Intelligent Design

See update at the end of this post. In the comment section to the last post Bill Dembski alluded to an NSF staffer who attempted to justify surfing porn at work.  The staffer’s justification:  he was only trying to help provide a living to poor overseas women. Denyse O’Leary suggested that if this loser had really wanted to help poor women overseas he could have made a donation to any of the various religious orders that actually help poor women overseas instead of participating in ensnaring them in sexual slavery. Dembski responded by posing tongue-in-cheek the following question: Denyse, You raise an interesting question for Richard Dawkins: If we had to choose one or the other, helping “poor overseas women” by Read More ›

Is Dawkins pulling the wool over our eyes? Dawkins: “Lenski and a different set of colleagues investigated this phenomenon [bigger cells] by taking two of the [E. coli] tribes, called Ara+1 and Ara-1, which seemed, over 20,000 generations, to have followed the same evolutionary trajectory, and looking at their DNA. The astonishing result they found was that 59 genes had changed their level of expression in both tribes and all 59 had changes in the same direction. Were it not for natural selection, such independent parallelism, in all 59 genes independently, would completely beggar belief. The odds against it happening by chance are stupefyingly large. This is exactly the kind of thing creationists say cannot happen, because they think it Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith has written a blog on human exceptionalism at Secondhand Smoke, his blog at First Things, in light of the recent publications about  “Ardi”, the hominid that is supposedly “pretty close” to the common ancestor of humans and chimps way back 4.4 million years ago.

Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes…I bring this up because some Darwinsists and other assorted materialists have attacked human exceptionalism on the basis that our supposed emergence from the great apes and/or our genetic closeness means that we should not think of ourselves as distinctive. I never thought that was in the least persuasive.  What matters is what we are now, not what might have been millions of years ago or how we got here…

And that brings me to Ewen Callaway’s review in New Scientist of the book Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human authored by Jeremy Taylor. As Mr. Callaway explains, Jeremy Taylor’s book sheds light on the issue of genetic similarity:

In this book, his first, the former BBC producer synthesises recent genetic, behavioural and neuroscientific research to argue that far more than a handful of genes divides humans from our evolutionary cousins, 6 million years removed.

Take that 98.4 per cent, an oft-repeated figure that has been used to argue that chimps deserve human rights. True, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes share an extraordinary amount of genetic similarity – yet humans and mice share almost as much.

Read More ›

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Richard Dawkins www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

Dr. Karl Giberson President, BioLogos Foundation Dear Dr. Giberson: As a professor, author and President of the BioLogos Foundation, you have powerful communication tools at your disposal. You have access to major media outlets and you speak with scientific authority. In short, you are a teacher with a very large audience. This is an enormous teaching responsibility which I am sure you take seriously. For this reason I want to alert you to a fundamental mistake which you and the BioLogos Foundation have made. Given the magnitude of your teaching responsibility I hope that you will carefully consider this situation and take the appropriate corrective measures.   Read more

It is interesting to see how evolutionists respond to failures of their theory. For all their talk of following the evidence and adjusting to new data, evolutionists find all kinds of ways to resist learning from their failures. Consider one of the major failures of evolution, its view of the very nature of biological change. Twentieth century evolutionary theory held that biological change is a rather simple process that is blind to the needs of the organism. As Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin confidant T. H. Huxley, put it, mutations “occur without reference to their possible consequences or biological uses.”   Read more

Karl Giberson has responded in a post at Beliefnet to Dr. Dembski’s previous post here at UD. The post that Dr. Dembski wrote was in response to another Beliefnet post written by Darrel Falk. What is left out of this triangle is that I had also posted a response to Darrel Falk’s post right after Dr. Dembski’s post. But Karl Giberson seems to have missed my post, because not only am I not mentioned in his reply, his reply has already been directly refuted by my post, and I would assume that Karl Giberson wouldn’t have written his post if only he had read mine. He wrote:

The key point here, that Dembski claims to miss, is that the gift of creativity that God bestowed on the creation is theologically analogous to the gift of freedom God bestowed on us. Both we and the creation have freedom…In exactly the same way, less the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine, God is “off the hook.” Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy its autonomy, such things occur. Likewise, unless God coercively micromanages human decision making, we will often abuse our freedom.

In my post I wrote:

Read More ›

I was raised an atheist, and was very devout as a kid. I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a scientist, “I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, and that all the laws of physics were fine-tuned to make life possible. Wouldn’t this require design and purpose?” Unfortunately, the response I got was, “Only mindless, uneducated religious fanatics ask that question. It was all an accident. Stop asking stupid questions.” But I wasn’t mindless, uneducated, or a religious fanatic. I was an atheist! A light went off, and I said, “Materialism doesn’t make sense. Design and purpose in the cosmos makes Read More ›

Computers are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and those improvements have been mainly due to better hardware. Future improvements, however, may well rely increasingly on better architecture and software. One reason why this seems likely is that the human brain, with its very different architecture, dramatically out performs computers in performing various tasks (such as perceiving an object in a complex visual scene). If computers are to match the brain’s performance, they likely will need to exploit features of the brain’s design.   Read more

Clearing out the Inbox, I find this item, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’” A British film about Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer (Anita Singh,The Daily Telegraph, 11 Sep 2009). Utter rubbish. Most likely, the film – which led off the Toronto International Film Festival – was rejected because it is a bore. No one here cares about Charles and Emma Darwin. A tell-all about Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack and Michelle Obama, now …. This whole fake uproar* reminds me of a recent occasion when some pundit from the States claimed that Canadians have a growing fear of Read More ›

Excerpted from The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins 2009

“It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record because they have been taught that it is full of “gaps”. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all. The massive numbers we now do have document evolutionary history. Large numbers by any standards constitute beautiful “intermediates.” The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong.

We don’t need fossils. The case for evolution is watertight without them, so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. There is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species and their geographical distribution.

Read More ›

Chuck Colson at Break Point discusses Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer… But here is your takeaway, and I’ll let Dr. Meyer do the talking: “Our uniform experience affirms that specified information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in Read More ›

As I have observed in these pages before, the United States Supreme Court has a very uneven record on the issue of eugenics.  Indeed, one of the justices we lawyers are taught in law school to revere without question, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an uber-Darwinist and philosophical materialist who also happened to be, not coincidentally, a great admirer of the American eugenics project of the 1920’s.  In the infamous case of Buck v. Bell the court considered a Virginia law authorizing the forced sterilization of mentally challenged people.  The state proposed to use the law to sterilize Carrie Buck on the ground that she was feeble minded and thus a genetic threat to society.  The court upheld the law, and Read More ›

For those still clinging to the risible notion that scientists are above petty self-interest there is this.  Note especially this response from a leading climate researcher to another researcher’s request for his raw data:  “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”  Science is not, as some would have it, an automatically self-correcting enterprise.  As with every other human intellectual endeavor, science has entrenched orthodoxies that seek to perpetuate themselves at all costs.  Note to non-US readers:  The title does not refer to German National Socialists.  It is an allusion to a famous Seinfeld episode.  See here. Update:   Berlinski is scintillating on the silly notion that unlike other Read More ›