Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Intelligent Design

Woodpecker drumming inspires shock-absorbing system

One of the pleasures of walking through a wood is hearing the distant drumming of woodpeckers. We know they are searching for food, but few of us grasp the extraordinary nature of their achievement. Drumming rates of about 20 impacts per second are normal, with decelerations of 1200 g, and the drumming sessions may be repeated 500-600 times per day. By contrast, humans can lose consciousness when experiencing 4-6 g and are left concussed with a single deceleration of about 100 g. The authors of a recent analysis of the woodpecker’s shock-absorbing mechanism describes it as “advanced” and “special”. By looking at video material of drumming and CT scans of the bird’s head and neck, they found four structures that Read More ›

Non-Racemic Amino Acid Production

As the Urey-Miller model of abiogenesis has grown weaker with time, interest in extra-terrestrial sources of amino acids has increased. The phrase “building blocks of life” is well-used: in 2005, space.com referred to amino acid precursors formed “in the winds of dying stars and spread all over interstellar space”; in 2008, National Geographic used the phrase when reporting on the detection of a precursor of glycine in the galaxy Arp 220. In December 2010, Nasa reported the presence of 19 amino acids in a carbon-rich meteorite and commented: “Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe.” Read More ›

So Martin Gaskell, the punching bag of the New Atheist street gang,

turns out to be a “theistic evolutionist”? Astronomer sees room for God in sciencesThe two are not wholly exclusive, Christian scientist who won lawsuit says Gaskell, who studies supermassive black holes at the University of Texas in Austin, said he considers himself a “theistic evolutionist”: a Christian who accepts Darwin’s theory along with evidence that the earth is billions of years old. “We believe that God has done things through the mechanisms he’s revealing to us through science,” he said. He has also written that evolution theory has “significant scientific problems” and includes “unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations.” – Dylan Lovan, MSNBC, 2/9/2011 Okay, so Gaskell didn’t fall down and worship the Beard. Do you? This is just a Yank Read More ›

Optimised hardware compression, The eyes have it.

Image processing is but one of the many very clever design features in our eyes. Mores the pity that many who are focused on the blind spot cannot understand eyes to be Intelligently Designed. The fovea of the eye captures the small section of our visual field where we are looking directly. It is richly replete with colour sensing cones. It requires more light but has very high precision. When we look directly at someone or something in good light, that is where we get the detail from. In contrast to a TV screen and a video camera, which have the same detail all over the screen, the eyes economically concentrate on our point of direct interest, and scan the remaining Read More ›

Nightly cuppa helps you sleep: Now let us give praise to the Beard

Evolution Sunday was couple weekends back, right? Never got there.* But the thought intrigued me, could we help these forlorn people out by composing some praise songs? Hey, how about”mutation” instead of “salvation” or “selection” instead of “perfection” … Brainstorming just to get you started. No blasphemy now. Our list guvs are all devout Christians. But, given popular iconography, we may certainly refer to the atheists’ object of adoration as “the Beard,” and help them look openly as well as privately ridiculous. (*At my church that Sunday, we were mostly doing what churches have done for 2000 years, so we must be doing everything wrong, right? The competition says so, and we of course agree with them politely and go Read More ›

Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) Weighs in on Science Education

Dr. Cornelius Hunter recently posted on some findingsfrom the NCSE (the National Center for the Selling of Evolutioner, I mean, Science Education, on how many biology teachers are reluctant to teach evolution. Now, TV personality Bill Nye “The Science Guy” has given us his two cents worth on this controversy. In the interview he’s asked what he thinks about the reluctance of teachers regarding evolution. He says:

It’s horrible. Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Read More ›

EMTs_at_work

ID Foundations, 5: Functionally Specific, Complex Organization and associated Information as empirically testable (and recognised) signs of design

(ID Foundations series so far: 1, 2, 3, 4 )

In a current UD discussion thread, frequent commenter MarkF (who supports evolutionary materialism) has made the following general objection to the inference to design:

. . . my claim is not that ID is false. Just that is not falsifiable. On the other hand claims about specific designer(s)with known powers and motives are falsifiable and, in all cases that I know of, clearly false.

The objection is actually trivially correctable.

Not least,  as we — including MF — are designers who routinely leave  behind empirically testable, reliable signs of design, such as posts on UD blog in English that (thanks to the infinite monkeys “theorem” as discussed in post no 4 in this series)  are well beyond the credible reach of undirected chance and necessity on the gamut of the observed cosmos. For instance, the excerpt just above uses 210 7-bit ASCII characters, which specifies a configuration space of 128^210 ~ 3.26 * 10^442 possible bit combinations. The whole observable universe, acting as a search engine working at the fastest possible physical rate [10^45 states/s, for 10^80 atoms, for 10^25 s: 10^150 possible states] , could not scan as much as 1 in 10^ 290th of that.

That is, any conceivable chance and necessity based search on the scope of our cosmos would very comfortably round down to a practical zero. But MF as an intelligent and designing commenter, probably tossed the above sentences off in a minute or two.

That is why such functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information [FSCO/I] are credible, empirically testable and reliable signs of intelligent design.

But don’t take my word for it.

A second UD commenter, Acipenser (= s[t]urgeon), recently challenged BA 77 and this poster as follows, in the signs of scientism thread:

195: What does the Glasgow Coma scale measure? The mind or the body?

