Intelligent Design

Evolutionary psychology, the idiot cousin of evolutionary theory, has dropped another bombshell of scintillating cutting edge science on us – when a kid calls the kid across the street a “poopyhead” he’s not being mean.  He is just following the dictates of his genes, because teasing is an evolutionary adaptation, don’t you know.   Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, gives us this   Given the perils of negotiating rank, many species have evolved dramatized status contests, relying on symbolic displays of physical size and force to peacefully sort out who’s on top. Stags roar. Frogs croak. Chimps throw branches around. Hippos open their jaws as wide as possible to impress competitors.  And humans tease.  Teasing can be Read More ›

The original Professor Olofsson post now has 340 comments on it, and is loading very slowly.  Further comments to that post should be made here.

Dear UD Visitors   Today you may have noticed that UD went out of commission a couple of times.  We are experiencing technical difficulties resulting from a significant upswing in site usage.  Obviously, the more visitors we have the more we fulfill our mission of serving the ID community and promoting a vigorous debate, so from our perspective we count this as a “good” problem to have.   Nevertheless, we are always distressed when our service goes down, and I want to assure the users of our site that we are actively working to prevent these problems from recurring.  In the mean time, I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration.   On behalf of myself and the others who work Read More ›

In church on Sunday the sermon was about Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead.  What does this have to do with the ID/Darwinism debate?  Nothing, of course.  But the story does contain a remarkable illustration of what I will call the “psychology of blinding obedience to a paradigm.” 

The central claim of ID can be illumined by a very simple illustration from the movie 2001, a Space Odyssey.  After the opening sequences, the plot of the movie shifts to a scientist journeying to the moon to investigate an “anomaly” that has been discovered buried under the moon’s surface.  Here is a picture of the anomaly.  The scientists immediately reach an obvious conclusion – the anomaly was created by an intelligent being.  In other words, they make a “design inference.”  Why do they make such an inference?  Because the anomaly exhibits complex specified information (“CSI”) that cannot reasonably be attributed to chance, mechanical necessity or both acting together.  Therefore, the commonsense conclusion reached by the scientists is that “act of an intelligent agent” is the most reasonable explanation for the existence of the anomaly.  Read More ›

Below the fold I have reproduced an interesting comment thread in which ribczynski attacks ID proponents’ criticisms of macroevolution through NDE, and two ID proponents convincingly refute the Darwinist line.

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I’ve just discovered that my friend Richard Buggs is in some kind of trouble for having said what everyone obviously knows, that chimpanzees are NOT 98% human (and therefore humans are not 98% chimpanzee).

Guys, have you ever even considered dating a female chimp?

Yuh, thought so.

Common ancestry? Well, it’s way easier to defend if we start with the fact that humans and chimps are NOT obviously all that similar. So starting with a lower (believable) figure would be a better way to begin than starting with a higher (unbelievable) figure.

That’s all Buggs was trying to do. But, to keep the UK government-funded trolls at bay, Buggs clarified:

Given these statistics, it is factually incorrect to say that humans are 99% the same as chimpanzees. Yet, just last month, the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Chicago Press in the USA published a book entitled “99% Ape: How evolution adds up.” This misleading title was doubtless chosen by a marketing guru rather than the editor, who is a reputable and distinguished scientist in plant evolutionary ecology (the field in which I did my doctoral research). Such promotion of the ”myth of 1%” to the public as evidence for evolution is probably why some non-scientists have suggested on the internet that my earlier article, dispelling this myth, is somehow a death-blow to evolution – it is not.

Look, I am totally sorry that my friend Buggs is pestered by these creepy trolls. Can anyone call the trolls off? Or is this going to end like another Michael Reiss “sinner in the hands of an angry God.” story?

And DON’T try telling me that some supposed Christian Brit toff like Denis Alexander is going to, like, do something about it.

We know that if he cared, he would have done it already …

Dammit, Brits, we’ve bailed you out of two World Wars. Don’t force us to do it again. My Dad was one of the very few survivors of his Canadian air force unit.

It is overwhelmingly obvious that Darwinism and its attendant =isms are a bunch of crap. How many of your own must you feed to the shredders before you recognize that?

Hey, I’m a Canuck (really, honestly) and we’re a-watchin’! And we don’t see why you need us to tell you.. Maybe this is the day when you need us and all you get is awful silence. Read More ›

The Ian Ramsey Centre’s annual international conference is planned to take place in July 2009 (July 15th – 18th) – RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO DARWINISM 1859-2009: Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. At St Anne’s College, Oxford, England. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~theo0038/Conferenceinfo/General.html There is a call for short papers of 20-minutes duration plus 10 minutes discussion.  Topics to include, but are not restricted to, the following: Historical accounts of religious reactions to Darwin’s thought. Specific problems raised for religious belief by Darwinism (e.g.: theodicy, human uniqueness, the contingency of natural selection, the basis of morality), and theological responses to these problems Darwinism, naturalism, and the ‘new atheism.’ The history and/or sociology of religiously-motivated anti-evolutionary movements. Evolution-religion conflict as Read More ›

Whereas you, like, don’t, m’kay?

This from Curtis Brainerd at Columbia Journalism Review (December 4, 2008)

CNN is not the only television network that has been slashing science jobs. According to The Washington Post, “NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel [last week], axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s ‘Green Week,’ as well as several on-camera meteorologists.” Gannett has eliminated roughly 1,800 jobs this week at newspapers around the country, though it’s unclear which beats have been most affected. And Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine recently nixed its bureau in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launches its rockets and shuttles. Cowing, at NASAWatch, says that he is simply shocked “that at a time when science and technology should be on everybody’s lips, this expertise is suddenly not in demand.”

Remember this, folks, when they tell you that they support Darwinism because they “believe in” science.

