Intelligent Design

Last night, the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. offered a panel discussion on the theme of the book, edited by an old friend Paul Marshall, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion.

By the by, in Chapter 8, “Getting Religion in the News Room,” Terry Mattingly discusses a recent “dropped ball” in coverage of the intelligent design controversy:

Many materialists argue out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to consciousness.    On the one hand, they argue that consciousness is the key to dignity and the right to life.  See, for example, the arguments of Peter Singer, who argues specifically that there is no ethical problem in killing an unborn baby because the baby at that stage of development is not self-conscious.    But then materialists turn right around and argue that consciousness is ontologically meaningless, asserting that it is nothing but an epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical activity of the brain.    Well, which is it?  Is consciousness absolutely crucial, literally a matter of life and death, or is it the essentially meaningless byproduct of chance Read More ›

The December issue of Scientific American has an article by Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch entitled ‘The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom’ Not being an American citizen it is perhaps not for me to comment on American education policy, but the article provides some humorous circular reasoning. At one point it says that evolution is not ‘scientifically controversial,’ and anyone who says it is, ‘miseducates students about evolution.’ Presumably if evolution wasn’t controversial the authors would not have felt the need to write the article. But in the article there is precious little evidence to justify their position, but lots of empty rhetoric. “Vast areas of evolutionary science are for all intents and purposes scientifically settled; textbooks Read More ›

An invitation to provide initial posts for discussion here at UD was recently extended to me.  My name is Donald M and for those who have posted here for a while, I’m probably not a stranger.  I’m a strong proponent of ID and I have serious doubts and reservations about several aspects of Darwinian evolution.  My main area of interest is in the Philosophy of Science and the philosophical assumptions of science and scientific practice.  While I am not a working scientist, I do hold a Masters degree in a scientific field.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to share some thoughts here, and hopefully provide some fodder for useful discussion among participants. 

With that brief intro, I’ll dive into my first contribution.

The January issue of Scientific American is focused entirely on the Evolution of Evolution. There are several articles on different aspects of Darwin and evolution. The article I want to focus on here is a critical piece by Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch of the NCSE (National Center for Saving Evolution Science Education). Entitled The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom, the article laments the fact that Science still has to deal with “creationism”…the favored term over Intelligent Design for purely pejorative reasons. Read More ›

In a previous post JT believes he has crushed the entire ID project by pointing out that: “A process determined entire[ly] by law can have EXTREMELY complex behavior and extremely difficult to predict behavior.”   No one disputes JT’s point, but it is beside the point as far as ID is concerned.  JT is making a common error – he is confusing “unpredictable” with “contingent.”  They are very different things.   When a bomb explodes the pieces of the bombshell are scattered willy nilly, and it is impossible to predict where any piece will land.  Nevertheless, where each and every piece lands is utterly determined by law.  In other words, where each piece lands is a function of nothing but the Read More ›

When assessing media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, the first thing you should do is forget what defenders of legacy mainstream media say about their media. You’ve already heard it all anyway: “We’re objective.” “We’re not biased.” “We only report the facts.” Et cetera. Not only isn’t that true, but it couldn’t possibly be true, as I will explain below. And it wouldn’t be a good thing if it were true. Modern media grew up self-consciously aware of their key role in promoting materialist ideas. You know the sort of thing: “Science has shown/research has demonstrated/studies have shown” .. what? The Big Bazooms theory of evolution? Due to the rise of citizen-directed, Internet-based, new media, they currently face a Read More ›

Nature 456, 453-454 (27 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456453a; Published online 26 November 2008 Robert M. Brosh, Jr Genomic instability often underlies cancer. Analyses of proteins implicated in a cancer-predisposing condition called Bloom’s syndrome illustrate the intricacies of protein interactions that ensure genomic stability. Bloom’s syndrome, which is characterized by severe growth retardation, immunodeficiency, anaemia, reduced fertility and predisposition to cancer, is caused by mutations in the gene BLM. At the cellular level, the hallmark of this genetic disorder is a high rate of sister-chromatid exchange — the swapping of homologous stretches of DNA between a chromosome and its identical copy generated during DNA replication Robert M. Brosh Jr is in the Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology, National Institute on Aging, National Read More ›

Over at Access Research Network, British physicist David Tyler asks, “Did meteorite impacts help to spawn life?”, as per the theory of the week:

The Scientific American report emphasized the tentative nature of the research: meteorites “may have helped spawn life” and “Did heat, pressure and carbon from meteorite impacts create biological precursors?” An astrobiologist is said to fear “that theories of life’s origin may never move beyond the hypothetical”. Astronomer Donald Brownlee found the research interesting but added: “If the body is too large, generated materials are probably destroyed by impact processes.” One of the authors of the paper cautioned that the meteorite-impact theory “is not ready to supplant the vaunted Miller-Urey experiment”.

