Intelligent Design

This month’s Scientific American is another example of evolution’s influence on science. Read more

Here’s my MercatorNet column about the decline of traditional media (known to bloggers as “legacy mainstream media”). Anyone interested in the intelligent design controversy should think carefully about how the media are changing.

Hint: Imagine a world in which media went to someone other than the Darwin lobby to find out what might be wrong with Darwinism …

I don’t accept the thesis that the old media declined because they were partisan. Rather they became more ridiculously partisan as they were declining.

Single-minded partisanship is – in a free society – usually an outcome of consumer choice. People can get their news from lots of sources. So if they choose your source, you can develop the story as you like.

But – by contrast – how many air traffic controllers are permitted to bug pilots with their opinions about politics and religion? How many weather forecasters would last long if they likewise bugged farmers seeking data on the tornado watch?

So the tsunami of consumer choices in media fuels partisanship – but also opportunity. Read More ›

One of evidences for evolution that has been strongly touted in recent years is the fact that the genomes of the human and chimpanzee are so similar. About 98.4% of the instructions in our genome match the chimp’s. We must share a common ancestor, so goes the argument which doesn’t worry about how humans and chimps could be so different. With a 98.4% match, evolution must be true. That, of course, is not a scientific argument. But leaving that aside, when we look under the hood we actually find that comparisons of the human and chimp genomes contradict evolution. Read more

PZ Myers has, once again, railed against something that he doesn’t understand at his blog Pharyngula. Hi PZ! Notice that he doesn’t actually address the content of Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks’ paper, which you can read here: Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success, published at the IEEE. Given his argument, he doesn’t know how to measure the cost of success, yet claims that Dr. Dembski doesn’t understand selection. A bit of advice PZ, the argument presented by Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks is very sophisticated PZ, your mud slinging isn’t PZ, you need to step it up PZ. I know this new stuff isn’t ez, but you may want to consider a response that has Read More ›

In informatics metaprogramming is a technique consisting in developing computer programs (sets of instructions) that output other programs. While simple programming means instructions generating data, metaprogramming means instructions generating instructions. In general the prefix “meta” means a thing/cause that stays at a higher semantic/ontological level than another thing/effect (in the case of metaprogramming we have a two-level hierarchy where a parent program creates child programs). For a tutorial introduction to metaprogramming see for example the following Jonathan Bartlett’s brilliant articles:
one, two and three.

DNA contains instructions, biological code for working-out various constructive cellular jobs (making proteins, setting developmental parameters, etc.). Question (inspired by the above ascertainment and readings): does DNA contain also meta-programs beyond simple programs?

Much DNA (outside its coding-for-proteins portions) seems without function (junk-DNA). Is it possible that some junk-DNA is meta-code able to assembly other DNA code? This could be an interesting ID prediction. Many have noted as the information amount contained in the genomes seems really too little to account for the overall complexity of organisms. Metaprogramming would be exactly one of the techniques able to compress the biological information. Read More ›

youtube video – Harry Hill puts a fresh spin on Darwinism Sorry not embedded, but you will enjoy this UK TV comedian’s take off of Darwinism and his finches

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, vol.39, #5, September 2009, pp.1051-1061. *****For the official listing, go here. *****For a pdf of the article, go here. P.S. Our critics will immediately say that this really isn’t a pro-ID article but that it’s about something else (I’ve seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have a look at the article. In it we critique, for instance, Richard Dawkins METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL (p. 1055). Question: When Dawkins introduced this example, was he arguing pro-Darwinism? Yes he was. In Read More ›

In “Joke science” (Sunday Spectator, August 2, 2009), David Warren writes, One of the great attractions of popular Darwinism, as a financial investment, is its appeal to what we in the media refer to, in our jaded way, as the “tabloid audience.” That is to say people who, through no fault of their own (lack of education, native dullness, mental injury, etc.) are extremely credulous. You can sell stuff to them that you just couldn’t sell to — you know, “people like us.” From another point of view, it may be a misfortune that our schools and media have been working, for decades now, on expanding this “tabloid audience.” But that has been a subject for many other days. Today Read More ›

The following YouTube video may seem overdrawn, but the social media described in it may prove critical in disarming Darwinism in the general culture: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Nick Spencer of Theos has interviewed Mary Midgley as part of their Rescuing Darwin project. This is written up in a report entitled Discussing Darwin. It would seem though that Midgley is closer to post-modernism and a multi-faith approach to truth, than the type of objective modernism that Darwinists believe underpins their science. Is she really the person to ask to defend science? Both Dawkins and scientific creationists have one point of agreement, that there is such a thing as objective truth.

Discussing Darwin – Mary Midgley

 Science and Values blog

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New research is telling us more about how water striders, those bugs that walk on water, get such long legs. Read more

Consultant Rick Ferguson quipped that the hacking of Dawkins’ website “is proof there’s no “Intelligent Design” on Dawkins’ forum”:
Dawkins’ website forum hacked to send spam: God! What a nuisance By John Leyden

A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday.
Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was back, and apparently fighting fit. . . . Read More ›

Reading through some of Huxley’s writings caused me to pause and ask a question: After more than a century of study, trial-and-error, and free-wheeling speculation, what has history taught us about the origin of life? For an exhaustive review of this question, see Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. But the specific question was prompted by the following passage from Huxley’s Discourses Biological and Geological: Essays (1894):

But though I cannot express this conviction of mine too strongly, I must carefully guard against the supposition that I intend to suggest that no such thing as Abiogenesis  ever has taken place in the past, or ever will take place in the future. With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call “vital” may not, some day, be artificially brought together. All I feel justified in affirming is, that I see no reason for believing that the feat has been performed yet.

And looking back through the prodigious vista of the past, I find no record of commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me; but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith (pp. 255-257).

Now more than a century later, research into the origin of life has largely proceeded on this basis. Convinced that some form of abiogenesis must be true, its primary motivation has indeed not been “scientific” but rather has proceeded as an “expectation,” an act of philosophical faith. Where, it seems reasonable to ask, has this brand of philosophical faith gotten us?
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One of the main arguments to support evolution appeals to shared non-functional structures between organisms. Since design entails design for function, shared non-functional structures would suggest common ancestry in the absence of common design. But how can we tell whether something is truly non-functional? Here are some insights from a colleague that address this point: As a programmer, sometimes I spend a lot of time designing error-detection and/or error-correction algorithms (especially for dealing with user input). Some of these functions may never, ever be used in a real-life situation. There are also various subroutines and functions that provide either exotic or minor capabilities that, likewise, maybe be used very seldom if at all. But they are there for a reason. Read More ›

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article relating Obama’s Healthcare Bill to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the technocrats responsible for the U.K.’s health care.  The article states:

This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which “cost-effectiveness” is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient’s final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.

These NICE people bring to mind another technocratic group I’ve read about called the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE)” in C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.  Those NICE folks in Lewis’s novel were an institution which would decide who lived and who died in accordance to their agenda of control and advancement of the remaining people into a Utopian, omni-competent and global scientific technocracy. That Hideous Strength was the fictional representation of the governmental materialism and scientism philosophy of social control Lewis described in The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis explains:

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

The Investor’s Business Daily article continues: Read More ›