Intelligent Design

If I had a nickel for every time evolutionists insisted that they are merely following the evidence, immediately after (or before) making religious arguments, I think I would be a zillionaire. You can read about Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers insisting on their innocence here and here, but this self contradiction is not limited to the big shots. From laboratories to sanctuaries, and dorm rooms to chat rooms, the constant refrain of evolutionists is that the raw data make their idea a fact, but then the supporting arguments are religious. Evolutionists are the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, the lampshade partier who doesn’t know he is drunk.  Read more

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) exhibits numerous adaptations to cold environments, fur, foot pads, head shape, exclusively carnivorous diet, heightened sense of smell, etc. Their close relationship to the brown bear (Ursus arctos) has long been recognised. Fertile hybrids are well-documented in captivity and there are rare examples of hybrids in the wild – the most recent being in 2006. Interbreeding, however, has not outweighed other taxonomic criteria, although it has been a factor in moving the polar bear from the genus Thalarctos back to the genus Ursus. “With their distinctly different morphology, metabolism, and social and feeding behaviors, the polar and brown bears are classified as separate species.” Interestingly, a cluster of brown bears (known as ABC bears) have Read More ›

It was 15 months ago that Science carried a story about the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome. Palaeogeneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was reported as saying “he can’t wait to finish crunching the sequence through their computers”. It has been quite a long time coming, as it is more than a decade since Paabo first demonstrated it was possible to analyse Neandertal DNA sequences. Earlier reports suggested that Neandertals were sufficiently distinct from humans for them to be classified as a separate species of Homo. The draft genome has more than 3 billion nucleotides collected from three female Neandertals. “By comparing this composite Neandertal genome with the complete Read More ›

Because similar species are thought to share a relatively recent common ancestor, they are assumed to have not had much time to evolve differences between them. That explains why they are similar, and it also predicts that such species do not have significant differences. Their genome differences should be minor. This is because evolution is limited by the rate at which genetic variations can appear and subsequently spread throughout the respective lineages. But we now know of significant numbers of unique genes between allied species and even between different variants within the same species.  Read more

You know the drill, new forms appeared rapidly followed by little change. This time it’s whales, the late comers turned allstars of the ocean. Somehow the whale ancestors lost their hind limbs, grinding teeth and pelvises and developed a host of new features with great efficiency. These new features include the fluke tail with its unique vertical propelling motion, the huge filter-feeding jaw, and the ability to give live birth and raise its young in the marine environment. All this while acquiring superior skills in its new marine environment. The latest entry to the community could swim, dive and feed better than most fish and sharks. It all just happened to happen, and with great evolutionary speed.  Read more

What good is a compass that is never right? Evolution certainly is not that bad, but it is telling how often Darwin’s idea, mandated to be a fact, is so far off base. Consider for example the kangaroo genome, which turned out to be similar to the human genome. As one evolutionist explained:  Read more

Just as Charles Darwin dealt with difficulties with his theory of evolution in Chapter 6 of Origins, so too Denis Alexander deals with objections in Chapter 6 of his book Creation or Evolution. And just as Darwin’s logic was often questionable, so too is Alexander’s. The chief problem is Alexander’s rather selective presentation. For an author of a book about the origins controversy, Alexander seems to be remarkably unaware of the actual debate.  Read more

Evolutionists have a problem. Their theory doesn’t fit the facts, yet it must be true. They have to constantly change their story, all the while insisting it is a fact. Like a Heraclitean flux, it is constantly changing and yet always called the same thing. Evolutionists are continually surprised by the science, yet they euphemistically call this “progress.” A recent article in The Lancet, suggesting that evolution is like a rhizome, is a good example of evolution’s folly that is so obvious.  Read more

I did an interview recently with the Sceptics’ Society of Birmingham (UK) on the relationship between science and religion, which may be of interest to people here. The interview was conducted over Skype, which explains some of the alien sounds, especially from my end, even though my interlocutor and I were separated by a mere 20 miles. What struck me most about this quite genial interview is the lack of scepticism that today’s self-avowed ‘sceptics’ have towards the scientific establishment. Indeed, they have a rhetorical strategy for deflecting this point. So, if you listen to the whole interview, you’ll hear that my interlocutor periodically draws a strange distinction between ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ — as in ‘I grant that anti-evolutionists are Read More ›

Every biology student learns of two massive machines that operate on the DNA molecule. There is the transcription machine that makes a single-stranded copy of a gene, and there is the replication machine that makes a double-stranded copy of the DNA double helix. The former is the first step in the protein synthesis process while the latter is part of the cell division process. But what happens when these different machines meet as they operate on the same stretch of DNA? What are the rules of the DNA road?  Read more

A fellow hack phoned me the other night to advise that I am a minor feature in a Canadian book called The Armageddon Factor by one Marci McDonald. The book makes me out to be vastly more important than I am in the intelligent design controversy. This is, of course, in the cause of insisting that traditional Christians pose a major threat to Canada. Read More ›

What do bacterial resistance to antibiotic drugs and the universal genetic code have in common? They both have been explained by horizontal gene transfer, a mechanism that evolutionists are increasingly using to explain the origin of the species. And what’s wrong with that? First, it makes evolution superfluous and second, it makes evolution ridiculous.  Read more

In my post below I described as “fabulous” Ed Oakes’ “Atheism’s Just So Scenarios,” and I stand by that description.  That said, Oakes never fails to befuddle me when it comes to the topic of evolution.  Oakes is a brilliant and insightful writer, whom I almost always enjoy reading.  Consider his take on “Just So Stories” favored by evolutionary psychologists:   This, um, scenario reminds me of those Just So Stories so beloved of evolutionary psychologists, who like to speculate that the reason a male wooer pays the restaurant bill when he takes his inamorata out on a date is because in our hunter-gatherer days the menfolk did the hunting, with their meat-consuming wives trapped back at home nursing their bambini Read More ›

Ed Oakes has a fabulous essay over at FT.  A taste: Today, one can hardly find more puffed-up braggarts than those noisy New Atheists currently mounting their soapboxes in Hyde Park, and who seem to labor under the assumption that they are doing the human race a favor by attacking belief in God. In fact, as Nietzsche saw, in his own inimitably ironic way, these atheist frat boys are really attacking science. This is because for Nietzsche—who was perhaps the only truly honest atheist in the history of philosophy—science was ultimately a moral, not an epistemological problem, a point he drove home with special force in The Gay Science (all italics are his): The question “Why science?” leads back to the moral Read More ›