Intelligent Design

My motorcycle gang (think “Wild Hogs”) planned to ride up to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Memorial Day weekend, but the forecast was for cold and rain, so we called an audible and headed south through the deserts and mountains of northern New Mexico. On the way down we made a detour to see the motorcycle rally at Red River. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we approached the center of town, which was crammed with literally thousands of motorcycles of every shape and hue and their equally colorful riders. We headed out of Red River along the winding mountain roads towards Taos, and as I glided around a curve a few miles from town I saw Read More ›

“Seriously, aren’t atheists ashamed of P.Z. Myers, asks Reb Moshe Averick (the “maverick”rabbi and author of The Confused, Illusory World of the Atheist), for The Allgemeiner (May 29, 2011):

One of my mentors, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, (of blessed memory), made the following, rather sobering, observation about human nature: “Nobody ever allowed something as trivial as facts and logic to interfere with their agenda. If the facts and logic don’t fit, then the facts and logic will just have to fend for themselves.” Nowhere do we find more glaring examples of the human predilection for intellectual corruption than when we examine the writings and lectures of an ideologue who is driven, not by a burning desire for truth, but by a burning desire to further his or her own agenda.

Having said that, we are now ready to introduce one of the more zealous and outspoken (read: tiresome and obnoxious) advocates of the Darwinian/atheist worldview, P.Z. Myers. Read More ›

Evolutionists say undirected, random events, such as mutations, accumulated to create the entire biological world. An analogy once used for this claim is that of a room full of monkeys pounding away at typewriters and producing Hamlet. Today the analogy needs to be updated from typewriters to computer keyboards, but otherwise remains apropos. When the letters are selected at random, a page (or screen) full of text is going to be meaningless. And the problem is no easier in the biological world. Whether English prose or molecular sequences, the problem is that there are relatively few meaningful sequences in an astronomically large volume of possibilities. Nor does selection help because the smallest sequence that could be selected—such as a small Read More ›

Arguing with Darwinists is like trying to teach calculus to people who have not yet mastered arithmetic. kairosfocus has an excellent presentation here. This is the kind of stuff Darwinists dismiss with a shrug of the shoulder while proclaiming that the Darwinian mechanism could have done it, and furthermore must have done it, because there is no other alternative. My AI checkers program is approximately 65,000 lines of C code, with more lines than that required to compute the endgame databases. (By the way, it’s the coolest checkers program ever, and it’s available for free. You can even download the mega-version if you have enough bandwidth and patience. In addition, you can download a paper I and my colleague wrote Read More ›

Image courtesy of Hans Hillewaert and Wikipedia.

The recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is one of Professor Jerry Coyne’s favorite pieces of evidence for evolution. It is also the topic of a recent post of his on Why Evolution is True. Professor Coyne is certainly right about one thing: the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is relevant to the debate on Intelligent Design. However, Professor Coyne’s argument (which has also been recently made by Professor Richard Dawkins) that the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is poorly designed has already been dissected and thoroughly refuted by Casey Luskin here, here, here, and here, and by the geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lonnig in his online article, The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe: Does it Prove Evolution? so I will not comment any further on it here.

In today’s post, I’m going to briefly outline the evidence for intelligent design in the giraffe.
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In “Critics take aim at NASA ‘arsenic life’ study” (May 27, 2011), CBC News tells us

Eight articles questioning a controversial study claiming that some bacteria can use the normally toxic substance arsenic to build DNA have been published in the journal Science.The study, published last December in Science, was led by NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and claimed that bacteria from a lake in California were able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus, normally an essential ingredient in DNA, fats and proteins.

