto Rico would permit a few hours every month for listening for aliens, but it really wasn’t very much time, and after a few decades of not hearing anything, despite the absolutely brilliant innovation of having screensavers around the world processing the SETI data with SETI@Home, Arecibo was giving even less time. So the movie wasn’t just a hit with the box-office, it also was a hit for SETI funding, with multi-billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, chipping in a cool $13M to build forty-two 20-foot radio dishes to listen Read More ›

At MSNBC’s “Cosmic Log,” Alan Boyle invites the audience to join a citizen science project to help identify future targets for a NASA interplanetary flyby — in this case, for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. – “Join the search for icy worlds,” (June 21, 2011) Right now, the New Horizons team’s top job is getting ready for the 2015 flyby past Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. But the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, principal investigator for the $700 million mission, said he and his colleagues are already looking for follow-up targets in the Kuiper Belt, the wide disk of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Those targets will have to be selected before the Pluto Read More ›

Here. What if an alien intelligence is calling us from a distant planet and we have the phone off the hook?What if one (or more!) of the Kepler worlds recently discovered are emitting signals RIGHT NOW and we aren’t listening? That would be one heck of a message left on the answering machine. What would it say? From the newsletter: The ATA is a powerful field of 42 linked radio telescopes in Northern California that enable countless avenues of astronomical study, chief among them the search for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and insight into the nature of our cosmic origins. In the wake of a recent funding shortfall, however, this invaluable tool lies dormant and our vision of the universe Read More ›

The American Journal of Physics article by Daniel Styer which was offered as a “concise refutation” to my Applied Mathematics Letters article by the blogger whose letter apparently triggered the withdrawal of my AML article is possibly the dumbest work ever published by a major physics journal. To demonstrate how absurd the logic in this article is, I wrote a little satire ( here ) which extends Styer’s attempts to quantitatively demonstrate that the decrease in entropy of the universe due to biological evolution is easily “compensated” by the increase in the “cosmic microwave background”, to the game of poker.

I submitted this satire to the American Journal of Physics this morning, just to see what reason they would give for not wanting to correct the errors in the Styer piece. As cynical as I have become, I still was not prepared for this answer, which I received a few hours later:

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check her ID: On Friday, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — incredibly, a Presidential front-runner for the Republicans — said this: I support intelligent design […] What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides. Why is that incredible? Most Americans, in poll after poll, find Darwinism unbelievable. So they should fund it? Sponsor persecutions on its behalf? Note: UD News can’t help the fact that an entire field in science is having a collective nervous breakdown about the idea that anyone would question their total devotion to Read More ›

Editor’s note: ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law’’

An article, ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law,’’ by Dr. Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at University of Texas at El Paso, was submitted on October 21, 2010 to the Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters. Dr. Sewell’s article was peerreviewed and accepted for publication on January 19, 2011.

On March 2, 2011, the Editor-in-Chief of Applied Mathematics Letters, Dr. Ervin Rodin, decided to withdraw the articlewithout consultation with the author, not because of any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors,but because the Editor-in-Chief subsequently concluded that the content was more philosophical than mathematical and, as such, not appropriate for a technical mathematics journal such as Applied Mathematics Letters.

The Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters and its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rodin, provide their sincere and heartfelt apologies to Dr. Sewell for any inconvenience or embarrassment that may have been caused by their unilateral withdrawal of his article, and wish Dr. Sewell the best in the future and welcome Dr. Sewell’s submission of future articles for possible publication.

Dr. Sewell’s article as accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters can be viewed at:

http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf.

It is on line, but it’s only free if you have a science direct subscription.

Further:

Breaking, breaking: ID friendly math prof gets apology and damages from journal Read More ›

In Gil’s recent ANNOUNCEMENT thread, Dr Liddle has made a summary of her core challenge to design thinkers, at no 6:

One of the few books of Stephen Jay Gould I never read was his Mismeasure of Man. I suppose it was a low priority – as I have never considered cranial capacity a measure of intelligence or state of advancement. This is partly because of an awareness that women tend to have smaller skulls than men and yet this has no bearing on their cognitive skills. I knew that Gould was taking Samuel George Morton to task because Morton had considered cranial capacity to be significant for ranking human races in some sort of hierarchical order. Gould considered that Morton provided a case study of someone who had “finangled” his data and his analysis to reach unwarranted conclusions. His 1978 Read More ›

Remember, autism was – one author claims – a useful adaptation in “evolutionary history”?

Caroline Crocker at AITSE discusses that in the most recent newsletter, after addressing the theories of autism’s cause that are worth taking seriously:

Jared is writing his first paper as a doctoral candidate and so, should be given credit for a very imaginative hypothesis. But, his professors should be held accountable for their lamentable lack of guidance. The young man then goes on to bury himself even deeper in the evolutionary psychology mumbo jumbo and begins to compare the behavior of those with ASDs with that of orangutans and the behavior of non-autistics with that of chimpanzees. He does give a disclaimer on page 221, saying that “no offense is intended towards autistic individuals in this comparison with orangutans,” but by then the reader is finding it hard to focu on his meaning for laughing at this poor student’s politically correct squirming. 

[Most people looking for answers are pretty desperate, and don’t appreciate this kind of thing.] Read More ›

Here at Listverse. Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3) The author’s thesis is: On the list because: It fuels fundamentalist attacks on Science By arguing against aspects of Darwin’s theories, this book has given fuel to the fundamentalists who argue that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is the only possible manner in which the earth was created. Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true. The book itself was not peer reviewed as Behe claimed under oath, and the Science community has overwhelming rejected it. It should be noted that Behe himself is not Read More ›