206: kairosfocus: What does the Glasgow Coma scale measure? Mind or Body?

This is a scale of measuring consciousness that as the Wiki page notes, is “used by first aid, EMS, and doctors as being applicable to all acute medical and trauma patients.” That is, the scale tests for consciousness. And –as the verbal responsiveness test especially shows — the test is an example of where the inference to design is routinely used in an applied science context, often in literal life or death situations:

Fig. A: EMT’s at work. Such paraprofessional medical personnel routinely test for the consciousness of patients by rating their capacities on eye, verbal and motor responsiveness, using the Glasgow Coma Scale, which is based on an inference to design as a characteristic behaviour of conscious intelligences. (Source: Wiki.)

In short, the Glasgow Coma Scale [GCS] is actually a case in point of the reliability and scientific credibility of the inference to design; even in life and death situations.

Why do I say that?

Read More ›

John Lynch on The Voyage that Shook the World

The National Center for Science Education, whose mission is to defend the teaching of evolution in public schools, recently published a review of the film Darwin: The Voyage that Shook the World. The review was written by John Lynch, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science, and Jim Lippard, a student, both at Arizona State University. Aside from misrepresenting science, the review also misrepresents my views and contribution to the film. Lynch and Lippard write:  Read more

Oh, you mean, there really is a bias in academe against common sense and rational thought?

Jonathan Haidt decided, for some reason, to point out the obvious to a group of American academics recently, that they are overwhelmingly modern materialist statists (liberals).

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

Why anyone would bother pointing that out, I don’t know. It’s not a bias against conservatives, anyway; it’s a bias against rationality, which they don’t believe in. Our brains, remember, are shaped for fitness, not for truth. Indeed, these are the very people who channel Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone for insights into human psychology, and anyone who doubts the validity of such “research” should just shut up and pay their taxes, right?

Well, his talk had attracted  John Tierney’s attention at the New York Times (February 7, 2007), who drew exactly the right conclusion (for modern statists and Darwinists):

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism.

[ … ]

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

I have friends here in Canada who make bets on when the Times will finally, mercifully shut down.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle weighs in at Atlantic Monthly, driving home the shame: Read More ›

Like Not Believing in Algebra

Though evolutionists insist evolution is a fact many life scientists do not share their conviction. Our entire existence including all of biology, according to evolutionists, just happened to arise on its own—somehow. Nothing in biology makes sense, they claim, except in the light of evolution. But such dogma has badly failed. Not only are their claims not scientific to begin with (“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is equivalent to an if-and-only-if statement which is impossible within the bounds of science), but evolution’s fundamental predictions are consistently proven wrong. It is hardly surprising that many life scientists hold a more tentative view. But one recent survey revealed that even biology teachers routinely fail to carry Read More ›

Richard Dawkins – the Protestant Atheist

Thomas Jackson observes that Richard Dawkins’s view of science is really one born out of Protestant principles. Richard Dawkins, the Protestant atheistDawkins does not recognise that experimental science is not value-free but deeply enmeshed with a Protestant myth There have been a number of other books over recent years by Peter Harrison The Fall and the Foundations of Science & The Bible, Protestantism, and the rise of Natural Science, that have pointed to the Protestant influences in the development of science.

Nature of Nature is the book to get … right now!

Dembski, below, is appropriately modest about Nature of Nature , in saying that it was seven years in the making. The conference from which the book arose provoked such a storm of outrage from the Baylor Bambinos that Dembski’s Polanyi center (which organized it) was shut down. He became persona non grata among the Bambinos*. If Bill, and senior editor Bruce Gordon,  had just been willing to swallow the Darwinade ladled out to them, they could be pontificating today from some secure chair. But something about respect for the facts … I’ve read the book (advance copy). In it, key thinkers on both sides of the ID controversy present their best arguments. Both sides will doubtless claim victory and you, Read More ›

The Machinery Of Life

Recently, I encountered two stunning cell animations which serve to highlight the sheer beauty, magnificence and power of intelligent design. Those among us who have been in ID circles for some time will undoubtedly recognise much of the first. It is a compilation of clips which have been used in ID multimedia, put together in stunningly elegant fashion with an inspirational new background soundtrack. A number of months ago, Pigliucci and Boundry expressed their strong dislike of machine metaphors in science (see also Paul Nelson’s remarks on this statement here). If you recall, Pigliucci and Boundry said that, …if we want to keep Intelligent Design out of the classroom, not only do we have to exclude the ‘theory’ from the Read More ›

The top three books that helped change me from a mindless, irrational Darwinist into an ID proponent

#1 Evolution, A Theory in Crisis I was arguing with a (yes, Christian) friend named Dave, about “evolution,” and told him that science had proven that in the primordial seas, once upon a time, a self-replicating molecule came about, and then random changes filtered through natural selection eventually produced all of life. This is what I was taught all my life, having grown up in an academic community infested with “scientists” who told me that any other interpretation of origins was evidence of mindless religious fanaticism. Dave said, “Don’t trust me, read Michael Denton’s book.” I read it in two days, and exclaimed to myself: “Unholy Crap, I’ve been conned!” (By the way, as best I can figure, Denton is Read More ›