Intelligent Design

When I was a Zoology undergraduate at Oxford my teachers often referred to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book “On Growth and Form”. They acknowledged it as a work of undoubted erudition, but somehow they evaded any impact it might have on our studies. That was reserved for Darwin, and Darwin alone. Returning to “on Growth and Form” after several decades it is possible to better comprehend what Thompson was trying to say. In his own words: The fact that I set little store by certain postulates (often deemed to be fundamental) of our present day biology the reader will have discovered and I have not endeavored to conceal. But it is not for the sake of polemical argument that I have Read More ›

Wired.com has a new article about why ID isn’t science because it’s been falsified. Usually the tactic against ID is that it isn’t a science because it isn’t falsifiable. I reckon use whatever club is closest at hand when you’re interested only in beating ID instead of being consistent. The article states: “You look at cellular machines and say, why on earth would biology do anything like this? It’s too bizarre,” he said. “But when you think about it in a neutral evolutionary fashion, in which these machineries emerge before there’s a need for them, then it makes sense.” “In which these machineries emerge before there’s a need” for the machineries. I don’t see how that makes any sense. Evolution Read More ›

Every time human DNA is passed from one generation to the next it accumulates 100–200 new mutations, according to a DNA-sequencing analysis of the Y chromosome.

This number — the first direct measurement of the human mutation rate — is equivalent to one mutation in every 30 million base pairs, and matches previous estimates from species comparisons and rare disease screens.

The British-Chinese research team that came up with the estimate sequenced ten million base pairs on the Y chromosome from two men living in rural China who were distant relatives. These men had inherited the same ancestral male-only chromosome from a common relative who was born more than 200 years ago. Over the subsequent 13 generations, this Y chromosome was passed faithfully from father to son, albeit with rare DNA copying mistakes. Read More ›

Interesting that DNA can exhibit such fine-grained usefulness in engineering design when, by Darwin’s lights, it is cobbled together by a sloppy unguided evolutionary process. It would seem that when the instruments we use are more refined than the things we are designing, the instruments themselves are likely to be the product of design. Building circuit boards using DNA scaffolding By Darren Quick There have been a few breakthroughs in recent years that hold the promise of sustaining Moore’s Law for some time to come. These include attaching molecules to silicon and replacing copper interconnects with graphene. Now IBM are proposing a new way to pack more power and speed into computer chips by using DNA molecules as scaffolding for Read More ›

Their chat is here. I don’t think Bloggingheads science regulars Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer (who complained publicly and behind the scenes about my Bloggingheads segment with Ron Numbers) are going to like this.

A curious piece was posted a few days back by Ewen Callaway at the New Scientist (go here). Its focus was on the recent IEEE paper by Robert Marks and me on conservation of information (for the paper, go here). Callaway remarks: “Even if a paper supporting ID has made it past peer review — and no doubt the arguments will rumble on — it seems like nothing much has changed.” Callaway and his colleagues are welcome to hide their heads in the sand and pretend that nothing has changed. But at the next Dover trial, as the body of peer-reviewed work supporting ID continues to grow (Marks and I have plenty in the pipeline, and there are other labs Read More ›

In the 1954 movie The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart plays the compulsive-paranoid Captain Queeg who is relieved of duty when unable to deal with a dangerous storm at sea. Upon return to port two officers face a court-martial for mutiny. The trial goes badly for them and they appear to be destined for prison until the final testimony of Captain Queeg where his underlying paranoia is suddenly revealed. In the courtroom sideways looks and wide eyes reveal a collective revelation: “Ohh, noooowwww I understand.” Read more

Richard Dawkins has a new book out soon; ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.’ An unfortunate title perhaps, bearing in mind the type of acts that have performed under that banner headline in the past. So is Dawkins no more than a travelling conjurer pulling bunnies out of hats in the name of science? Is his show cart of evolution just a charade of smoke and mirrors?

Let’s be frank, Dawkins is in reality more dangerous than a harmless travelling charlatan – the type of twisting rhetoric that Dawkins engages in is the type that leads to tyranny, not to respectful dialogue or family entertainment. He should be more careful, but he seems to have sacrificed his cares on some high alter; perhaps the million dollar book deals are clouding his judgment, but in reality his atheism leaves him unaccountable to anyone but himself or his atheist friends in the Royal Society. Yes, his rhetoric often appears to be as dangerous as that of the atheism of the twentieth century that led to fascist and communist regimes that abused human rights and led to the deaths of millions. Read More ›

I have recently come across Peter Strawson’s argument for soft naturalism in his book  Skepticism and Naturalism 1985. Also as a chapter Skepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments in Epistemology: an anthology pp.33-41 What strikes me from this is that proponents of hard forms of naturalism are trying to have it both ways, in that they allow naturalism a privileged place where it is not subject to the type of skepticism that the naturalist insists must be applied to all other knowledge claims. Strawson’s argument for soft naturalism comes out of Hume’s problem of induction and seems a more consistent approach than hard naturalism that is logically unsustainable.

The paper on evolutionary informatics by Robert Marks and me that was recently published in an IEEE journal (go here for the paper) continues to generate discussion on the Internet. One criticism is that it at best is consistent with theistic evolution but does not support ID. I think this is a mistake. I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change. The key contention of ID is that design in nature, and in biology in particular, is detectable. Evolutionary informatics, by looking at the information requirements of evolutionary processes, points to information sources beyond evolution and thus, indirectly, to a designer. Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian Read More ›

Synopsis Of The Fourth Chapter Of Nature’s IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi

Semiotix – Stephen Pain The distinction between “theorising” and “belief” is extremely important because our attitude differs towards them. In a theory the reified concept of the sign does not have an ontological status but an epistemological one. While in belief, the concept has often a clear ontological one. Uexküll believed in his concept of the Bauplan in the same way as Bergson believed in the vital force. The concept of a plan is of course no different from the creationist’s concept of “intelligent design”. Any usage of the Bauplan is further complicated by its ideological usage in The Biological State, Uexküll‘s template for the German State, one that was anti-democratic and in many instances attractive to the Nazi of Read More ›

In recent years evolutionists have been trying to pin down the theological implications of evolution. If evolution is true–and of course evolutionists believe it is true–then what does this tell us about god? From blogs to books to conferences at the Vatican, the “fact” of evolution is being integrated with our theology. The latest example of this science-informs-religion movement is Robert Wright’s op-ed piece in today’s New York Times which resurrects Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. It is yet another example of evolution’s abuse of science. Read more