At issue was a new strain of a new strain of Halomonadaceae bacteria from Mono Lake, Calif., that seemed to use arsenic instead of phosphorus, which is essential for DNA, fats, and proteins. This fact, if it is a fact, was immediately drafted as an origin of life theory. Then, in an unusual move, scientists began to ask questions as if an OOL theory deserved to be taken seriously. At which point … Read More ›

No, as a matter of fact. In “Winners, losers – and revenge” (Britain’s The Sunday Times, May 25, 2011), David Hawkes, reviewing a book, tells us, “The echoes of revenge drama, from Iago to Charlie Sheen, can still be heard today”and manages to discuss the subject meaningfully, precisely because he isn’t pretending to tell us what great apes think or how revenge evolved. He goes so far as to offer an interesting thesis: Read More ›

When Michael Behe visited the UK, back in November, the Humanist Society of Scotland and the British Center for Science Education wrote up a list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Behe” which they subsequently distributed to their ranks of faithful followers. I responded, at the time, fairly thoroughly to the arguments made therein here (to which the BCSE retaliated fairly viciously here).

Since PZ Myers has been invited to visit Glasgow next week (one week from today to be specific), to lecture on the embryological evidence for Darwinism, I took it upon myself to draw up this list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers”. If you happen to be in the area, and are anticipating attending this event next Monday (which will take place in the Crystal Palace, 36 Jamaica Street, from 7pm), feel free to use the following questions as inspiration for the Q&A session which will follow the talk.

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Dr Liddle, commenting on the Cambrian Robot thread (itself a takeoff on the Pre- Cambrian Rabbit thread), observes at comment no 5:

the ribosome is part of a completely self-replicating entity.

The others aren’t.

The ribosome didn’t “make itself” alone but the organism that it is a component of was “made” by another almost identical organism, which copied itself in order to produce the one containing the ribosome in question.

It is probably true that the only non-self-replicating machines are those designed by the intelligent designers we call people.

But self-replication with modification, I would argue, is the alternate explanation for what would otherwise look like it was designed by an intelligent agent.

I don’t expect you to agree, but it seems to me it’s a point that at least needs to be considered . . .

The matter is important enough to be promoted to a full post — UD discussion threads can become very important. So, let us now proceed . . .

In fact, the living cell implements a kinematic von Neumann Self Replicator [vNSR], which is integrated into a metabolising automaton:

Fig. A: A kinematic vNSR, generally following Tempesti’s presentation (Source: KF/IOSE)

Why is that important?

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At Outside Online (“Fair Chase,”May 2011), Charles Bethea tells us

On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.

Controversial? Yes, apparently:

As ridiculous as this spectacle might appear, the men are testing a much-debated scientific notion about when and how humans became hunters. Between two and three million years ago, when our australopithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard’s Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.

You’ll have to read the article to see if the runners succeeded and whether they think they proved something (another story). Read More ›

Genome mapper Francis Collins, who founded BioLogos, is hailed in the June 2011 article as “one of the most eminent scientists ever to identify as an evangelical Christian.”

An unexpected paean – and one that furrowed my brow (p. 23).   Read More ›

We often hear the phrase “the science is settled” from Darwinists who claim that the infinitely creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism (random errors filtered through natural selection) can explain everything. This claim is simply absurd on its face. Anyone with any awareness of the evidence and a simple education in basic mathematical logic, who is not blinded by a precommitment to Darwinian ideology, could tell you that that the science really is settled: Darwinism is greatest con job in the history of junk pseudoscience. The only evidence we have for the “creative” powers of the Darwinian mechanism is the selection of existing biological information for survival (nothing new is created; it’s just a mixing and matching of existing biological Read More ›

Or so some paint it. I’ve now had a chance to read Christianity Today’s “The Search for the Historical Adam” by Richard N. Ostling (June 2011). Recommended to all. I’m not sure re crisis. I think it comes down to a simple choice. Linked here. Some notes follow: Read More ›

Wintery Knight asks why intelligent, educated Christians won’t speak up for their views.

Why is this not being addressed by churches?

Do you have an experience where a Christian group stifled apologetics? Tell me about that, and why do you think they would do that, in view of the situation I outlined above? My experience is that atheists (as much as I tease them) are FAR more interested in apologetics than church Christians – they are the ones who borrow books and debates, and try to get their atheist wives to go to church after they becomes interested in going to church. Why is that?

A couple of thoughts: Read More ›