Intelligent Design

Researchers from Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind have found evidence that children are predisposed to believe in God or a supreme being. This is because of a natural assumption that everything in the world exists for a purpose and was therefore created. Dr Justin Barrett was reported in the UKs Daily Telegraph as saying that young children appear to have an inherent faith even when it has not been taught to them by family or school. Even children raised on a desert island without any external infuence would start out with a belief in God. Commenting on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said “The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown Read More ›

Get a load of this: Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought – the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career. The division lies in the question of whether or not anthropology is a science, and if it accepts that Darwinian evolutionary theory guides research into human behaviour and the development of societies. In other words, Darwinism is once again spreading its malign influence into some hapless discipline. Personally, I would ask one single, simple question of anyone who wants Read More ›

 Give me a break will ya.  In their feverish efforts to prop up the teetering materialist paradigm, to justify the unjustifiable, our materialist friends have now resorted to saying, essentially, black is white.  In a recent post a commenter turns Occam’s Razor on its head when he states:

It is a common misconception among ID supporters that scientists deliberately defy Occam’s Razor and pursue multiverse theories simply because they are uncomfortable with the idea of a designer.  This is false.

The commenter cites physicist Aurélien Barrau in support.  In this article Barrau states:

In any case, it is important to underline that the multiverse is not a hypothesis invented to answer a specific question.  It is simply a consequence of a theory usually built for another purpose. Interestingly, this consequence also solves many complexity and naturalness problems.  In most cases, it even seems that the existence of many worlds is closer to Ockham’s razor (the principle of simplicity) than the ad hoc assumptions that would have to be added to models to avoid the existence of other universes.

The sheer presumption, the overweening fatuity, of these statements (both the commenter’s and Barrau’s) beggars belief.  One must conclude that either they simply have no idea what Occam’s Razor means or they are deliberately trying to distort its meaning to support their conclusion.  I suspect the latter.

So, to set things straight, we will discuss first, what the Razor means, and secondly how it applies to the multiverse. Read More ›

Darwin was a classic Brit toff of his generation – crumpets and tea and genteel unbelief sat well with administering the parish church. Indeed. British physicist David Tyler tells us,  In an informative essay, Janet Browne reflects on three Darwin commemorations: his funeral in Westminster Abbey, the 1909 centennial and the 1959 celebration. Each grasped the “opportunity to push an agenda, and even to adapt the past, so telling us what we like best to hear”.  For sure. I defy anyone to read this ridiculous hagiography, and not realize that something is fundamentally wrong with the Darwin picture. Are people really expected to sit through this in museums? (I guess so. But if they walk out, good for them!) Still, don’t Read More ›

The venerable peppered moth (Biston betularia) has popped up a couple of times in recent posts.  It seems that some of our Darwinian commenters (see, e.g., qwerty017 in comment [2] here) have not gotten the memo – the peppered moth myth has been completely exploded.  Don’t take our word for it.  Uber-Darwinist Jerry Coyne says in the November 1998 edition of Nature:  “For the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action.”  Why else would the popular school text Biology pull its discussion of Biston as an example of “evolution in action”?

My purpose in this post is not, however, to re-hash the vast debunking literature.  Instead, when I did a brief internet search on the subject I was intrigued by an astonishing display of Darwinian “It’s just gotta be” psychology on display in this New Scientist article.  Read More ›

The staggering challenge is to think of a way to confirm the existence of other universes when every conceivable experiment or observation must be confined to our own. Does it make sense to talk about other universes if they can never be detected?

[ … ]

The credibility of string theory and the multiverse may get a boost within the next year or two, once physicists start analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider, the new, $8 billion particle accelerator built on the Swiss-French border. If string theory is right, the collider should produce a host of new particles. There is even a small chance that it may find evidence for the mysterious extra dimensions of string theory. “If you measure something which confirms certain elaborations of string theory, then you’ve got indirect evidence for the multiverse,” says Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London.

[ … ]

When I ask Linde whether physicists will ever be able to prove that the multiverse is real, he has a simple answer. “Nothing else fits the data,” he tells me. “We don’t have any alternative explanation for the dark energy; we don’t have any alternative explanation for the smallness of the mass of the electron; we don’t have any alternative explanation for many properties of particles.

