Intelligent Design

In 2004, a find of some very small humans (about a metre tall) was announced. They lived on the Indonesian island of Flores from about 93 000 years ago to about 12 000 years ago. At Access Research Network, Robert Deyes, in Homo Floresiensis: The Flower That Is Shaking The Human Evo Tree,

… what is becoming clear from these studies is that in many aspects of its anatomy H. floresiensis presents us with a clear ‘misfit’ for the human evolutionary sequence. In the words of one review “[H. floresiensis] threatens to overturn our understanding of where we come from and the type of ancestors that have shared the human family tree” (Ref 4).

[ … ]

While Gee’s wild speculation over missing species seems undeserved of the title of objective science, his concerns do tell of a crisis for evolutionary biologists. In short, H. floresiensis has today become the flower that is shaking the human evolutionary tree. Findings such as these turn our cherished notions of human evolution upside down since they show tool-making, small-brained hominin species living alongside humans as recently as 12,000 years ago. Read More ›

(an announcement from Professor David Snoke:) Upcoming event: “Grill the ID Scientist” Tuesday, June 9 7 PM, University of Pittsburgh Campus (room TBA) A network of scientists known as the Intelligent Design (ID) community continues to question basic tenets of Darwinism and origin-of-life scenarios. Not only are their views controversial in scientific circles — many in the evangelical world, who might be expected to embrace ID, are also not sold on the value of the ID program. This event brings together a panel of scientists associated with the ID movement. After a short presentation, the bulk of the evening will be given to questions from the audience. This event is aimed primarily at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergrad students Read More ›

In “Scientific American’s Editor and Its President to Step Down”, (New York Times, April 24, 2009), Stephanie Clifford notes

In a shake-up at Scientific American, the longtime editor John Rennie and the magazine’s president, Steven Yee, are leaving.

Rennie had been around since 1994, and was associated by various people I talked to with an aggressive slant toward Darwinism and multiverse theory.

This article by Max Tegmark, promoting four layers of multiverses – essentially to avoid the implications of the fine tuning of the only universe whose existence we can verify – may have been the oddest moment in the history of a magazine that dates back to 1845.

I’ve heard various figures quoted about the staff reductions, ranging from 5-30%. But it’s hard to say because many staff may have gone freelance (or, as the elite would prefer it, “became consultants”) or been reassigned to other divisions of the parent company, MacMillan.

Some friends have supposed that the decline was due to the ideological slant of the mag, which was increasingly at odds with that of the public. I think it had more to do with the recent 18% drop in ad revenue. A friend remembers glossy car ads, but these days that may even be politically incorrect.

Some of my friends cancelled their subscriptions to Scientific American, when it became increasingly political. However, most readers probably did not stop reading media like SciAm because they became more ideological. The process was actually the opposite. Magazines like SciAm became more ideological when they became less necessary for the purpose of delivering information.

In general, the more necessary a news source is, the less ideological it can afford to be.

Read More ›

Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, writes in Time:

David Sheff wrote a beautiful book called, appropriately enough, Beautiful Boy A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Meth Addiction, one of the most compelling portrayals I’ve ever read of a parent’s loss of a child to drugs. …

Many people still call addiction a moral failing. But 20 years of research tells us that it’s a disease that results in part from the damage that abused drugs to the brain circuits required for self-control. Unfortunately that damage is long-lasting, meaning that the person remains vulnerable to relapse even after years of successful rehabilitation.

Sheff’s experiences highlight how poorly our society addresses addiction. … Yet punishment and stigmatization do nothing to ameliorate the problem. How could they, when about 50% of addiction is rooted in our genes and much of the rest is due to social and cultural factors such as stressful childhood experiences?

