Intelligent Design

Over at Strange Herring, Anthony Sacramone gives us an hilarious send up of the latest evolutionary idiocy: I knew it! Researchers, looking into obesity, discovered that fatty foods not only send feelings of fullness to the brain but they also trigger a process that consolidates long term memories. It believed that this is an evolutionary tool that enabled our distant ancestors to remember where rich sources of food were located. Now they hope to develop drugs which mimic the effect of fat rich foods in order to boost memory in those suffering from brain disorders or who need to cement facts in their brain. I believe every word of this. BECAUSE IT’S SCIENCE. And if science says a bacon doublecheeseburger Read More ›

In Clever Critters: 8 Best Non-Human Tool Users, by Brandon Keim (Wired Science, January 16, 2009), we are introduced to best known examples of animal tool use.
The article begins with the requisite Darwin worship, of course:

Much more likely remains to be found: until Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks, scientists had been reluctant to credit animals with such sophisticated behavior — perhaps because, as Charles Darwin noted, “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
Darwin himself was quite intrigued by animal tool use, suggesting that it allowed them to overcome biological shortcomings. In On the Origin of Species, he noted that elephants snap off tree branches to swat away flies; in honor of Darwin’s interest, elephants are the first on our list of animal tool use.

So that compares with, say, the Canadarm on the Space Shuttle?

Well, the sad reality is better recorded here: “African elephants face extinction by 2020, conservationists warn”.

If I die tonight, the most urgent thing I want to say is this: Putting animals on the same plane as humans not only disses humans but dooms animals. Read More ›

“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

This is a phrase a software engineer will use to jokingly confess his software has a defect.

When Sharon Moalem wrote the NY Times Bestseller, Survival of the Sickest: Why We Need Disease, he probably did not intend to make a joking confession of flaws in Darwin’s theory, but he succeed in doing so.

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I had meant to post this sooner, but had too much on my plate: YouTube Source

In a very thoughtful essay that deserves its own post, vjtorley writes:

As someone with a background in philosophy, I’d like to make a few brief comments on the issues raised [in the Materialist Poofery” post]:

Regarding reduction, emergence and supervenience: these philosophical terms have multiple definitions in the literature.

One place where I might suggest that people begin is Dr. Richard Cameron’s brilliant dissertation, Teleology In Aristotle And Contemporary Biology: An Account of The Nature Of Life – especially pages 254 to 279. I think Richard Cameron’s work will be congenial to contributors of all points of view, as he has something that will please nearly everyone here: he is both an avowed Aristotelian (and hence a believer in final causes) and a thoroughgoing Darwinist.
One point which Cameron makes is that belief in emergence is perfectly compatible with very strong varieties of reduction:

Again, however, emergentists need not fear and may positively endorse the search for this type of a reductive account of emergent novelties. They may affirm the existence of causal correlations between basal conditions and emergent properties strong enough to support the formulation of laws and theories that microcausally explain the emergence of emergent novelities. Nevertheless, there remains clear sense to the emergentist’s claim that having a well confirmed explanatory theory of how Xs give rise to Ys does not entail that Ys are ‘nothing over and above’ Xs. Ys may still constitute a genuine – and in a sense still to be defined an irreducible – addition to the ontology of the world conceived only in terms of the Xs (p. 269).

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A magazine I recommend to the kind readers of Uncommon Descent is Salvo.

Yes, I write for it, and here are some of my recent contributions that are available on line.

Livin’ on a Prayer

The “nothing but” approach to describing humans

The Truth Hurts:Following the Evidence to Career Oblivion

But many skilled writers serve Salvo, and it is worth your subscription dollar. It is one of the only theist-based magazines around with a serious commitment to science writing. In other words, you can get science writing free of materialist bias.

It’ll sound a bit different, but you’ll get used to that, and you will learn stuff that could be really valuable to you.

And, heck, you sure do learn some interesting things. Here’s a brief excerpt from Terrell Celmons’s Crosshairs department, about an individual, known to many readers here, PZ Meyers, a biology prof at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and – as Clemons tells it – “a virulent shock-blogger who despises religious believers.”

