Intelligent Design

In my previous article, I discussed the background of one of the most commonly made arguments for primate common ancestry. In this article, I want to examine the first of the three layers of evidence offered by a popular-level article written about this subject. Read More>>>

Yes. About Uncommon Descent’s moderation policies in detail, and it is hosted by markf, who comments here.

So, if he comments here … does that … ? No, wait, this is the confused, illusory world of the Darwinist. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Hat tip: Our Cannuckian Yankee drew our attention to the continuation of the “overlong” MathGrrl’s thread over there,  here, by citing this comment.

Now, are we such hot stuff? Come to think of it, Satan doesn’t like us either, for some reason. And the ID guys are, in the view of a Christian Darwinist, an evil and adulterous generation.

Cannuckian notes,  Read More ›

This charming tale, “Crocodiles swam the Atlantic to reach America” should be true, but some are undecided.

Michael Marshall explains for New Scientist (11 May 2011), “Millions of years before Vikings crossed the Atlantic, crocodiles swam thousands of kilometres from Africa to colonise the Americas,”

… all four American species are most closely related to the Nile crocodiles of east Africa, and must have split away roughly 7 million years ago, long after Africa and South America began drifting apart 130 million years ago. By 7 million years ago, over 2800 kilometres of ocean lay between the two continents.

And no rest stops? Read More ›

It’s not the Church, exactly; it’s the fashions in who speaks for the church.

The work of biologists and astronomers “had no more ardent supporter” than Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), but

Although he was a giant of twentieth-century philosophy and (according to Pope Paul VI) a seminal influence on the Second Vatican Council, Maritain’s stock among Catholic thinkers was already in sharp decline at the time of his death. Deal Hudson has argued that the cause of this seemingly inexplicable neglect was the scathing critique of Teilhard de Chardin in one of Maritain’s last books, The peasant of the Garonne (1967). Read More ›

Richard Weikart, Cal State U prof and author of Hitler’s Ethic, wrote UD a note on the recent study in which fear of death supposedly increased support for ID (yes, that one where they stitched together a bunch of stuff to represent  ID theorist Michael Behe, including stuff he hadn’t written¹).

Weikart says,

This article is intending to suggest that people believe in Intelligent Design because of their “death anxiety” (rather than empirical evidence). However, the solution suggested by these researchers—to explicitly explain to people that evolution can provide meaning and purpose to their lives—is astonishing, if you really think about it. Read More ›

Last week science writer John Farrell discussed the genetic evidence for evolution in his Technology article at Forbes. Farrell referenced evolutionist Stan Rice to argue the genome could not have been designed. Not only is it a clumsy design but it is susceptible to terrible, debilitating mutations. Such a design would never have been intended and must have evolved via the mindless play of natural processes. Farrell’s other source was evolutionist Larry Moran, who has convinced Farrell that Jonathan Wells has it all wrong in his new book, The Myth of Junk DNA. As Farrell summarizes:  Read more

In “Birch Mouse Ancestor Discovered in Inner Mongolia Is New Species of Rare ‘Living Fossil’”, we learn that tiny fossil teeth (ScienceDaily May 25, 2011)” found in Inner Mongolia are “a new species of birch mouse, indicating that ancestors of the small rodent are much older than previously reported”:17 million years old as opposed to the previous estimate of eight. Kimura identified Sicista primus from 17 tiny teeth, whose size makes them difficult to find. A single molar is about the size of half a grain of rice. The teeth, however, are distinctive among the various genera of rodents known as Dipodidae. Cusps, valleys, ridges and other distinguishing characteristics on the surface of the teeth are identifiable through a microscope. “We are Read More ›

One common argument for common descent which one hears very frequently in the evolutionary literature concerns the placement of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) in orthologous loci in primate genomes. Read More>>>

Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself – conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protectd from god ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc.- Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, p. 175.

To the extent that Sam Harris is running your life, you must quit reading stuff like this and this immediately. Read More ›

Denyse: First, step with us a moment into Scientific American’s past (a past it repudiates) where, in 1911, it enthusiastically editorialized about “The Science of Breeding Better Men.” How about this for an opening line: “ADA JUKE is known to anthropologists as the ‘mother of criminals.'” Well, how’s that for coming straight to the point? The solution?

The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to [Thomas] Huxley. “We are sorry for you,” he is reported to have said; “we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate.”

Actually, her real name was “Margaret,” and the history was rather more complex than eugenics hysteria allowed for. In Canada, the worry surfaced as a fear that “the British race was ‘becoming small, dark, and emotional'” (p. 26). Maybe that’s code for “like the separatist-minded French-speaking Catholics of Quebec” …
(This is the third and final part of Uncommon Descent’s interview with Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Here’s Part I and here’s Part II.) Read More ›

Lots of people, including us folk at Uncommon Descent are accused of  “undermining science.”

Dennis Prager, reflecting on last weekend’s “Prepare to Meet Thy Doom“-fest observes that secular apocalypses (that never really happen) have done our work for us:

There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science. Read More ›

One of philosopher Robert Pennock’s arguments for methodological naturalism (which rules out evidence for design in nature in principle, because it cannot be considered) is that “we cannot control the supernatural:”

Experimentation requires observation and control of the variables. We confirm causal laws by performing controlled experiments in whichthe hypothesized independent variable is made to vary while all the other factors are held constant so that we can observe the effect on the dependent variable. But we have no control over supernatural entities or forces; hence, these cannot be scientifically studied.

Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), replies, Read More ›

… and physicist Rob Sheldon will reply on: Could the universe be infinite in space, and how would that affect the design argument? Dr. Sheldon has notified us that he has ordered Dr. Monton’s book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), which argues that case. Further details later.

Further to previous posts on the Synthese special issue, this blog considers another case of bully-boy behaviour masquerading as scholarship – the paper on demarcation by Robert T. Pennock. Those most opposed to intelligent design (ID) and creationism have typically maintained that a clear line can be drawn between science and non-science, and ID and creationism are declared to be outside the boundary of science. In this essay, Pennock choses to talk down to one of his peers in the world of philosophy. An example is as follows: “When we look empirically at what scientists and science educators themselves say science is, then we see immediately that they all ignore Laudan and clearly operate on the idea that there is Read More ›