All true, but all irrelevant, and in my view, harmful. Read More ›

From the Faraday Institute, we learn of an effort to combat intelligent design in Turkey:

A significant event during the past month has been the Darwin Anniversary Conference organized by The Faraday Institute and held in Istanbul. As one of our Turkish speakers remarked: “It was the first time for evolutionary discussions in Turkey that both vulgar positivism and religious fundamentalism were excluded”. The main two-day Symposium was attended by 50 faculty biologists from universities all over Turkey, 10 PhD students and 10 observers in the field of education, and drew an international platform of speakers, including Prof. Francisco Ayala (University of California at Irvine), Prof. Aykut Kence (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), Prof. Nidhal Guessoum (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), Prof. David Lordkipanidze (Director General of the Georgian National Museum), Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah (Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore) and Prof. Simon Conway Morris FRS (Cambridge University). Whereas the main focus of the conference was evolutionary biology, time was also given to the challenge of teaching modern biology today in Turkey and beyond. Details in English and Turkish may be seen [here]. Talks and summaries will be posted at this site as they become available.

On the final night of the Symposium a Public Event was held attended by 430 people, mainly students from different Istanbul universities.

The programme included a number of short talks about Darwin and evolution, the first performance of Re:Design in Turkey (the dramatisation of the Darwin-Gray correspondence performed by the Menagerie Theatre Company), and a televised Panel Discussion on ‘The Hard Questions’ in which the audience posed questions about Darwin and evolution to a panel of experts. The event drew extensive media coverage with clips on the Turkish evening news and 17 journalists in attendance resulting in full-page articles and interviews in publications such as Turkish Newsweek.

Francisco Ayala: Some notes of interest

I don’t know much about most of these people, but the first-mentioned, Francisco Ayala, is here described, accurately in my view, by Phillip Johnson: Read More ›

From a Science article by Elizabeth Pain (February 20, 2009): Szilágyi sees his religious faith and his research efforts as two complementary aspects of his life. Within the scientific environment, “I have some options where I can express my faith,” Szilágyi says. He directly referred to God both in the acknowledgements of his master’s and doctoral dissertations and while receiving his awards. He runs a Bible-study group for young adults, and together with a friend he founded a Christian scientific group. But although Szilágyi’s views often lie far outside the scientific mainstream, he expresses those views only off-campus and in his personal time. For him, “the debate over evolution, design, creation, supernatural intelligence, etc., is not a scientific question in Read More ›

ScienceBlogs has just posted what can only be called a rant (go here) against the paper by Robert Marks and me that was the subject of a post here at UD (for the paper, “Life’s Conservation Law,” go here; for the UD post, go here). According to ScienceBlogs, the paper fails (or as they put it, “it’s stupid”) because (1) As a search, evolution is a multidimensional search. Most of our intuitions about search landscapes is based on two or three dimensions. But evolution as a landscape has hundreds or thousands of dimensions; our intuitions don’t work. (2) Evolution is a dynamic landscape – that is, a landscape that changes in response to the progress of the search. Pretty much Read More ›

Evolutionary explanations to resist — For ease of conversation, I here define a “threat” as a macro-evolutionary explanation that inherently threatens the successful communication of the biotic message. (I do not mean threat in any other sense.) Evolutionary explanations are not all equal. Some are more potent at explaining-away data; some are limited in scope; some are weak; and some are unscientific. In other words, some evolutionary explanations are more threatening than others. There is some tension between the three design-goals claimed in Message Theory, so tradeoffs must be made in order to approach an optimal solution. Message Theory claims life’s design should resist a given evolutionary explanation in proportion to the threat it poses. If a given evolutionary explanation Read More ›

 This is Contest Question 2 for the Uncommon Descent Earn free stuff contest: “Iowa Professors Mobilize Against Measure on Teaching Alternatives to Evolution” by Peter Schmidt (February 26, 2009): More than 200 faculty members at 20 Iowa colleges have signed a statement opposing a proposed state law that would give instructors at public colleges and schools a legal right to teach alternatives to evolution. Well, these were the folks who drove out gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. You must pay for the article, and I do not recommend that. We’ve all pretty much heard it all already. Instead, for a free copy of Gonzalez’s Privileged Planet DVD, go to Uncommon Descent and answer this question: Why does Guillermo Gonzalez’s view that Earth Read More ›

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews goes after Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) on Science.