Most Recent Offense: Read More ›

Trillions are much in the news lately regarding the economy. Such large numbers also come up in the small probability arguments inherent in design inferences (small probabilities are reciprocals of large numbers). As a public service, I’m herewith presenting some visuals for dealing with large numbers: ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ——————————————————— ———————————————————

Last evening I posted the following, and within a short period of time the Darwinbots descended upon it, challenging my expertise in two highly sophisticated areas of computational science, AI and FEA, fields in which I have the goods to demonstrate that I know what I am talking about. One commenter even asserted that the physics involved in an LS-DYNA simulation cannot be represented with mathematical precision. Yes they can. And it works.

At this point I decided that I have nothing further to offer. If some people cannot recognize that the information-processing systems encoded in biological systems defy naturalistic explanation and suggest a design inference, I cannot help them, and they are free to continue to pursue a phantom.

Farewell, and best wishes to all.

Gil
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From time to time we see materialists raising the “poof objection” against ID. The poof objection goes something like this: An ID theorist claims that a given organic system (the bacterial flagellum perhaps) is irreducibly complex or that it displays functional complex specified information. In a sneering and condescending tone the materialist dismisses the claim, saying something like “Your claim amounts to nothing more than ‘Poof! the designer did it.’” I have always thought the poof objection coming from a materialist is particularly ironic, because materialists have “poofery” built into their science at a very basic level. Of course, they don’t use the term “poof.” They use a functional synonym of poof – the word “emergent.” What do I mean? Read More ›

4. ID does not make scientifically fruitful predictions. This claim is simply false. To cite just one example, the non-functionality of “junk DNA” was predicted by Susumu Ohno (1972), Richard Dawkins (1976), Crick and Orgel (1980), Pagel and Johnstone (1992), and Ken Miller (1994), based on evolutionary presuppositions. In contrast, on teleological grounds, Michael Denton (1986, 1998), Michael Behe (1996), John West (1998), William Dembski (1998), Richard Hirsch (2000), and Jonathan Wells (2004) predicted that “junk DNA” would be found to be functional. The Intelligent Design predictions are being confirmed and the Darwinist predictions are being falsified. For instance, ENCODE’s June 2007 results show substantial functionality across the genome in such “junk DNA” regions, including pseudogenes. Thus, it is a Read More ›

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line. He writes,

The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come.

Mesner appears to want to be the male Amanda Gefter. (Hey, I am all for gender equity.)

He wants a free exchange of views, but sadly, one thing that is not free is my time just now, so I must decline.

I am not sure why he references the stem cell debate, but if people like Gefter and Mesner are entitled to private definitions of creationism, I guess they can apply their definitions and worries to the stem cell debate, wind energy, or the assignment of parking spaces in municipally owned garages – or anything else they want to.

Having almost finished Alva Noe’s thoughtful Out of Our Heads Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness and having read Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself, I would say that the skepticism (= materialism) espoused by Mesner is dead in the water and electrification of the corpse by a long discussion will not help. Things have just moved on.

And we all should too. Read More ›

In my “Bleak Conclusions” post I quoted kairosfocus who was in turn quoting Hawthorne for the following: Assume: (1) That atheistic naturalism is true. (2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” If these two things are true, nothing exists from which we can infer any moral principle. If moral principles cannot be inferred, nothing is prohibited by any moral principle and therefore all things are permitted. This leads to the conclusion that the Holocaust was permitted. I asked our materialist friends to explain to me how, if their premises are true, they can avoid the conclusion that the Holocaust was permitted. The nearly 300 comments boil down to indignation mixed with the childhood rejoinder – “Oh yeah, same Read More ›

In “A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down”, Coyne criticizes the NCSE:

The pro-religion stance of the NCSE is offensive and unnecessary

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Nature FANTOM studies networks in cells  “An international consortium has released an analysis of unprecedented detail showing the genes and proteins that guide an immature cell to its final identity. The models show that a complex network of transcription factors is responsible for a cell’s differentiation, with no one ‘master regulator’ in control. “It’s like a transcription-factor democracy,” says Harmen Bussemaker, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York. From an evolutionary standpoint, distributing responsibility is a good strategy, he says: “It would not be a good design principle to have an Achilles’ heel.” (Don’t they mean “From a design standpoint”?) Piero Carninci of Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), in Yokohama found that RNA is produced Read More ›