Intelligent Design

Interesting slide show at Discover Magazine titled “Intelligent Design’s 8 Biggest Fails,” the guiding intelligence behind it being Ken Miller (go here). I receive a mention next to one of the slides — apparently the emergence of nylonase is supposed to provide empirical disconfirmation of my theoretical work on specified complexity (Miller has been taking this line for years). For my response about nylonase, which the critics never cite, go here. As you look at these slides, ask yourself for all of the systems in question just how Darwinian evolution explains them. Why wasn’t this slide show called “Darwinian Evolution’s 8 Biggest Successes”?

Researchers at Brigham Young University shaped DNA strands into the letters BYU, reported Live Science.  Let’s have a little fun with this clever achievement (an indisputable case of intelligent design) with some thought experiments that make use of ID reasoning. Suppose instead of forming the DNA into letter shapes, they used a code with the existing bases arranged in triplets: AAA = A, AAC = B, AAG = C, AAT =  D, and so forth.  Cracking the code would reveal the letters BYU. Suppose they spelled out “Brigham Young University” in full using this code and signed their names with it.  Now they’re not only approaching the Universal Probability Bound, they are tightening the independently verifiable specification. Suppose instead they Read More ›

Over at the First Things blog Stephen M. Barr and I have the following exchange regarding a story about the latest evolutionary psychology explanation (Why Women Hate Snakes):  Barry Arrington:   Who doesn’t love evolutionary psychology? We can make up stories all day long explaining any phenomenon we like, and then we can explain its inverse with equal élan, without even the remotest chance of our story being falsified. But is it science? Stephen M. Barr:  Dear Barry, Is evolutionary psychology all bad? A lot of it is just common sense. Consider a simple example: Why do men have more upper body strength and more aggressive tendencies? Is it possibly related somehow to the fact that women who were pregnant or caring Read More ›

I mean, really, whodathunkit? I haven’t got the book Greatest Show on Earth yet – Bantam’s publicist could always get in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca, if she wants to send me a copy.

What’s interesting to me is that Randy “Flock of Dodos” Olson, referring to Dawkins’s constant free insults, says

Dawkins provides a transcript of his interview with the president of Concerned Women for America which reads like a Monty Python skit as the woman, a bullheaded creationist, simply answers all of Dawkins’s sophisticated argumentation by saying she’s not convinced – like a cartoon character standing in front of a hail of bullets taunting, “You missed me.”

It’s a shame Dawkins couldn’t take a few tips from his atheist colleague Jerry Coyne. Coyne’s powerful and popular book [Why Evolution Is True] was, to quote Booklist, “far more presentational than disputatious”. That is a desperately needed attribute these days in making the convincing – and persuasive – case for evolution.

In short, Olson is virtually admitting that, in his view, Dawkins did not make a very effective case, but he does quite the fancy dance around admitting it.

Dawkins refuses to debate educated people who doubt his theories, like Michael Behe. People like Olson and institutions like New Scientist help him get away with this because they need to believe so badly that if they suspect he laid an egg, they could not admit it to themselves, never mind to others.

Anyway, Olson’s suggestion won’t work. Read More ›

Monash University issued a press release yesterday about its contributors to a recent PNAS paper that claimed to refute irreducible complexity (IC). The release declared victory for Darwin, stating that “Our work … shows that Darwin’s theory of evolution beautifully explains how molecular machines came to be.”  PhysOrg dutifully echoed this announcement without contest. Casual readers may not know about the comeback arguments posted by Michael Behe on Evolution News and Uncommon Descent, by Casey Luskin on Evolution News and by Cornelius Hunter on Darwin’s God, because the evolutionists refused to hear them or allow them inside their sphere of influence.  For example, PNAS refused to publish Behe’s response.   The Darwin Party basically barred the doors and windows and announced Read More ›

Why People Believe What They Do
Scientific American April 10, 2009

On Scientific American’s Science Talk, Steve Mirsky interviews cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley detailing some surprising data on understanding of vs belief in evolution. Particularly amazing is Steve’s positing: “So it may be justifiable to say, “Here’s what we understand about evolution as a science. We don’t care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it.””

. . .Lombrozo: Sure. So I think one of the most surprising findings has to do with the relationship between understanding the basics of evolutionary theory and accepting it as our best account of the origins of human life. So most people, I think, [or] in particular scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it’s because they don’t understand it very well; they don’t really understand what the theory is telling us. But in fact, if you look at the data from psychology and education, what you find is either no correlation between accepting evolution and understanding it or very, very small correlation between those two factors, and I think that’s surprising to a lot of people and in particular to educators and scientists. Read More ›

Here.

A new study has come out that tracks ‘tracks’; i.e., reptile ‘tracks’. It seems that the transition from a straddled to an upright position of reptilian limbs took place almost immediately. So scientists say that have studied fossilized tracks prior to, and immediately after, the end-of-the Permian mass extinction. [BTW, let’s remember that the Darwinian objection to an absence of intermediate forms is the imperfection of the fossil record, with the difficulty of ‘soft-tissue’ fossilizing as a partial reason. But here we’re talking fossil footracks, which would seem even harder to form, and yet they’re found!] Professor Mike Benton offers this: “As it is, the new footprint evidence suggests a more dramatic pattern of replacement, where the sprawling animals that Read More ›

1. I see where Ladd Allen, producer of the Privileged Planet DVD that caused such a ruckus when it was shown at the Smithsonian in 2005, has now come out with Darwin’s Dilemma.

