Kairos, Chronos and Theodicy – Bill Dembski on Premier Radio
I want to kick-off a discussion here following Bill’s very interesting interview on Premier Radio. Premier Radio I’ll add my first thoughts below.
Intelligent Design
Lobbing a grenade into the Tetrapod Evolution picture
A year ago, Nature published an educational booklet with the title 15 Evolutionary gems (as a resource for the Darwin Bicentennial). Number 2 gem is Tiktaalik a well-preserved fish that has been widely acclaimed as documenting the transition from fish to tetrapod. Tiktaalik was an elpistostegalian fish: a large, shallow-water dwelling carnivore with tetrapod affinities yet possessing fins. Unfortunately, until Tiktaalik, most elpistostegids remains were poorly preserved fragments. “In 2006, Edward Daeschler and his colleagues described spectacularly well preserved fossils of an elpistostegid known as Tiktaalik that allow us to build up a good picture of an aquatic predator with distinct similarities to tetrapods – from its flexible neck, to its very limb-like fin structure. The discovery and painstaking analysis Read More ›
Recent podcasts in the intelligent design controversy
1. On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin examines a new peer-reviewed paper that demolishes a very common and very fallacious objection to intelligent design. That objection? “Aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?” Go here to listen. For more information on this and other peer-reviewed papers relating to intelligent design, visit Evolution News & Views at www.evolutionnews.org. [My comment: I would have thought that lottery scandals had long ago demolished the idea that just anything can happen in a given space of time – apart from design. Oh, wait! If you believe otherwise, shouldn’t you continue to buy government-sponsored lottery tickets, no matter what? I would not recommend that any skeptic cdo it, but othesPlease do. Read More ›
The Next Revolution in Biology (according to the Templeton Foundation)
I just received this email from the Templeton Foundation. It is fascinating for what it includes and leaves out. On the one hand, it admits that evolutionary theory is incomplete and it even tacitly consents to evolution being a telic process (evolution is a “search mechanism” — Bob Marks and I have been arguing that evolution is a search right along at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab — www.evoinfo.org). And there’s even an admission that there might be limits to evolvability (a dominant theme in ID research). At the same time, intelligent design is given no mention and the solution to evolution’s incompleteness is said to lie in “cooperation,” which is supposed to complement the competition usually associated with Darwinism. I tried to find this announcement on the web, but it appears not to be up yet, so I’m reprinting the newsletter here without a link.
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The Next Revolution in Biology [from “Templeton Report” newsletter, 6jan10]
“In every field of science, when it’s successful, you think you understand all of it,” says Martin Nowak, professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. “In classical mechanics,” he explains, “there was a time when physicists thought, “‘Well, that’s all there is. If I know the place of the particles in the universe, I can predict the future.’ But then came quantum mechanics and relativity theory. There was a total revolution.” Nowak is hard at work trying to launch another revolution, this time in evolutionary biology. “Our understanding of evolution,” he says, “is very incomplete.”
Thanks to a five-year, multipart grant of more than $10 million from the John Templeton Foundation, researchers will be able explore some of the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology (FQEB) that have yet to be answered. For instance, Nowak explains, “evolution does not explain the origin of life because evolution presupposes populations of reproducing individuals.” The origin of life, what he calls “prevolution,” needs more research. This would include examining the transition in which chemistry finally gave rise to biology.
Established in 2009 to mark the Darwin double anniversary (Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species), FQEB is offering fellowships of up to $75,000 for up to two consecutive years of research for both junior and senior scholars in a variety of fields. The deadline for applications for the first round of fellowships is February 1, and the fellows will begin work in September.
The scholars who win fellowships will do research at Harvard or other academic institutions in the Boston area. They will be expected to participate in the creation of new research networks, to attend regular meetings, and to work across disciplinary boundaries. Priority will be given to work that has significant philosophical implications for evolutionary biology and scientific understanding more broadly.
What kind of research meets that standard? Nowak offers another example. Evolution, he says, is a kind of “search mechanism.” “It searches for constructions, for solutions, for particular cell shapes, particular organs. Evolution is always searching, but there is a space of possibilities that is being searched.” He asks, “What is that space of possibilities? How can we describe a theory of that space that is being searched?” Read More ›
Pierre-Paul Grassé, Daydreaming, and Darwinian Depression
What gambler would be crazy enough to play roulette with random evolution? The probability of dust carried by the wind reproducing Durer’s “Melancholia” is less infinitesimal than the probability of copy errors in the DNA molecule leading to the formation of the eye; besides, these errors had no relationship whatsoever with the function that the eye would have to perform or was starting to perform. There is no law against daydreaming, but science must not indulge in it.
Arrington and Stephen Barr Mix it Up
At the First Things blog.
Coffee!! Here are my latest Examiner stories:
(I am an “intelligent design examiner” now. Don’t know how long that will last, due to possible incoming flocks of trolls. Just thought I’d cumulate my posts here. Apologies for any duplications. ) Intelligent design: What it is Top ten science news events in the intelligent design controversy Faked embryos are back – at PBS Some claim that Satan is a great motivator, just like God
WWND? (What Would Nietzsche Do?)
