Intelligent Design

PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne both commented on the Numbers-Nelson Bloggingheads exchange. Some comments on their comments:

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I’ve heard geneticists say we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, and that no one really understands what’s going on. I even read an article the other day showing how at least one creature DELETES portions of its own DNA during certain stages of development. Basically, the long-held ideas from even a couple years ago are being modified. Until scientists can look at an arbitrary line of code and say “this does this or that” I would not say any idea is “certain”.

Lamarck’s specific hypothesis had been rejected once Mendel found a mechanism for inheritance. Lamarckism was so obviously wrong. Darwin came up with something that was just the opposite. It was obviously true and easily understandable. It is easy and true within a certain scope, although it’s inadequate to explain certain biological features. Hence the modern synthesis and the current attempt to formulate a new synthesis of ideas, which may or may not succeed. Read More ›

With the chemical composition of DNA sufficiently well established, the world of science appeared poised for a major shake-up in its understanding of heredity.  Still, the road of discovery up until that time had been anything but a ‘walk in the park’.  While important details concerning the components of DNA had been ironed out as early as 1909, several erroneous turns at the beginning of the twentieth century had thrown biologists ‘off piste’ into thinking that protein and not DNA lay at the heart of heredity. Read More ›

Religious doctrinaire PZ Myers now incredibly claims there is no religion in evolution. After seeing Paul Nelson and Ronald Numbers discuss the issue, Myers reveals he is deeply in denial. Continue reading here.

Marvin Olasky, in an article at Townhall.com, makes a simple request: that Dr. Francis Collins, former leader of the Human Genome Project and President Obama’s recent nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health, come to King’s College in the Empire State Building and spend an hour discussing Darwinism and ID with Dr. Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Mr. Olasky states, What I and many others need help with is the science. I’ll put it simply and personally: I like Collins and find him convincing as he attacks ID. But when I hear Steve Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, a major new book published by HarperCollins and reviewed positively by many scientists, expound the flaws in Darwinism, Read More ›

Or so Nicholas Wade tells us is the view of Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist who studied twins raised apart (“Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers,” New York Times, July 25, 2009). Now retiring, in an interview with Constance Holden, Bouchard assails his colleagues (paywall). Wade writes,

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”

Whether you are right or wrong on the facts makes no difference because facts are what the academic monoculture chooses to recognize as such.

David Tyler notes here:

A bit of history of science will help here. Why is it that science did not flower after the young plant started so well among the ancient Greeks? Why did Islamic science falter in the Middle Ages? Why did Chinese science not get beyond some promising technological innovations? The answer is that in each case, the thinking of the scholars was dominated by a consensus ideology. Instead of testing ideas by reference to the natural world, they showed their allegiance was to Aristotelian philosophy (or to the equivalent in the cases of the Arab and Chinese cultures). Why did science develop in 17th Century Europe? It is because the scientists were consciously throwing off Aristotelianism and resolving to test their theories of the natural world by reference to observations of nature. The experimental method was the hallmark of their enquiries.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to develop avatars of academics that would lecture students on TV screens? They’d all pretty much say the same thing, just like before, right. We could change the graphics now and then.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

Go here. Ron goes after Coyne and Dawkins for promoting atheism; I talk about living in a trailer park (so to speak). Watch the whole thing while you clean up your office — that’s how I watch Bloggingheads on Saturday morning, when John Horgan and George Johnson usually hold court — and post a comment or two.

As recently noted on this site, in his letter to the Boston Globe, Harvard University psychology Professor Steven Pinker began SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise. (bold added) Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design” seriously? There appear to be more than a few in the chemistry/chemical engineering community that do. Kudos to a chemist for alerting me to this. Two weeks before Professor Pinker’s letter, Chemical & Engineering News (July 6th issue, pp 5-6) Read More ›

Andrew Halloway has reviewed ‘The Evolution of God’ by Robert Wright, published over at Science and Values blog. Science and Values – So even God evolves now ?

My apologies for not posting more here recently. I now have a blog on my university’s website dedicated to the future of the university, where I have done a bit of posting.  But mostly I have been trying to finish a new book on science as an ‘art of living’ for new series by the UK philosophy publisher, Acumen.  ID followers should find it of interest. I have been also travelling and lecturing. On my audio lecture page, scroll to 28 at the bottom, and you’ll find a talk and the Q&A given at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, sponsored by Genesis Agendum on my recent book Dissent over Descent. You’ll hear from the Q&A that I was by no Read More ›

In World of Life, Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s co-theorist, directly addressed one of Darwin’s key reasons for rejecting design in nature, in a letter to American supporter Asa Gray:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.— (Letter 2814 — Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa, 22 May [1860])

Now, Darwin was a slippery character, as biographers have acknowledged, and he had been a materialist atheist long before he had any theory of evolution to propose, so his pretense of coming to these conclusions reluctantly was just that – a pretense. (See Flannery on this.)

However, Wallace addresses both examples in The World of Life. With respect to insects, he notes, Read More ›

(Originally published on the Access Research Network on the 28th Aug, 2008 as  The Organocentric Illusion: The Biological Complexity Underlying Dynamic Systems)

Brian Goodwin died last week at the age of 78

Today much of evolutionary biology has focused on trying to establish how genes may have provided the raw material for natural selection to run its course (Ref 1, pp.1-2). In this genocentric view, inheritance through random mutation and selection is the basis upon which all of life and its ensuing diversity have arisen. Nevertheless several scientists including Open University biologist Brian Goodwin have challenged this view by postulating that organisms are built not only through genetic instruction but also through processes of dynamic organization that act independently of genes (Ref 1, pp.1-8). In his book How The Leopard Changed Its Spots, Goodwin outlines several key examples in nature that support his position. From the elegant concentric and spiral patterns of slime-mould amoebas to the dynamic mode of the mammalian heart and the brain, and finally to the ordering of haphazard ants into efficient, hard working colonies, (Ref 1, pp.43-76) Goodwin comes to the conclusion that in these systems, biological complexity has arisen through the ordering of dynamic systems independently of the action of genes. Experiments on the bacterial flagellum are yet another of his notable examples. Read More ›

Apparently, atheist Bradley Monton has just published a book with Broadview Press: The doctrine of intelligent design is often the subject of acrimonious debate. Seeking God in Science cuts through the rhetoric that distorts the debates between religious and secular camps. Bradley Monton, a philosopher of science and an atheist, carefully considers the arguments for intelligent design and argues that intelligent design deserves serious consideration as a scientific theory. Monton also gives a lucid account of the debate surrounding the inclusion of intelligent design in public schools and presents reason why students’ science education could benefit from a careful consideration of the arguments for and against it. I sure hope Monton has tenure. Otherwise, he could end up driving truck Read More ›

Synopsis Of The Second Chapter Of Nature’s IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi
ISBN 978-0-9817273-0-1

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of Nature’s IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi
ISBN 978-0-9817273-0-1