PENCE: Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that’s in them, and —
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Right, but you believe in evolution from the beginning.
PENCE: The means, Chris, that He used to do that, I can’t say, but I do believe —
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) You can’t what?
PENCE: — in that fundamental truth.
MATTHEWS: Well — well did you take biology? (screaming) Did you take biology in school? Did you take science, which is all based on evolutionary belief and assumption?
PENCE: Well, I’ve always wanted to —
MATTHEWS: (screaming) If your party is to be credible on science, you’ve gotta accept science. Do you?
PENCE: Yeah, I want to —
MATTHEWS: Accept science?

[youtube KsMGvvUyNDE] Read More ›

This is  Contest Question 1 for Earn Free Stuff: Does the multiverse help science make sense – or simply destroy science? To help you decide, here’s a classic pop science article by Anil Ananthaswamy of New Scientist, fronting the multiverse: Today’s measurements show the universe to be flat, but the uncertainty in those measurements still leaves room for space-time to be slightly curved – either like a saddle (negatively curved) or like a sphere (positively curved). “If we originated from a tunnelling event from an ancestor vacuum, the bet would be that the universe is negatively curved,” says Susskind. “If it turns out to be positively curved, we’d be very confused. That would be a setback for these ideas, no Read More ›

Professor Walter Bradley, Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Baylor University, has spoken on every major campus in North America concerning “Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God.”  Here is a shortened version of the talk he gave in March at ORU .  When introduced, reference is made to Bradley’s “The Mystery Of Life’s Origin” which is available online at http://themysteryoflifesorigin.org/ . Because the venue is appropriate, Dr. Bradley talks of his Christian faith.  There are three parts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GWYHVgg3XI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74LepQDrB4g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMNW5jon6cc

Recall this post by Bill Dembski, August 31, 2006 where Bill pointed out how A.N. Wilson railed against the ID proponents in Kansas and labeled them Morons.

A.N. Wilson Skewered — it couldn’t happen to a nicer credulous moron!

A. N. Wilson, the epitomy of English snootiness, recently fell for an elaborate prank that he could have avoided if he had drawn a design inference. Note that Eve de Harben doesn’t exist either, and the letters in “her” name are an anagram for “Ever been had?”

Why am I being so hard on Wilson? Here’s what he wrote back in 1999 about the good people of Kansas: “Their simple, idiotic credulity as a populace would have been the envy of Lenin. That is the tragic paradox. The Land of the Free, telly and burgerfed, has become the Land of the Credulous Moron.” (go here and scroll down) What goes around comes around.

–Bill Dembski

But what now, April 2, 2009, Can you love god and agree with Darwin?

The Descent of Man, with its talk of savages, its belief that black people are more primitive than white people, and much nonsense besides, is an offence to the intelligence – and is obviously incompatible with Christianity.

I think the jury is out about whether the theory of Natural selection, as defined by neo-Darwinians is true, and whether serious scientific doubts, as expressed in a new book Why Us by James Lefanu, deserve to be taken seriously. For example, does the discovery of the complex structure of DNA and the growth in knowledge in genetics require a rethink of Darwinian “gradualism”. But these are scientific rather than religious questions.

–A.N. Wilson

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Here at UD we’ve heard over and over again that unless we “know” who the Designer is, then we can’t infer design. For example, if we were to argue that we’ve never seen the ancient Native Americans who fashioned arrowheads from stone, yet we are able to infer design in arrowheads nonetheless, the Darwinian side would respond saying, “Yes, but that’s because the Native Americans are humans like ourselves.” PhysOrg.com has an article about the microRNA, miR-7, which has been found to regulate a network which brings about uniformity among humans. The article is interesting in itself, but most interesting is this comment by one of the lead authors, Richard W. Carthew: When something is changed, say the genetic sequence Read More ›