“What I am saying is, look at it with open eyes. These are experimental facts, and these facts fit one theory: the multiverse theory. They do not fit any other theory so far. I’m not saying these properties necessarily imply the multiverse theory is right, but you asked me if there is any experimental evidence, and the answer is yes. It was Arthur Conan Doyle who said, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

1. What is the likelihood – given that the article makes clear that so much is speculative – that small amounts of ambiguous data will be over-interpreted and professions of faith in the multiverse demanded – the way Darwinian evolutionists must believe in the Peppered Myth. In that case, the data are ambiguous, but the call to conversion is not.

It is overwhelmingly clear is that most of the people interviewed have an emotional aversion to the idea of design in our universe, which would make them unreliable judges of ambiguous data from the Large Hadron Collider (which is currently out of commission for a couple of months due to a superconductor failure).

2. The mantra “we don’t have any alternative … ” is downright spooky. It sounds like these people are preparing themselves to interpret anything they do find as evidence for what they need to believe.

Note: If you like this and other related posts archived at Colliding Universes, you can vote for Colliding Unverses at the Canadian Blogger Awards, sci-tech division. Vote early, vote often, and vote for me, of course.

I’m halfway through mathematics Professor Peter Olofsson’s essay titled Probability, Statistics, Evolution, and Intelligent Design which originally appeared in the journal Chance. The first thing I want to thank PO for is stating this early on: Although [religion] is of interest in its own right, in fairness to ID proponents, it should be pointed out that many of them do not employ religious arguments against evolution and this article does not deal with issues of faith and religion. The second thing I’d like to thank him for is describing ID as a valid scientific hypothesis in the discussion of the explanatory filter and the flagellum. PO brings up the same argument I’ve always pointed out when he talks about the Read More ›

Friend Malcolm Chisholm writes to say,

Some fascinating research on electron transport chain proteins from Princeton.

These guys say:

“Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”

Apparently they have self correcting proteins, but they seem to think it goes beyond that to proteins that can find optimal energy levels.

“In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace’s original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks,”

Oddly, they cite as an inspiration A. R. Wallace, Darwin’s co-founder of the Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection (whose ID views gave Darwin regular heartburn).

They also feel the need to deny the possibility of ID. Apparently no publication in this area is complete without one. Maybe such denials should be turned into a standard disclaimer, like the ones at the bottom of email messages for these guys.

And maybe if William Paley had stubbed his toe on an atomic clock they would still claim it was produced by chance.

That’s an idea! Why not compose a standard disclaimer that all these people can just insert at the bottom of their papers: Something along the lines of “Please rest assured that this intricate machinery is not designed, no matter what it looks like.” But doen up in obfuscated research paper style.

List, can you help?

While we are here, more fun with Chisholm, Read More ›

Below are links to the Discovery Institute’s five podcasts of University of Colorado (Boulder) professor of the philosophy of physics Bradley Monton – who is an atheist – on why the universe might show evidence of design. Monton teamed up with another skeptic of religion, mathematician David Berlinski, against materialist atheist Lawrence Krauss and British theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander, to defend the design of the universe as an intellectually worthy idea (not just some religious schtick).

Here’s more on the debate. And the five pods are linked below.

Well, it’s no secret that the intelligent design debate is more nuanced than legacy media portray it.

I suspect that fewer than 200 journalists in the world actually know what the controversy is about.

How can you tell if they do?

First, they realize that the evidence from science does not support current materialist or naturalist or no-design theory. (Shhhh!)

They are not columnists retailing fatuous lines like “There is no conflict between faith and science!”

or

“No creationism is the schools! Darwin explained it all without God. (But (optionally) you can holler your guts out for Jesus anyway. Maybe it is good for evolution if you do.”

Often, the same columnist is shouting both slogans, at different times.

Good thing too, because there isn’t a 360 degree swivel joint in the human head!

Second, they have actually read and thought about the books written by ID theorists like Mike Behe, Bill Dembski, and Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, which advance a testable thesis.

They have looked beyond the smoke and noise generated by fossil science organizations and the “Christian” scientists who meet with them to plan strategy to prevent consideration of design, purpose, or meaning in the universe. (There is a scandal here, awaiting detailed discovery – rats for me, I am mainly a trade news hack, and may not get in on the best cellar.)

Anyway, here’s Monton on design (audio): Read More ›

Dilbert, the date-challenged engineer and his life companion Dogbert discuss evolution here:

There is a history here. Dilbert’s creator, animator Scott Adams attracted a variety of trolls in their natural environment when he started to question “ass hat” Darwinian evolution. Here are some posts detailing his funnyman response:

Dilbert cartoonist: Fossils are bullshit!

