Intelligent Design

Recently, in the “stuff we know that just ain’t so” files, I referenced Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize for supposed discoveries about herring gull chicks – a discovery that turned to ashes. A friend writes to say: Read More ›

In DonaldM’s post (‘Analyze and Evaluate’ Are the New Code Words for ‘Creationism’) discussion ensued about high school students and challenges to orthodox evolutionary theory.

One of the ploys of Darwinists is to pretend (and especially to try to fool young students into thinking) that evolutionary theory is like real science (mathematics, chemistry, physics, or electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, software, or other engineering disciplines) — when it is not. It’s Mickey Mouse stuff pretending to be hard science, and is not difficult to understand and therefore not difficult to challenge.
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Nature 458, 571 (2 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/458571b; Published online 1 April 2009 Jerome H. L. Hui1 Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Michael Smith Building, Manchester M13 9PT, UK Email: jerome.hui@manchester.ac.uk Your News story ‘Hong Kong evolution curriculum row’ (Nature 457, 1067; 2009) reports a call by faculty members at Hong Kong University for a sentence to be removed from new guidelines for secondary-school biology education. At present, these state: “In addition to Darwin’s theory, students are encouraged to explore other explanations for evolution and the origins of life, to help illustrate the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge”. Read more…

A recent article in Cracked, discussing plagiarism, used the careers of Richard Owen and H.G. Wells – both important evolutionists – as 40% of “Five Great Men who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism.” Read it and see what you think.

What make you all of this, in City Journal?: How Science Fiction Found Religion Benjamin A. Plotinsky Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory. Winter 2009 There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the Read More ›

By now most of you are probably aware of the news from Texas and the new science standards there. Apparently, the new standards don’t sit well with Dr. Eugenie Scott and her friends at the NCSE, (National Center for Saving Evolution).

“The final vote was a triumph of ideology and politics over science,” says Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). “The board majority chose to satisfy creationist constituents and ignore the expertise of highly qualified Texas scientists and scientists across the country.” NCSE presented the board with a petition from 54 scientific and educational societies, urging the board to reject language that misrepresents or undermines the teaching of evolution, which the board likewise ignored.

Although the “strengths and weaknesses” wording that has been part of the standards for over a decade was finally excised–wording that has been used to pressure science textbook publishers to include creationist arguments–a number of amendments put the creationist-inspired wording back in.

One can almost see Dr. Scott wringing her hands as she says this. Read More ›

Someone by the name of skeech is cluttering up UD with impervious sophistry and wasting a lot of our time.

His/her latest thesis is that “according to biologists…” there is a “credible possibility that small incremental changes could have developed massive increases in biological information in a short time — followed by stasis.”

So, skeech assures us that “biologists” are universally agreed upon this proposition?
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After giving his famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL computer analogy to evolution in his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins remarks, “Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distant target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection.” I would dispute that there are no targets. Certainly no human has imposed biological targets on nature. But the fact that things can be alive and functional in only certain ways and not in others indicates that nature sets her own targets. The targets of biology, we might say, are “natural kinds” (to borrow a term of use from philosophy). But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection Read More ›

Dogs, not chimps can help us understand human behaviour?

Well, this moved recently at msnbc.com:

Dogs (not chimps) most like humans

Man’s best friend serves as model for understanding human social behavior

By Jennifer Viegas

Discovery Channel
updated 11:58 a.m. ET, Thurs., March. 26, 2009

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

While there is no evidence to support that dogs and humans co-evolved their laundry list of shared behaviors over the past 10,000 to 20,000 years, the researchers believe adapting to the same living conditions during this period may have resulted in the similarities.

Well, I am glad someone noticed that dogs are way better at understanding and living with humans than chimpanzees are. It sure beats this (horrific chimp rampage). Read More ›

Don Johnson (PhD in Computer Science from Univ. Minnesota, another PhD in Chemistry from Michigan State) has just published a pro-ID book, “Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability: A Call to Scientific Integrity” amazon.com link here . My question to readers: how many scientists have to reject Darwinism before there is a “scientific controversy”?

I see where Nature News published (2009 03 25) an item about Canadian science minister Gary Goodyear vs. the puff dino suits in downtown Toronto (young researchers with nothing better to do (?), claiming that he doesn’t believe in evolution – like it was some kind of religious experience he never had, but was supposed to have had). You’d have to pay to read the story, and I certainly won’t. It was never a story in the first place but, as I point out here, activists and academics, hard up for work, have been trying to commercialize the ID controversy in Canada. It’s not easy because the way the Canadian public divides on the issues makes commercialization difficult. They should Read More ›

Hey everyone, check out these amazing animations of cellular processes at http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations/

Natural selection is posited as the only mechanism to lead to differential survival among individuals of varying fitness. However, if selection pressures cause mortality to occur in individuals who would soon be dead anyway, then natural selection is not really operating. The hypothesis of the Harvesting Effect in epidemiology leads to this conclusion. I think this has so far only been explored in respiratory epidemiology, but hats off to them for bringing it up. If the Harvesting Effect is real, then Darwinists must differentiate its effects from that of natural selection. So far this issue has not been addressed. Harvesting or the Harvesting Effect is a hypothesis in epidemiology. It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who Read More ›

In Bill Dembski’s thread, No Major Conceptual Leaps, I posted a comment about the evidential, logical, and probabilistic vacuity of the Darwinian co-option hypothesis. (I use the word hypothesis with reservation. A hypothesis in a domain such as this should at least be based on a minimal, mathematical probabilistic analysis.)

In response to my comment, another commenter offered this as a refutation.

This text from Deborah A. McLennan, of Evo Edu Outreach, is utterly embarrassing for her cause, because it makes the case for design, just as Tim Berra did with his infamous blunder.
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