Intelligent Design

Michael D. Thomas, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Division of Spanish and Portuguese at Baylor and is an ordained pastor.  On his BLOG,  he has a dialog between God and Evolution I found fun.  There are some other ID posts on his site that are worth perusing.

A review of a book titled “The Universe: Order without design” appears in New Scientist. The summary of current ideas has a mythic sound to ordinary readers “a tiny piece of inflating “false vacuum” decays into a fireball, and stars and galaxies congeal out of the cooling debris”. Read it and see what you think. I have two questions. First, does description equal causation? Second, is the invoking of billions of theoretical and eternally undetectable other universes simply to give an atheistic explaination of our one tuned universe, more scientific or rational than believing in an Intelligent Fine Tuner?

For a fascinating misreading of what the recently announced Messel Pit fossil really shows, go here: Scientists have found a 47-million-year-old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil, described as Darwinius masillae, is 20 times older than most fossils that explain human evolution. That fossil doesn’t “explain” human evolution; it complicates the picture. The theory that was gaining ground was that humans were descended from tarsier-like creatures, but this fossil, touted as a primate ancestor, is a lemur-like creature. Often, I hear from people attempting to patch the cracks in the unguided Darwinian evolution theory, as follows: “We have more information than ever!” Yes, but what if it is – as in this case – the evidence is Read More ›

I know this is old news by now (I was teaching an ID-intensive last week at Southern Evangelical Seminary, so I’m only now getting caught up), but the following paragraphs in ScienceNews struck me: RNA molecules are formed from three components: a sugar, a base and a phosphate group. In past research, chemists developed each of the components and then tried to put them together to make the complete molecule. “But the components are quite stable, and so they wouldn’t stick together,” Sutherland says. “After 40 years of trying, we decided there had to be a better way of doing this reaction.” The team took a different approach, starting with a common precursor molecule that had a bit of the Read More ›

Check out the following at fedbizopps.gov (click here):

Solicitation Number:
DARPA-SN-09-35
Notice Type:
Special Notice
Synopsis:
Added: May 05, 2009 11:23 am

Special Notice DARPA-SN-09-35: Physical intelligence (PI);
Proposers’ Day Workshop, DATES: June 9th and June 11th, 2009;
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 29, 2009; TECHNICAL POC: Dr. Todd Hylton, DARPA/DSO, Email: Todd.Hylton@darpa.mil; URL: www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/solicit.htm

In anticipation of a potential program on the topic of Physical intelligence (PI), DARPA is hosting two Proposers’ Day Workshops that will provide critical information on the program vision, the milestones, and opportunities associated with the development of interdisciplinary teams to respond to an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Physical Intelligence program aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems. The program plan is organized around three interrelated task areas: (1) creating a theory (a mathematical formalism) and validating it in natural and engineered systems; (2) building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems; and (3) developing analytical tools to support the design and understanding of physically intelligent systems. If successful, the program would launch a revolution of understanding across many fields of human endeavor, demonstrate the first intelligence engineered from first principles, create new classes of electronic, computational, and chemical systems, and create tools to engineer intelligent systems that match the problem/environment in which they will exist. Concepts relevant to the objectives of the Physical Intelligence program can be found in numerous disciplines and areas of research including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, group theory, collective behavior, complexity theory, consciousness theory, non-linear dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, systems analysis, multi-scale modeling, control systems, information theory, computation theory, topology, electronics, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, artificial life, origin of life, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary chemistry, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, brain modeling, organizational behavior, operations research and others. Read More ›

Further to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 3: Human evolution – What do we actually know? (13 May 2009), this article in Wall Street Journal by Gautam Naik (May 15, 2009) boosts the finding of the skeleton of an ancient primate from 47 million years ago as a “landmark discovery.” Why?

Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

In other words, the landmark discovery in an abandoned quarry near Frankfurt, Germany, keeps the controversy going by evening the odds. Read More ›

Walter ReMine once said to me, the supposed 99.5% identity between chimps and humans is like taking two books, creating an alphabetical listing of all the unique words in each book, and then comparing the lists of unique words derived from each book. It would be really easy then to use these lists to argue: “see the books are 99.5% identical!” Another ID proponent, David Pogge, argued that the sequence comparison are like comparing driving directions: two sets of directions can have 99% similarity, but a few differences can lead to radically different destinations. With this in mind, here is Rick Sternberg’s Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He’s a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity.