Fun for once: Dilbert cartoonist fights back against “ass hat”

Internet Darwinist attacks Dilbert’s creator

Dilbert cartoonist: More opinions on the ID controversy, but that’s all – for now. I thought Adams would make Catbert the Darwinist, but he flagged poor old Dilbert for the position, at least for now. (Catbert could have made a grand human resources scheme out of it … )

Despite his current inability to “get” the fact that there might be a problem with his creed on the origin and development of life, Dilbert is still my favourite engineer. Dilbert, give a kiss for me to the talking frog in your pocket!

The tallking frog in Dilbert’s pocket? Well, here is the story as it was told to me: Read More ›

One cause (of many) delaying the completion of On Common Descent, my monograph examining the theory of the universal common ancestry of life on Earth — Darwin’s monophyletic Tree of Life, rooted in LUCA (the last universal common ancestor) — has been the explosion of publication on the topic. In 1998, when I submitted my dissertation, only a handful of researchers openly doubted monophyly, and only generally-known-to-be-crazy philosophers of science, like me, cared much about it. Now an international workshop series on the question has been organized, to culminate in a major meeting in London in July 2010. The first workshop in the series was held on November 7th, 2008, at the Philosophy of Science Association biennial conference, in Pittsburgh. Read More ›

Here is an interesting article: By Malcolm Jones | NEWSWEEK How’s this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. As historical facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it’s just a coincidence, it’s a coincidence that’s guaranteed to make you do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution and the Civil War in the same sentence? Why would you, unless you’re writing your dissertation on epochal events in the 19th century? But Read More ›

In First Things (December 2008), editor Richard John Neuhaus comments on the decision not to invite intelligent design theorists like Michael Behe, author of Edge of Evolution to the Vatican conference next March: So let’s see now: The conference is strictly scientific. In that case, there would seem to be no reason for the Church to be sponsoring it, since there are numerous other institutions that attend to the strictly scientific. But then we are told the conference will also include philosophers and theologians, but only those who are rational – meaning, presumably, those who do not raise critical questions about the strictly scientific. We are told it will exclude scientific ideologues who reject that philosophers and theologians have to Read More ›

In “When Fossil Genes Become Fossilized Rhetoric”11 05 08) Robert Deyes recounts the trouble an evolutionary biologist named Sean Carroll went to in order to demonstrate that evolution occurs without design or purpose – largely demonstrating the opposite:

There are no grounds for assuming that the processes through which genes might degrade are the same processes through which they could be built up (Ref 1). In simple terms, genes are long stretches of DNA that carry the information necessary to code for the production of functional proteins. Intelligent design theorists claim that a piece-meal assembly of information-rich genes using the basic building blocks of DNA exceeds the capacities of Darwinian selection and is better explained by appealing to the activity of an intelligent agent (Refs 3,4). If anything, this very principle should have been Carroll’s first point of contention if he was to say anything against ID. From a philosophical perspective the possibility remains that a designer may have supplied an organism with more genetic information than may have been needed for life- what one may call an “all the options, all the bells and whistles” approach. Such a designer could have been interested in placing non-functional genes in the genome for a future role in his or her design. We all install software into our computers that may not be operational until some later date when we finally choose to use it. Computers can now be accurately scheduled to start a process at a specified instant in the future, similarly to the programming of a recording on a video-recorder.

Deyes follows up with a discussion of the “living fossil”fish, the coelacanth, noting: Read More ›

Having connected the dots of the vast conspiracy run by the Discovery Institute so as to include non-materialist neuroscience, Steven Novella goes on to cheerlead, for methodological naturalism – about which I will say only this:

Methodological naturalism is usually described as meaning that science can consider only natural causes. But by itself that doesn’t mean anything because we don’t know everything that is in nature. For example, if – as Rupert Sheldrake thinks – some animals can demonstrate telepathy, then telepathy is a natural cause. And so?

And so Richard Dawkins goes to a great deal of trouble to attempt to discredit Sheldrake because the hidden assumption is that nature mustn’t include telepathy.

In practice, methodological naturalism frequently becomes a method of defending bad – and often ridiculously bad.- ideas in order to save naturalism. Think of the persistent efforts to “prove” that humans don’t “really” behave altruistically. In fact, we sometimes do. Here’s a recent story, for example, about a Texas woman named Marilyn Mock who went to an auction of foreclosed homes, ran into Tracey Orr – an unemployed woman she had never met – who had come to endure the sale of her home, and … Read More ›