Darwin’s Dilemma presumably references the sudden Cambrian explosion of complex, multicellular life forms, including vertebrates, the creatures most likely to have intelligence, about half a billion years ago. Note how they talk around the problem here. Darwinists have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how this could happen purely by natural selection acting on random mutation. Darwin started the thing off by suggesting that the explanation was that the fossil record was poor. Well, the fossil record is way better now, and it supports him even less. Not what you expected to hear in the Year of Darwin, eh?

Behind the Scenes With Darwin’s Dilemma: An Interview With Producer Lad Allen

On this episode of ID the Future Anika Smith interviews Illustra Media producer Lad Allen on the new film out next week, Darwin’s Dilemma. As the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, Darwin’s Dilemma represents a capstone for Allen, who traversed the globe to present the story of Darwin’s journey to his theory of evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, the nagging problem for Darwin in the fossil record that has become a crisis for evolution today.

Listen in as Lad Allen shares with us what it’s like to shoot on location in four continents and work with scientists like Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Meyer.

Go here to listen.

(Note: The Smithsonian always had a huge problem with the Cambrian explosion because it never supported Darwinism, and their key scientist on the case in the days it first came to public notice attempted to hide the results.) Read More ›

When a thing is false, is false from all points of view. In fact it cannot exist a point of view from which the thing becomes true, given it is false, rather each view point manifests a particular aspect of the falsity of the thing. As a consequence, when a thing is false, whether we suppose it is true we get contradictions, one for every point of view we consider the thing from. All that is simple logic. Read More ›

In the Darwinism debates, ‘peer review’ is often invoked as a panacea – quite mistakenly, since these debates presuppose a much more free-ranging intellectual universe than the one in which peer review is effective. By ‘peer review’ I mean the process by which colleagues in the field to which one aspires to contribute vet articles before they are published. To be sure, peer review has its uses. It catches obvious errors of fact, curbs overstretched inferences and enables an author to phrase things so that the intended message is received properly.

In other words, peer review is a kind of specialist editing – full stop. It is not the mechanism by which disputes concerning overarching explanatory frameworks are usefully settled, since these typically involve judgements about the relative weighting given to various bodies of evidence that one would explain in a common fashion. Substantial disagreements over such judgements typically have less to do with factual issues than deeper, philosophical ones about what a field is ultimately about.

Read More ›

The fossil record reveals a history of life characterized by the abrupt appearance of new species followed by no change and eventual extinction in most cases. Needless to say, abrupt appearances and no change is not exactly what evolution expected. Much of this was known in Darwin’s time and he figured that the fossil record was incomplete. Today such speculation doesn’t work anymore. The evidence reveals even more clearly this pattern of abrupt appearances followed by stasis. As one recent paper explained:   Read more

A friend wrote to ask me about “evolutionary” psychology claims that humans are promiscuous because of our evolutionary history with chimps and bonobos.

I replied:

Those people stoop to just about anything, don’t they?

As per your summary, “Evolutionary biologists consider that bonobos and chimps are the most closest species according to our evolutionary tree or bush, and since both species are very promiscuous, they infer that this behaviour was present in our common ancestor with them, and that promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history. ”

Let’s picture ourselves in the Toronto Zoo’s primate sanctuary. It comes out that one enterprising bonobo male has impregnated all the females, willing or no. So? It’s inconvenient, because the zookeepers will need to find new homes for most of the expected offspring. If they think it’s a big enough problem, they can always put the females on the Pill hereafter, right? Or put him in a separate enclosure. Otherwise, as we say here, that’s just life wandering its way through time.

Okay, now let’s picture ourselves in a courtroom at the Old City Hall Courthouse. The judge is hearing oral arguments from the defense lawyer for a serial rapist. The defendant’s lawyer says that due to the behaviour of chimpanzees and bonobos, “promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history,” so we should go easy on his client.

I think the judge and the prosecution would be competing to interrupt at that point, and most local jurors and onlookers would be aghast.

What’s missing from the analysis is that lots of characteristics may be part of our evolutionary history, but humans uniquely possess the ability to select among characteristics which ones we think we should encourage.

A guy could be a serial rapist – or he could take a folk dancing class and meet a nice girl. The former choice will likely get him a set of leg irons at the Courthouse and the latter a rental tux and free carnation at the City Hall wedding chamber.

It is not an argument for any form of human behaviour whatever that it may have been in our evolutionary history, because all sorts of behaviour has been in our evolutionary history, including a great many behaviours never practiced by chimps or bonobos.

Also, at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Thousands of DNA segments have been found to be nearly identical across a wide range of species including human, mouse, rat, dog, chicken and fish. Evolutionary theory expected no such high similarity for species that are supposed to have been evolving independently for hundreds of millions of years. The only explanation could be a super strong functional constraint requiring the very unusual similarities, but none was found. Now new research is adding a twist to the story.   Read more

Last week’s review of Richard Dawkins’ new book in the Economist hit all the usual chords. Dawkins’ purpose is to demonstrate that evolution is a fact–as incontrovertible a fact as any in science, and the Economist is only too happy to propagate the absurdity. First, there are the usual silly evidential arguments that only work with the uninformed, of which there are apparently many. True, species appear abruptly in the fossil record but, explains the Economist, “That any traces at all remain from so long ago is astounding, and anyway it is not the completeness of the fossil record but its consistency that matters.” After all, there are no fossil rabbits in the ancient strata. That’s right, no rabbits before Read More ›