Intelligent Design

The publications page at EvoInfo.org has just been updated. Two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles that Robert Marks and I did are now up online (both should be published later this year).* ——————————————————- “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success” William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II Abstract: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs on average as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Three measures to characterize the information required for successful search are (1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target Read More ›

In his review for The Sunday Times (January 11, 2009) of a new book on the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo of the Science Museum of London, John Carey begins by noting that Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton:

In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize.

pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it’s gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.

The big mistake in Origin that Darwinists won’t admit is gradualism. Darwin explained that according to his theory we should expect to observe a continuum of living species each with only the slightest of variations between them. He postulated that we don’t observe this because the fittest species take over and the insensibly slight variants die off leaving species that are fully characteristic of their kind which then makes possible taxonomic classification by those characters. It’s in the full title in the latter half “The Preservation of Favored Races”. That left Darwin with explaining the fossil record which is indisputably a record of saltation. Species in the fossil record appear abruptly fully characteristic of their kind, persist unchanged for an Read More ›

Steve – I appreciate your work in thinking these issues through, and want to encourage you in your research into intelligent design. As your post was seemingly addressed to me I thought it best to reply with a new thread. Firstly, my concern is to address the possible pitfalls for the design argument that might occur by extending it too far, although I think it possible that some progress can be made in this direction with care. There are historical examples, and the danger is that we might only repeat the errors of previous times if we are not careful. I too have an interest in theodicy and I have discussed theodicy and ethical issues in my book Restoring the Ethics of Creation (my PhD supervisor wrote The Groaning of Creation). Read More ›

Memo to bus passengers stranded in massive snowstorm:

Don’t worry! Be happy! Don’t be in such a hurry! There’s probably no God …

… and if you freeze to death by the side of the road, no one cares …
Don’t worry! Be happy!

Apparently, a Christian bus driver has refused to drive a bus with one of Dawkins’s slogans proclaiming that “There’s probably no God: Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” plastered on the side.

Like commenter jstanley, addressing this post on Dawkins’s bus ad campaign, I am mystified why anyone holding a pink slip, foreclosure notice, or list of pills to start – prior to dreadful cancer treatment – would be especially happy to learn that there is probably no God.

And today, those people are pretty numerous, too …

(Pssst! There probably is a God. So pray anyway. It might help, and can’t hurt.)

Actually, it’s odd, and quite sad, to see the career of Dawkins, Oxford’s once Professor of the Public Understanding of Science end this way – raising funds for anti-God transit ads. But that’s his supporters’ problem.

He himself claims that he fears that his atheism campaign is losing to religion. Read More ›

It offers a paean of praise to Dutton (and Steve Pinker) who “know” that great tenors could “spot the savanna with little Pavarottis” by catching the ear of ladies:

Natural selection is one thing, but the stronger, and more entertaining, basis for Dutton’s case for an evolutionary aesthetics is sexual selection, which Darwin explored in The Descent of Man. A clear tenor voice wouldn’t help Pleistocene man outrun a jaguar, but it might ingratiate him with the ladies — remember the guitarist on the stairs in Animal House? — allowing him to spread his genes widely and spot the savanna with little Pavarottis. Dutton describes the possession of artistic talent as “an ornamental capacity analogous to the peacock’s tail” — or to a florid vocabulary. These traits signal a certain robustness or intelligence, which are attractive qualities in a potential mate.

First, if Pleistocene man (with whom Katie Couric has never booked an interview, no matter how passionately she believes in him) couldn’t deep-six a jaguar, Read More ›

Steve Fuller, in the preceding article, begins by saying that Darwinists acknowledge the flaws in Darwin’s Origin of Species and seek to correct the flaws and expand on it. He further says this separates the Darwinist reading of Origin from the Christian reading the Bible. Well, I for one would like to know exactly what flaws in Origin of Species Fuller thinks are acknowledged. Furthermore, I know plenty of Christians who believe much of the bible is methaphoric. They don’t think the earth and life was created in 6 days. They don’t think Lot’s wife  was literally turned into a pillar of salt. They don’t think the entire earth was flooded and all the animals were saved in pairs on Read More ›

This post originally began as a response to Andrew Sibley but the issues here may resonate with others wanting to reconcile science and religion, coming at it mainly from the religious side. My concern here, as an interested bystander, is that apologetics tends to be much too apologetic. Christianity, in particular, has a much stronger hand to play with regard to the support of science.

