Intelligent Design

In the New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer recounts how “Debate Over Intelligent Design Ensnares a Journal” (May 13, 2011). He means the Beckwith-Forrest-Synthese controversy where Southeastern Louisiana U philosopher (and supposed expert in intelligent design) Barbara Forrest misrepresented Baylor philosopher Frank Beckwith (who is not a design supporter). The print version of the journal disowned the paper, and the Darwin lobby, in which Forrest is a key player, has been carrying a torch ever since, demanding that the hit paper be reinstated as respectable.

Reporter Oppenheimer gets it mostly  right, for example,

Dr. Forrest said this week that she suspected that intelligent design theorist William A. Dembski “was involved in this, because his work was mentioned” in her article, too. Reached by phone, Dr. Dembski said that he had not contacted Synthese and knew of no specific campaign to influence the journal.

No, Dembski didn’t know. There was no campaign. Read More ›

Oh, call them “Christian evolutionists” if you want. Terminology wars are fun but let’s talk about facts.

In “Karl Giberson Has a Problem With Bill Dembski’s “View of Science”, Anika Smith (ENV, May 13, 2011) responds to Giberson’s article at Patheos,

When he finally does get around to addressing Dembski himself [after a side trip into young earth creationism], Giberson objects to Dembski’s use of marketing metaphors as an ad hominem attack, which is strange considering that Dembski wrote that this is something that scientists and people with ideas generally ought to communicate and advance them, with nothing cynical or slimy about it. Either Giberson is hypersensitive and looking for an excuse to display his lofty umbrage, or he is working to avoid the actual questions raised by Dembski’s review. Most likely it’s both.He does, however, give us a nice quote for giggles:

The scientific literature is not filled with growing concerns about the viability of the theory; scientific meetings do not have sessions devoted to alternative explanations for origins; and leading scientists are not on record objecting to the continuous and blinkered embrace of evolution by their colleagues.

Has he never heard of Jerry Fodor? Lynn Margulis? The Altenberg 16?

That’s a question I too have wrestled with, while writing a book, and here’s my assessment. Read More ›

This point is apparently made in Cameron M. Smith’s The Fact of Evolution: Walking the reader through the steps in the evolutionary process, Cameron uses plenty of real-world examples to show that not only does evolution happen, it must happen. Cameron analyzes evolution as the unintended consequence of three independent facts of the natural world that we can observe every day: (1) the fact of the replication of life forms (producing offspring); (2) the fact that offspring are not identical (variation); and (3) the fact that not all offspring survive (selection). Viewed in terms of this analysis, evolution is no longer debatable; in fact it has to occur. It is simply the inevitable consequence of three obvious, observable, factual natural Read More ›

It’s called entropy, and it applies to everything. If you’re a pianist and don’t practice on a regular basis you don’t stay the same, you get worse, and it takes extra discipline, effort, and dedication to get better. Natural selection is a buffer against decay that is constantly operating in nature. Natural selection throws out bad stuff in a competitive environment but has no creative powers. Since decay is the norm, and random errors, statistically speaking, essentially always result in decay, a creature living underground will lose its eyes because the informational cost of producing eyes is high. Thus, a crippled, decayed creature in a pathologically hostile environment will have a survival advantage. This is devolution, not evolution. This phenomenon Read More ›

… just so some tenured airhead can prove common ancestry of humans with apes? What did I ever do to you folks anyway?” Here Casey Luskin summarizes the growing recognition that Neanderthals were just us, with nutcracker jaws: In fact, Neanderthals buried their dead, and they had an average brain size which was slightly larger than that of modern humans. Perhaps it’s time to stop seeing Neanderthals as a primitive species–a popular icon of evolution–but rather as a sub-race of our own species. To Giberson and Collins’s credit, they recognize this point. But they do not recognize that it therefore prevents Neanderthals from demonstrating that humans share ancestry with something that isn’t human.If Giberson and Collins want to make the Read More ›

Intelligent Design is often accused of being entirely driven by religious motivations. I don’t think there’s anything about ID itself that warrants this conclusion, but I do think it’s obvious that ID’s supporters by and large tend to be religious. Even I’m a religious theist (Catholic, though a poor one by most standards), and some, though not all, of my ID interest is spurred by metaphysical considerations. At the same time, I see nothing in ID that mandates a person being religious, even theistic in the common sense of the term.

