Intelligent Design

A paper came out just in the last month defending The Modern Synthesis (aka Darwinism) from attacks by biologists such as Jablonka, Lamb, Wright, Shapiro, and others who opt for including a neo-Lamarckianism into biology. This paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View” (go here if the previous link is down) was published in the journal Philosophy and Theory in Biology. It is very interesting, not only for what it says about Darwinism and its challenges, but also, indirectly, the Intelligent Design movement (ID is never mentioned but directed mutation is a topic close to home for many ID’ers).
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(From In the Beginning … ): For the layman, it is the last step in evolution that is the most difficult to explain. You may be able to convince him that natural selection can explain the appearance of complicated robots, who walk the Earth and write books and build computers, but you will have a harder time convincing him that a mechanical process such as natural selection could cause those robots to become conscious. Human consciousness is in fact the biggest problem of all for Darwinism, but it is hard to say anything “scientific” about consciousness, since we don’t really know what it is, so it is also perhaps the least discussed. Nevertheless, one way to appreciate the problem it Read More ›

Extracted from the UK Telegraph comes the faith creed of modern scientism. “Evolution by natural selection, and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe. However, there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole. The designer may have been responsible for the Big Bang, but nothing more. A very advanced civilisation would have the ability to set precise parameters, thereby designing the universe in detail. It would not be possible – even at the most advanced level – for the designers to interfere with baby universes once Read More ›

On August 21 Karl Giberson, physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College and one of several engaged in the ever-interesting juggling act of defending “faith and science” by means of a Darwinian apologetic, now has added to his litany of misconceptions a boorish attack on Al Mohler in The Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth.” Since David Klinghoffer has provided an excellent summary of the issues involved in an earlier post to this site, Karl Giberson v Al Mohler on Darwin: The Grudge Match, they need not be restated here. The point here is to address Giberson’s principal objection, namely, Mohler’s assertion that “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he Read More ›

This is an important event. I would encourage all UD readers to try to make it to it. I’ll be speaking on ID. For conference information, click here.

Check this out: LINK

Nevada is mostly empty; I mean really empty.  Ninety percent of the state’s residents live in the vicinity of Las Vegas or Reno, and the rest of the state is all but uninhabited.  I realized just how empty the state is when I was riding my motorcycle across the desert last month, and I passed a sign that said “Next Gas 167 Miles.”  They weren’t kidding.  My bike’s range is only a little over 200 miles, and if I hadn’t stopped to top off my tank, I would have run out of gas in the middle of the desert. 

This is the kind of riding I love the best.  Riding hour after hour through a vast emptiness, alone with my thoughts, the wind in my face, and the deep-throated throb of my engine in my ears, fills me with a peace and joy that is difficult to describe.  One day my two friends and I decided to just keep on riding after the sun went down, and at about 11:00 we stopped in the middle of the desert and turned off our motorcycles.  There was no moon that night and the wind had died down.  No other vehicles were on the highway, so we were alone in the quiet darkness, the only sound the pinging noises made by our engines as they cooled in the night air.

Hundreds of miles from the lights of the nearest city, the night sky was stunning.  The Milky Way was clearly visible from one horizon to the other.  Antares glowed like a tiny ruby in the heart of Scorpio.  My friends and I just stood there, gaping in awed silence at the numberless points of twinkling light in the celestial sphere.  Then John said, “I wonder why God made the universe so big.” 

John’s comment got me to thinking.  Why is the universe so big, with billons of galaxies and with each galaxy containing billions of stars, there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches of the world.  Read More ›

The Darwinian model of evolution holds that one of the key mechanisms of evolutionary innovation is the duplication of genes and the subsequent divergence of one of the duplicate copies to undertake a new functional role. Because a probability of a single gene stumbling upon a significantly different (yet functionally advantageous) sequence is so small, the idea is that, following a duplication of a gene, one copy is able to retain the original function, while the other is free to explore the vast sea of combinatorial possibilities in search of some novel function. It is widely believed that a duplicate gene has no phenotypic cost or advantage associated with it – that is, it is selectively neutral. In such a Read More ›

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475-486. LINK

Take a close look at this organism—a very close look. Now answer these questions: Are you an evolutionist? Was this bug created by random mutations? Is it a Lucretian concoction? For evolutionists the answer is yes, all organisms must be such concoctions, and in so saying they are their own accuser—this is not about science.  Read more

I was digging around for some good examples for a talk I am doing on mutation theory in a few weeks, and came upon this great paper in PNAS – Molecular Origins of Rapid and Continuous Morphological Evolution. Their argument? “tandem repeat expansions and contractions are a major source of phenotypic variation in evolution”. Hmmm…. it almost seems as if these repeats are functioning as parameters to a larger system. That reminds me of something…. Almost like parameterized evolution. The paper has a great image of repeat-based morphological variation, too: . The primary differences in the skulls are nose bends and midface length, which are governed by a repeat sequence in the Runxp-2 gene. By expanding or contracting parts of Read More ›

If you want to hear some silly explanations of crying (weeping), go here. One theory is that crying may have evolved as a kind of signal — a signal that was valuable because it could only be picked up by those closest to us who could actually see our tears. Tears let our intimates in — people within a couple of feet of us, who would be more likely to help. “You can imagine there’d be a selection pressure to develop a signaling system that wouldn’t let predators in on the fact that you’re vulnerable,” says Randy Cornelius, a psychologist at Vassar College. College is often a waste of money. Any human can see when another is crying, close or Read More ›

I was writing about this earlier. Michael Moyer at Scientific American notes,

Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations.

And more. Well, there is always a catastrophe somewhere; right now, the floods in Pakistan.

It looks like an interesting SciAm issue, though I don’t think that fear of catastrophe is – as claimed – the outcome of “pattern-seeking brains.” That’s just another neuro Darwinism crock. For one thing, for most catastrophes, there is no pattern. That’s the problem. Read More ›

Autonomous air vehicles are finding increasing use and the Air Force is interested micro versions:  Read more

In “Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world?”, Richard Webb explains why we might need a new theory of quantum mechanics: In our day-to-day world, we are accustomed to the idea that two events are unlikely to be correlated unless there is a clear connection of cause and effect. Pulling a red sock onto my right foot in no way ensures that my left foot will also be clad in red – unless I purposely reach into the drawer for another red sock. In 1964, John Bell of the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, described the degree of correlation that classical theories allow. Bell’s result relied on two concepts: realism and locality. Realism amounts to saying Read More ›