In an earlier post I commented on Alasdair Cochrane’s efforts to jettison “inherent dignity” as a criterion for determining whether it is moral to treat certain classes of humans as objects. Cochrane is impatient with the “dignity criterion,” because it prevents actions that he deems beneficial, for example medical experiments on human guinea pigs that might lead to advances in medicine. As I thought more about Cochrane’s thesis, it became clear to me that our old friend Nietzsche was lurking just beneath the surface of his arguments. Nietzsche had no use for what he called “slave morality.” For Nietzsche, “good” does not mean adherence to a moral standard. Instead, it is more or less a synonym for “strong.” Thus, the Read More ›
$5000 Video Contest at GodorNot.com: “Why do you believe that God is good?”
As part of the promotion for my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY, the publisher has arranged a $5000 video contest in which participants upload an up-to-2-minute video explaining why they believe that God is good. The contest has just started and the deadline for submissions is April 5, 2010. The contest is operated by Memelabs, which allows online voters to judge the contest. Go to GodorNot.com for details. Interestingly, THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is receiving most of its criticism not from atheistic and theistic evolutionists but from young-earth creationists (e.g., Johnny Helms’ blog here). As I comment at that blog, “What I’m trying to do is preserve Christian orthodoxy within an old-earth perspective…. BOTTOM LINE: The only way my book Read More ›
Calling Dr. Mengele, Calling Dr. Mengele
Alasdair Cochrane works at an organization called the Centre for the Study of Human Rights in the UK. The journal Bioethics has just published Cochrane’s article “Undignified Bioethics” (subscription required), in which he argues that the concept of inherent human dignity should be rejected. Cochrane correctly notes that treating all humans as though they possess inherent dignity merely by virtue of the fact that they are human gets in the way of the really nifty medical experiments we could perform on the defenseless among us if we were to jettison that notion: This conception of dignity as inherent moral worth certainly seems coherent enough as an idea. Indeed, we can also see why this conception of dignity is employed in Read More ›
Joe Carter Takes on David B. Hart
In UD Contest 19 Denyse asked readers to identify the several errors in a passage from David B. Hart’s blurb about the “problems with ID.” Over at First Things Joe Carter also goes after Hart (here).
DEBATE: William Dembski vs. Lewis Wolpert at UNBELIEVABLE
. Lewis Wolpert and I had an audio debate a few weeks ago, which is now available online as a podcast: go here (there’s about three minutes of stage-setting by the interviewer Justin Brierly before the actual discussion with Wolpert begins). The debate is part of a program series called UNBELIEVABLE. Other debates available there include one between Denis Alexander and PZ Myers and also one between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox.
Music, Evolutionary Cheesecake And The Designer Brain
A Review Of Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music
ISBN: 978-0-452-28852-2
Physicist Emerson Pugh once quipped, “if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t” [1]. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music neuroscientist Daniel Levitin notes how the number of ways that brain neurons can connect is so vast that we will never fully comprehend all the thought processes that we are capable of.
In recent years, mapping techniques have revealed a lot about the functional regions of the brain. Wernicke’s area is responsible for language processing, the motor cortex for physical movement and frontal lobes for generating personalities. Both encephalography and MRI have given us key spatial-temporal data about brain function in these regions. But we also find that activities such as listening to music contravene such a simplistic compartmentalization.
In fact the perception of pitch, tempo, the emotions invoked by a piece of music and the lyrics of a song all use different parts of the brain albeit simultaneously. Levitin repeatedly emphasizes the multi-faceted aspects of the music ‘experience’ noting how a, “precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake” leads to our appreciation of music [p.188]. The brain is thus a massively parallel device, capable of carrying out several different tasks at once.
While it is through a lifetime of exposure that our brains become used to the note scales and music styles of our culture, it is during childhood that we are most receptive to learning music rules and note sequences. The finding that children’s tastes in music are heavily influenced by the music heard during prenatal development, has forced a shift in the way we think about childhood memory.
We now know for example that the cerebellum has the capacity to recall with precision accuracy the rhythm of a music piece long after it has been heard while the brain stem and dorsal cochlear nucleus are able to distinguish between consonant (harmonious) and dissonant sounds. In fact our brains are able to group sounds without any conscious effort from ourselves. Read More ›
The Altenberg 16 — coming to a bookstore near you February 9th
< This book takes a look at the rivalry in science today surrounding attempts to discover the elusive process of evolution. In one camp are the faithful followers of the long-standing theory of natural selection promulgated by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago. This “survival of the fittest” theory, according to author Suzan Mazur, is no longer the scientific cornerstone of biology and has been challenged for decades. In the other camp are those challengers who want to steer evolutionary science in a more honest, scientifically accurate direction. However, the Darwinian theory has become a political powerhouse brand that is hard to unseat because of the money and power associated with it. The Altenberg 16 is about a group Read More ›
A Question for Joe Felsenstein (and Everyone Else)
Joe Felsenstein, and most other evolutionists, tell us that science must be restricted to law-like causes and explanations. In a word, they require the scientific method to be restricted to naturalism. While this methodological naturalism seems like a reasonable way to do science, it is an incomplete instruction. There remains the question of what to do when methodological naturalism doesn’t work. Read more