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As many of you probably saw in the news NASA announced significant new evidence that microbial life exists on Mars. The evidence is methane plumes. There are some rare abiotic mechanisms which can produce methane but the probability that those account for it are slim. For those who follow such things you might also recall that a meteor from Mars found in Antarctica bore what looked like fossilized bacteria. Along with the recent discovery by Mars surface explorers of water and minerals which only form in the presence of water it’s looking like a pretty strong case when all this is taken together. So what does this mean for ID? Well, it means that those ID supporters who put stock Read More ›

Following previous discussion on the influence that Plato’s Timaeus may have had on David Hume and Erasmus Darwin’s work, I thought it would be interesting to compare a well known paragraph of Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species with a passage in the Timaeus. Spot the allusion to ‘forms’ and the phrase ‘most beautiful.’ Having attended a lecture in the Ian Ramsey conference on Design and Nature at Oxford last year, it was pointed out by Stephen Snobelen that Newton had used similar phrases from Plato in his writing such as ‘form’ and ‘most beautiful.’ It is possible that Darwin was referencing Plato through Newton (hence reference to gravity), but also that it stems from Hume and E.Darwin. Leaving aside the question of how Plato ought to be interpreted I would appreciate comments about how people think Charles Darwin used it.  Read More ›

Keith Paterson, a fellow Torontonian, who reminds me that we met at the local lit fest The Word on the Street, writes to say,

Being familiar with your blogs, it seems that you are, like myself a science fiction fan. So I thought you might be interested to hear how ID concepts are finding their way into popular entertainment.

This week I saw the new remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now I am a big fan of the original 1951 version and I own it on DVD. Read More ›

The UK’s Sunday Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming Darwin Day celebrations, taking a thoughtful angle compared to some of the Darwin hysteria seen in some of the programming from the BBC For God’s sake, have Charles Darwin’s theories made any difference to our lives? – It is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth but creationists and scientists alike may spoil the party

A number of interesting points come out of this article by Bryan Appleyard. Dr James Le Fanu has a new book out Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. Le Fanu is a journalist and medical doctor and is reported in the Sunday Times as saying that “new biological discoveries have overthrown Darwin. The old man is “screwed”, he says gruffly.” Read More ›

A recent multidisciplinary study on the two-phase increase in the size of life has concluded that there must exist a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to explain the sudden increase in size and complexity which occurred twice in the history of life, both times following increases in atmospheric oxygen.

From the earliest bacteria to the largest organisms, there has been a 16 orders of magnitude increase in size. Far from the gradual progression over much time which one would expect from a Darwinian explanation, however, this increase was not incremental, but occurred in two very large steps, involving about a million times increase in size over very brief periods of time.

And things didn’t just get bigger, but much more complex as well:

Each size step required a major innovation in organismal complexity—first the eukaryotic cell and later eukaryotic multicellularity.

The investigators conclusion? There must have been a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to account for the rapid changes:
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I have been reflecting on the critical responses to my posts, which I appreciate. They mostly centre on the very need for ID to include theodicy as part of its intellectual orientation.

The intuitive basis for theodicy is pretty harmless: The presence of design implies a designing intelligence. Moreover, in order to make sense of the exact nature of the design, you need to make hypotheses about the designing intelligence. These hypotheses need to be tested and may or may not be confirmed in the course of further inquiry. Historians and archaeologists reason this way all the time. However, the theodicist applies the argument to nature itself.

At that point, theodicy binds science and theology together inextricably — with potentially explosive consequences. After all, if you take theodicy seriously, you may find yourself saying, once you learn more about the character of nature’s design, that science disconfirms certain accounts of God – but not others. Scientific and religious beliefs rise and fall together because, in the end, they are all about the same reality.

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As you’re reading this keep in mind it’s all due to a random dance of atoms. No design here. Matter, chance, and POOF it’s alive. Yeah right. From Science Daily The Ribosome: Perfectionist Protein-maker Trashes Errors ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2009) — The enzyme machine that translates a cell’s DNA code into the proteins of life is nothing if not an editorial perfectionist. Johns Hopkins researchers, reporting in the journal Nature January 7, have discovered a new “proofreading step” during which the suite of translational tools called the ribosome recognizes errors, just after making them, and definitively responds by hitting its version of a “delete” button. It turns out, the Johns Hopkins researchers say, that the ribosome exerts far tighter quality Read More ›