Intelligent Design

Scientists with an interest in developing design concepts and principles found in the natural world are not instinctively attracted by exhortations to expel design from Biology. However, developing a coherent academic framework that does justice to the design principles being studied has not attracted the attention it deserves. Consequently, many scholars in this field have absorbed views developed by people with a rather different agenda for design. McIntosh recognises there is a problem here, and sets out to provide an alternative perspective. “Many have taken the view that design is only an illusion in living systems, arguing that such ‘apparent design’ and accompanying complexity can be explained by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. [. . .] However, [. . .] the inference Read More ›

Anyone attempting to swat a fly will become aware of its remarkable aerodynamic capabilities. Its speed of response and ability to change direction abruptly far exceed our own powers as pursuers. The flight of insects has received considerable attention from researchers and some recent work was stimulated by the recognition of a gap in knowledge. The scientists realized that the previously-studied flight control system involving vision cannot be the explanation for how flies maintain stability in the face of unpredictable short disturbances. “Corrective behavior often takes advantage of vision. For fruit flies, however, reaction time to visual stimuli is at least 10 wingbeats, so these insects must employ faster sensory circuits to recover from short time-scale disturbances and instabilities.” [. Read More ›

Barry’s post on emergence has inspired me to re-link to my Feb 2008 Human Events article, which deals with the ultimate example of emergence in Nature (this is one of the essays in my new Discovery Institute Press book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design ): In a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran Read More ›

The basic idea behind evolution is rather simple: in times of difficulty not everyone survives, or at least not everyone reproduces. Those who are faster, bigger, taller, stronger, smarter, or whatever it is that makes for successful reproduction, will do just that. And those who lack the requisite capabilities will not reproduce, or not reproduce as prolifically. One way or another, the result is that, in those difficult times, future generations are more representative of the winners. The traits of the successful reproducers are passed on more often. This means the population undergoes a change—it evolves.  Read more

Evolutionary biologist Allen MacNeill, who appears frequently in the comments sections of our posts, makes the following comment to my previous post: Teleology must exist in any functional relationship, including those in biology. The question is not “is there teleology in biology”; no less an authority on evolutionary biology than the late Ernst Mayr (not to mention Franciso Ayala) emphatically stated “yes”! The real question (and the real focus of the dispute between EBers and IDers) is the answer to the question, “where does the teleology manifest in biology come from”? EBers such as Ernst Mayr assert that it is an emergent property of natural selection, whereas IDers assert that it comes from an “intelligent designer”. It has never been Read More ›

I have been informed about a couple of articles in the UK press recently. Guardian 19th March 2010 – Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong: What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? And from last year in Timesonline – The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin’s Legacy by Fern Elsdon-Baker

New research is confirming the evolutionary conundrum of early complexity. The research shows that a microbial eukaryote, Naegleria gruberi, shares a large number of genes in common with other eukaryotes. And why is this a problem? Evolutionists have resorted to many incredible just-so stories of convergence. From intricate spider web designs to entire vision systems, evolutionists have been forced to say such designs, because they are found repeated in distant species, have evolved more than once. And while the supposed independent evolution of these striking designs is silly, even these evolutionists have not yet said that similar genes evolve independently. Until and unless they resort to such a fantasy they must say that similar genes in different species have arisen Read More ›

March madness is upon us.  In that vein, I ask you to consider the following sentence:  “A basketball is round and orange.”  You read this sentence through a medium, probably a computer screen.  This means I had an idea, and I wrote out on my computer screen a representation of the idea in symbols (Latin letters forming English words arranged together into a sentence using the rules of English grammar and syntax).  I uploaded these symbols onto the uncommondescent.com website.  You downloaded the symbols to your computer and deciphered them.  Now a representation of the idea that was once in my head is in your head.  When you read my sentence you thought about a round orange basketball. Now consider this.  Read More ›

Imagine a Star Trek movie in which two strikingly similar planets are discovered. The planets are in different corners of the universe, yet their coastlines, mountain ranges, inhabitants and cultures are amazingly alike. Or again, imagine a new, yet fully-formed, planet is discovered. The planet was not there a few years earlier, but there it is, complete with inhabitants and civilizations. These two phenomena–convergence and rapid appearance–are common in biology and, needless to say, they contradict evolutionary expectations. These surprises are not often seriously reckoned with. Evolutionists do not engage the implications of these findings, and sometimes they even avoid or deny the findings altogether.  Read more

Review Of Probability’s Nature And Nature’s Probability – Lite, by Donald Johnson
ISBN: 978-0-9823554-4-2

The twentieth century unveiled the world of molecular biology, including DNA, the genetic code, proteins, and the molecular basis for modern genetics. Such findings, according to Neo Darwinists, nicely supported evolution. Evolutionary change was fueled by variation arising from genetic mutations. How the genes, and their supporting cast, arose in the first place was a more difficult question. But given their existence the evolutionary narrative was held with great confidence. This straightforward narrative is now understood, however, to be too simplistic. For instance, we now understand that biological variation often arises not from changes in the genes but rather from changes in the expression levels of the genes. Even those celebrated beaks of Darwin’s finches appear to be changing via Read More ›

Ruse asks us to believe that morality is subjective, a product of our genes. We only believe it is objective because our genes determine that is better for us. Let’s be frank, atheism kills morality, and any attempt to get it up and running in a godless system is futile. He writes in this article;

God is dead. Long live morality: Morality is something fashioned by natural selection. That doesn’t diminish its usefulness, or its comfort

‘God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good….Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection….Morality is just a matter of emotions…So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.’

There a number of angles to respond to Ruse. Firstly, what is moral? It isn’t enough to say that evolution can make us moral, we have to ask what is good morality. Read More ›

I once had a discussion with an evolutionist who, not surprisingly, claimed that evolution is fact. “Have you ever seen a sea lion try to move across a beach?” It is obviously not a good design, he argued, and so must have evolved. The sea lion’s “design is not intelligent, but rather is a product of evolution,” he concluded, for “design would attempt to produce something that works well, if it is intelligent design, and this does not work well and so is not intelligent design.”  Read more

I would like to encourage ID supporters that can attend a conference in Boston’s North Shore this summer to attend the following conference being offered by Biologos: BioLogos-Gordon College Conference 2010: “A Dialog on Creation” The BioLogos Foundation will offer summer courses in science-and-religion starting in the summer of 2010. These courses provide short 1–3 week overviews of the key ideas in developing a sophisticated and mature understanding of life’s origins in an explicitly Christian context. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of science-and-religion who will lead discussions of these core concepts. The BioLogos-Gordon workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore questions at the intersection of science & faith. In this inaugural BioLogos workshop, Read More ›

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a polymath of no mean skill. Mathematicians bemoan the fact that he spent his later years doing physics, and physicists wish he had started earlier. One of his contributions was the derivation and proofs for the bell-shaped curve known as a “Gaussian” or “normal” distribution. It is the result of a random process in which small steps are taken in any direction. So universal is the “Gaussian” in all areas of life that it is taken to be prima facie evidence of a random process. Only in recent years have people addressed situations that can deviate from a Gaussian. For example, one of the criteria that produce a Gaussian, is that the probability of a Read More ›