Which brings me to this thread. I’d like to invite an agnostics or non-theists who are either ID proponents, or are ID sympathetic, to speak up here. In fact, I’m going to lay out a few ground rules that I hope all will follow, in the hopes of keeping this thread particularly on-target.

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Live streamed here: Known for such landmark discoveries as “Lucy” (Johanson) and “Turkana Boy” (Leakey), the work of these two scientists has produced much of the fossil evidence which forms our understanding of human evolution.  (May 5, 2011). Don’t forget about the contest: For a free copy of The Nature of Nature mailed to your home: Do you think we understand the human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? In what ways?

According to Ian Stewart (“The formula of life,” New Statesman, 27 April 2011),

Biology is undergoing a renaissance as scientists apply mathematical ideas to old theory. Welcome to the discipline of biomathematics, with its visions of spherical cows, football-shaped viruses and equations that can predict the pattern of a zebra’s stripes.

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of the planet’s living creatures, evolution, the discovery of the gene and the structure of DNA. Now, a sixth is on its way – mathematics.

What will this mean? That math will get upgraded from a “bit player” to “centre stage” in biology, says Stewart: Read More ›

(That’s how Moshe Averick, rabbi and author of Nonsense of a High Order:The Confused, Illusory World of the Atheist explains the difficulty with many Darwinists’ arguments.)

Logic is not science. Logic is a commodity which cannot be hoarded or monopolized by any particular occupation or profession. Logic is an intellectual tool available equally to both scientist and non-scientist. If the issue at hand is not a question of scientific data or knowledge itself, but a logical comparison, deduction, or conclusion involving scientific data or knowledge, scientific credentials are for the most part irrelevant. At that juncture, the scientist, historian, plumber, and taxi-driver are all on equal footing, providing their logic is sound. No one made the point better than Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, indisputably a genius of the highest order and one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century: “I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”

It is my contention that many of the hottest areas of dispute in the so called “battle” between science and religion have relatively little to do with the actual science involved. They are to a great extent problems of logic.

Along the way, he wonders whether PZ Myers has “gone mad,” but read it for yourself to see why. He has somewhat to say about Myers audience as well … and Jerry Coyne … (Note: UD News does not think Myers has gone mad. Much depends on the emphasis … )

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CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) – you know, those stupid squiggly meaningless letters you’re supposed to interpret before you can post a polite comment- besides being the fourth most annoying thing on the Internet, in a list that includes trolls, spammers, and uranazis – don’t actually work that well. Alert spammers can

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Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canda in the mid-twentieth century.

Denyse: The thing that struck me, reading your book, was how widespread the idea was in the province of Alberta, that sterilizing “socially challenged” people was a great idea. You write, “Many early eugenicists were leftists, but most important, Social Darwinist ideas behind right-wing eugenics absolved the wealthy of responsibility to help the poor.” (p. 8.) True, and many were pastors and churchgoing people. Today’s evangelicals would likely have a hard time believing that, but it’s a fact.

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I thank Professor Feser for his reply to my latest question. Feser’s reply appears to bring us much closer together, though I am not sure, so I must probe a bit more. First of all, let me clear some things out of the way: 1.  No, I do not expect Feser to agree to bad arguments for a conclusion merely because he accepts the conclusion on other grounds. 2.  Yes, I understand that Feser has allowed that God designed the world and that we can know that He has. 3.  I have never argued or implied that living things are exactly like artifacts; I have argued only that the two have something in common, i.e., an orderly arrangement and co-operation of Read More ›

“if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.”

This is how, as a Canadian commentator explains:

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the “hyperlink” – that’s to say, if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.[ … ] Read More ›

From Alan Boyle at MSNBC (May 10, 2010), we learn: Sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid ranks as one of the top goals for NASA’s retooled vision for space exploration. A year ago, President Barack Obama told NASA to gear up to take on such a mission by the year 2025. Up to that time, NASA had been focusing on a return to the moon — which means that the agency had to retool its mission plans. This week’s engineering tests, organized by NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, will help NASA get ready to set off for its new target.”Even experts don’t know what the surface of an asteroid is going to be like,” NEEMO project manager Bill Read More ›