Yesterday, Intelligent Design critic and creationist basher, P.Z. Meyers, posted what he considers to be a real scientific challenge for ID proponents on his Pharyngula blogsite. The main thrust of his challenge is outlined in this Youtube video:

[youtube ZkED8cWRu4Q]

So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID?  Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics?  I vote for the latter. Read More ›

Here is a true story about “theistic evolution,” by Carol Iannone:

[Theistic evolution, as normally propounded today = accept on faith that God dun it and holler yer guts fer Jesus to feel good – because the evidence suggests there is no God].

Why any theist should do that today is incomprehensible to me, because the evidence is all in the theists’ camp. But tax-supported, tenured professors can say anything they want, and they certainly do.

Here is an instructive story about their true fate: Read More ›

Ladies and Gents, Schemes and Themes, and all Things in Between, it has been revealed to me by Memes, which I know now are truly called Themes, the true and tragic tale of Memes. In a very distant galaxy called Gleams, on a planet known as Dreams, a terrible war erupted among the parties of the Materialistic Regimes. Engaged in the conflict were the ruling party, known as Schemes, and the revolutionary party, known as Themes. The Themes were led by a ruthless leader, who had once been a member of the Schemes, named Xeme. After a long campaign that was very difficult and extreme, and in spite of very courageous fighting on their own steam, the Themes were beaten Read More ›

Scientists say this time the soup is good here.

On March 2, 2009, the controversial* Turkish intellectual Adnan Oktar responded to my questions about doubting Darwin in Turkey.

Turkey is of increasing interest in Western circles because of its application for membership in the European Union. And materialist atheists have been freaking out in the pop science press about Darwin doubt in Turkey.

Modern Turkey emerged from the breakup of the Ottoman empire, under secularist Kemal Ataturk.**

I became interested years ago when a Turkish friend kindly sent me a number of the books produced by Adnan Oktar and his associates, under the pen name Harun Yahya. I finally got a chance to correspond with him. Here are his responses to my questions. (I will also shortly post a review of Evolution Deceit, the most succinct and comprehensive of the critiques of overblown claims for Darwinian evolution that I have ever read.)

O’LEARY: How did you become interested in the evolution controversies? The conventional wisdom offered by many media sources in North America is that doubts about Darwin are a product of American evangelical Christianity in the deep rural South, and can only be understood with reference to that culture. Unless I have lost the plot, your doubts could not stem from that culture. From what, then, did they stem? Read More ›

Thomas Vaughan has written a play that takes a critical look at both intelligent design and evolution. It opens this Thursday and extends for two weeks. It’s being produced by Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company (go here). The writer’s notes are as follows and include a generous remark about me. I’m grateful to Thomas Vaughan for allowing me to look over his shoulder and offer comment. I encourage everyone in the Houston area to go see this enlightening play. The character Henry Darden’s views are based on the ideas of well-qualified scientists. These professionals are not creationists, and they do not believe in Intelligent Design. Their credentials and their motives are impeccable. As a dramatist, I am not qualified to have Read More ›

You can earn free stuff by answering the question below this entry:

One of the causes of “just-so” storytelling about human evolution is the fact that, until comparatively recently, people did not write things down or manufacture a lot of objects.

People like Pascal Boyer can write books like Religion Explained, secure in the knowledge that no documents or extensive artifacts are likely to turn up from 50 000 years ago that challenge his claims.

To see what difference this makes, consider the case of King Tut’s tomb. Archaeologists have unearthed an extensive story of the short-lived effort of one Pharaoh to convert Egypt to monotheism. We actually know a fair bit about what happened there, due to deciphering writings and examining extensive artifacts.

Now and then a brief light is shone on a far earlier era, and here is one: An Australian cave painting depicts a marsupial lion (“Cave Painting Depicts Extinct Marsupial Lion ” by Stéphan Reebs, Natural History Magazine 09 May 2009): Read More ›

Richard Lewontin, in reviewing several books that celebrate Darwinism, writes …There remains, nevertheless, a substantial population whose commitment to a fundamentalist Christian belief in divine creation of the earth and its inhabitants has driven them to political action. Having been convinced that the separation of church and state is here to stay, they have adopted a pseudo-scientific theory of intelligent design in which the designer is unspecified, and attempted to introduce it into the school curricula in the name of intellectual openness. The scientific community has the definite sense of being embattled and one of its responses is to use the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of its apostle of truth about the material basis of evolution and the Read More ›