It is one thing to generate organic molecules but quite another to label them as “precursors of life”. Life does not exist without biological information, and until abiogenesis research takes information seriously, it will continue to explore cul-de-sac avenues.

(Biomolecule formation by oceanic impacts on early Earth Yoshihiro Furukawa, Toshimori Sekine, Masahiro Oba, Takeshi Kakegawa & Hiromoto Nakazawa Nature Geoscience, Published online: 7 December 2008 doi:10.1038/ngeo383)

To me, the fundamental insight of the intelligent design theorists has been to apply insights from information theory to biology. The results were disastrous for Darwinian theory, of course – and especially ruinous for the New Atheism movement (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, et al.) that depends so heavily on Darwinism as its creation story. Read More ›

When Darwin proposed his hypothesis in the 19th century it was assumed that the basis of living systems was fundamentally simple. The exact opposite has been shown to be the case in the 20th century. It was thought that chemistry, physics, mechanism, and chance were the foundational principles underlying living systems, but we now know that information and information processing are the essential, underlying ingredients of life. Chemistry, physics, and mechanism represent the medium in which information is processed, interpreted, stored, retrieved, error-detected, and repaired. As we enter the 21st century it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a third entity that must be added to matter and energy as an explanation for all that exists, and that entity Read More ›

On last night’s CSI-Las Vegas Lawrence Fishburne guest starred as a psychology lecturer at a local university named Raymond Langston.  In a scene in which Langston was lecturing his students he described an incident reported by Jane Goodall where two chimps killed ten other chimps.  Langston compared the chimp killings to human serial killers and noted that we should not be surprised because – wait for it . . . wait for it – chimps and humans share 99.5% of their genetic code.   First, as far as I know, no one has ever suggested that humans and chimps share 99.5% of their genetic code.  99% is the highest figure I have ever seen reported.  But even that figure has Read More ›

In an off-hand comment in a thread on this blog I remarked that I was dispensing with the Explanatory Filter in favor of just going with straight-up specified complexity. On further reflection, I think the Explanatory Filter ranks among the most brilliant inventions of all time (right up there with sliced bread). I’m herewith reinstating it — it will appear, without reservation or hesitation, in all my future work on design detection. P.S. Congrats to Denyse O’Leary, whose Post-Darwinist blog tied for third in the science and technology category from the Canadian Blog Awards.

Whacha gonna do when they come for you, bad beav, bad beav. From the December 9, 2008 Austrian Times:   Green campaigners called in police after discovering an illegal logging site in a nature reserve – and rounded up a gang of beavers.  Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked for felling with notches at the beauty-spot at Subkowy in northern Poland.  But police followed a trail left where one tree had been dragged away – and found a beaver dam right in the middle of the river.  A police spokesman said: “The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There’s nothing more natural than a beaver.”   Most crimes require the prosecution to prove a culpable mental state.  Read More ›

The Natural History Museum (NHM) has issued a press release on the 5th December 2008, extolling the virtues of its new book ‘99% Ape: How evolution adds up’ and why Intelligent Design is flawed. This book has been written by academics at the Open University (OU) in the UK, and it is aimed at pre-university level (level 1), either for general interest, or to prepare potential students for study at university levels 2 and 3 – written, apparently, for those with no prior knowledge of science. Pointing out errors in such works is in the public interest to maintain scientific accuracy. It would be a disgrace for anyone to suffer for merely pointing out that material in a textbook from Read More ›

In “Why it isn’t as simple as God vs. the multiverse”, Amanda Gefter (December 4, 2008) who seems determined to turn Britain’s New Scientist into the “National Enquirer” of pop science mags, advises that

Pitting the multiverse against religion presents a false dichotomy. Science never boils down to a choice between two alternative explanations. It is always plausible that both are wrong and a third or fourth or fifth will turn out to be correct.

What might a third option look like here? Physicist John Wheeler once offered a suggestion: maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation. It’s an idea that Stephen Hawking has been thinking about, too. Hawking advocates what he calls top-down cosmology, in which observers are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.

Well, that’s a pretty remarkable idea: We create the universe?

Okay. Let’s take a deep breath and think about what this means: Read More ›