If local charities believed in the poor the way these people believe in science, Toronto’s poor would be a bunch of skeletons lining the sidewalks … not a bunch of people with caps out in the street.

Well, at least we can still hear Wolf Blitzer freaking out about supposed apocalypses. My cup runneth over, but not with anything I want to drink.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Recently, I interviewed Walt Ruloff, the Canadian producer who put serious money into Expelled, a documentary about the ID guys, which I first learned about, perhaps accidentally, in August 2007.*

Any design hypothesis attracts hordes of trolls. So I asked Walt the obvious question, “Would you guys have made the film if you knew how much trouble it was going to be?”

His reply was, “Yes, and we would have done it differently.”

No doubt he would. The Darwinists have all the pop science journalists on auto dial. They need only ring them up and bitch. Indeed, that is precisely what Richard Dawkins did. One might have expected a professor of the public understanding of science (Dawkins’s most recent job) to prefer a life in science rather than in soap opera, but people do what they can, not what they can’t.

For me, the big question is, why didn’t Walt Ruloff know all this? Why didn’t he talk to anyone who could tell him what everyone knows: Legacy media simply cannot give a fair hearing to the question of whether design is part of the makeup of our universe.

Hundreds of sniffy film critics had to enter the fray against his film, no matter what it was like. . They don’t know anything at all about the science, but they do know that there is no design in the universe. It was interesting and instructive to note that many critics made use of anti-Expelled resources supplied by the Darwin lobby. Showing the flag, I guess.

In later posts, I will comment in more detail on the role of legacy media in preventing informed discussion, but for now briefly: The dying establishment media were not always the red ink-a-sauruses we see today. They were once young and vibrant. Of course, they grew up with and imbibed materialism, often the crass know-nothing materialism that underlies pop science media articles like this one, the target of much well-justified criticism. But the people who honestly believe the worldview that underlies such articles know that they are justified in asking no questions, and assuming that Ruloff and Ben Stein “must” be lying. And plenty of boozy wakes for dead ideas await them.

So, of course, Ruloff’s film – while it did reasonably well in sales (#5 in political documentaries and #6 in DVD documentaries as I write this, 8:48 am EST) – was trashed by “cool” critics, including many Christian ones. Read More ›

I recently watched a PowerPoint presentation that neurosurgeon Michael Egnor gave at Birmingham, Alabama last month on “why we got eugenics.” He said pretty clearly something that I have been driving at for some time:

Evolutionary explanations are merely stories appended to the proximate (scientific) explanations. They contribute nothing to the scientific understanding of the disease beyond the contribution of the proximate explanations.

Evolutionary stories are ad-hoc and generally untestable guesses, and offer no meaningful framework for science. The proximate explanations (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, microbiology, etc.) are the framework for science.

Strategies for disease treatment and prevention depend on data from the relevant medical sciences, not on speculative stories about origins.

Darwinian medicine is scientifically vacuous, and the Darwinian theory of human origins is the antithesis of human exceptionalism and human dignity.

Of course. The whole concept of evolutionary medicine is a waste of time for a very simple reason: Read More ›

A mechanic was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a motorcycle when he spotted a well known heart surgeon in his shop. The surgeon was there waiting for the service manager to come take a look at his bike. The mechanic shouted across the garage,

“Hey Doc, can I ask you a question?”

The surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic working on the motorcycle. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked,

“So, Doc, look at this engine. I open its heart, take valves out, fix ’em, put ’em back in and when I finish, it works just like new. So how come I get such a small salary and you get the really big bucks, when you and I are doing basically the same work?”

The surgeon paused, smiled and leaned over and whispered to the mechanic …

“Try doing it with the engine running!”

So why can’t the patient’s system just be shut down the way a machine is turned off? Doctors can indeed place a person’s body on bypass, in a technical state of death, but they must in reality keep it alive. Once the cells die, the hope of recovery ends – and that is especially significant for brain cells. So the body cannot really just be shut off, the way a machine can.

From the pseudonymous Mike Gene’s The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues: Read More ›

Some people who support ID doggedly hold that life on the planet earth requires a supernatural agency to make it happen. Others who don’t support ID also doggedly hold that ID requires a supernatural agency. I’ve asked, many times, what is it about the construction of organic life on this planet that requires supernatural intelligence to make it happen? What laws of physics or chemistry must be violated to produce any aspect of any living organism thus far examined? I admit that the origination and diversification of organic life on the earth seems best explained by participation at some point or points by an intelligent agency but I don’t see where a supernatural intelligent agency able to bend or break Read More ›

This evening the CBS News show 60 Minutes reported on an impressive example of design detection in the on-line poker world.    Online gambling has grown in a few short years to a 16 billion dollar a year industry, and a big part of that growth has come from internet poker.  Recently several professional gamblers at one of the larger internet poker sites, Ultimatebet.com, noticed that some of their opponents were playing extremely poorly, yet winning consistently.  They suspected cheating.    One of the professionals obtained tracking data on one of the suspected cheaters, and after running the numbers determined that the suspect’s winning hand percentage was 13 standard deviations away from the mean percentage.  This is equivalent to winning Read More ›

In the Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision the honorable Judge Jones writes (or rather, to be more accurate, regurgitates from the complainants): While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify. If only this was true. If this were the true ground rule of modern science then how is it that the chance Read More ›

Jennifer Gold reports for Christian Today (November 24, 2008) that The results of a new poll out today by faith-based think tank Theos have revealed that eight in 10 people in Britain are unaware that 2009 marks two major Charles Darwin anniversaries. Across the country, special events and celebrations are being planned for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth on 12 February and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on 24 November. Yet the results of the ComRes poll out today reveal that only 21 per cent of the population are aware of the two anniversaries. The publication of the results coincides with the unveiling of a programme of major events Read More ›