Intelligent Design

Here are some realistic stats from Brit expert Richard Buggs: Looking closely at the chimpanzee-like 76% of the human genome, we find that to make an exact alignment, we often have to introduce artificial gaps in either the human or the chimp genome. These gaps give another 3% difference. So now we have a 73% similarity between the two genomes. In the neatly aligned sequences we now find another form of difference, where a single ’letter’ is different between the human and chimp genomes. These provide another 1.23% difference between the two genomes. Thus, the percentage difference is now at around 72%. We also find places where two pieces of human genome align with only one piece of chimp genome, or Read More ›

Before I say anything else, I want to take a moment to honor Bill Dembski.  That this site exists at all is a tribute to his foresight, and its stature as one of the premier ID forums in the world speaks to his dedication and tireless efforts.  When I say “tireless,” I mean it quite literally.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked the “sent” line in one of his emails, only to see that he dashed it off at 2:00 AM or some other outrageously late (or is it early?) hour.  Bill, thank you for all have done, for all you are doing, and for all you will doubtless continue to do, both here at UD and in your research ventures.

With this change of the guard, what can UD readers expect in the weeks and months ahead?  First, let me say what will not change.  I am very happy to report that DaveScot will be staying on as our primary moderator.  Also, all of our previous contributors, including Dr. Dembski, are staying on, and we can look forward to many more excellent and informative posts from them.  Finally, at the present time we have no plans to change the overall “look and feel” of the site.

So what is changing?
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In “Francis Beckwith finally disowns ID” Bill Dembski and a number of others have offered a variety of comments about this piece, “The Truth about Me and Intelligent Design.”

Honestly, Beckwith disowning ID reminds me of a guy divorcing his wife ten years after she’s run off with the plumber. The question isn’t “Why, Frankie, why?” but “Why, frankly, why?”.

Last I heard from Beckwith, he was defending John Lilley’s scorched earth campaign against the academic deans at Baylor (deans 1, scorched earth 0, as I recall – even at dysfunctional Baylor, there is some stuff you just can’t do).

My take is that some philosophy types will always hate ID because it asserts the priority of evidence over theory.

Let’s look at a typical Darwinist theory: The peacock’s tale (cue pompous science doc intro music) Read More ›

From the Discovery Institute:

Turning Darwin Day into Academic Freedom Day

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. As you can imagine, Darwinists have a full year of celebrations planned, and February 12th, Darwin’s birthday, is likely to be the high water mark for most of those celebrations. Every year Darwin Day celebrations get more and more elaborate and outrageous. Celebrants decorate evolution trees, sing Darwin carols and odes to natural selection, and eat from the tree of life.Academic Freedom Day.

Naturally, we don’t want you to miss out on the fun. On Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), we want students everywhere to speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution and turn “Darwin Day” into

Actually, the Darwin cult has become so ridiculous that it would be hard to parody. Just look at this ridiculous hagiography. And if they force it down school kids throats, some of it might wind up coming back again, too.

Video and Essay Contest: Grand Prize $500

All the details are here:

Who Is Eligible

Students currently enrolled in high school (grades 9-12) or as a college undergraduate may enter the contest. (High school students include those attending private, public, or home schools.) Essays must be submitted by an individual student, but videos may be submitted by a group of up to 5 students.The PrizesOne grand-prize winner will be announced and have his or her entry officially unveiled at academicfreedomday.com on Academic Freedom Day, February 12th 2009. The grand-prize winner will be awarded $500, and one essay runner-up and one video runner-up will receive $250. Up to 10 finalists will receive their choice of a free book or DVD.

The Deadline
Entries must be submitted to the YouTube Group “Academic Freedom Day Video Contest” here, by the end of business on January 23, 2009.

Here’s Ben Stein introducing the idea:

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

I’ve seen this a long time coming: www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2008/11/… Two quotes in particular stand out for me: My reasons have to do with my philosophical opposition to the ID movement’s acquiescence to the modern idea that an Enlightenment view of science is the paradigm of knowledge. [Comment from WmAD: Showing that the Enlightenment view of science fails on its own terms is hardly the same as acquiescing to it.] My point is to provide my reader with an intellectually respectable way to reject Dawkinian [sic] atheism without having to embrace ID. [Comment from WmAD: Why not simply present an intellectually respectable way to reject Dawkinsian–period? Why does he have to put his own preferred method of combating Dawkins explicitly in opposition Read More ›

In “Atheists Pick on God” (Sydney Morning Herald, November 2, 2008), Simon Webster explains:

LONDON buses will carry the slogan “There’s probably no God” next year, in a campaign paid for by an atheist organisation. Transport chiefs say it would never work in Sydney, where commuters wait at bus stops for so long that they eventually die and go to heaven, where God tells them: “There’s probably no bus.”

The British Humanist Association and prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, are paying for the ads. They believe God is nothing but a figment of the human imagination, much like the T-Card and the North West Rail Link.

The news comes at a time when record numbers of Sydneysiders say they have lost their faith: despite all the promises of a second coming, there never will be an extension to the light rail network.

Premier Nathan Rees has called on them to find it again quickly: if Sydney Ferries is privatised it may be necessary for commuters on the less popular routes to learn to walk on water …

The rest here. The campaign would never work in Toronto either. Here, once you give up waiting for the bus and call a taxi, the bus turns the corner just as the taxi pulls up – which proves that the atheist’s explanation of the universe cannot be quite right.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack Read More ›

The language in the following paper is hilarious. Basically the researchers are saying “We know this looks like an engineered feedback control loop. We analyzed it and found it statistically impossible to have come about through a stochastic processs. But we will strenuously object to anyone calling it evidence of design.” ROFLMAO

“Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins’ behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as “bang-bang extremization,” the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

Evolution’s new wrinkle: Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective
by Kitta MacPherson · Posted November 10, 2008; 10:00 a.m.

The rest of the paper is below the fold or at the link above.

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Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many. by Tim Folger Discover published online November 10, 2008 A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I’ve come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde’s office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the Read More ›

My friend Forrest Mims, survivor of Darwinist thug attacks, has recently been named one of the “50 best brains in science” by Discover Magazine (December 2008, page 43). The cover story informs us, “there may be no amateur scientists more prolific than Forrest Mims.” It is not on line yet.

The Discover article classes Mims as an Outsider and reads, in part, “There may be no amateur scientist more prolific than Forrest M. Mims III, 64, of south central Texas. He has published in major scientific journals such as Nature as well as countless general-interest publications. Mims began teaching himself science and electronics at age 11 and says he never received any formal training apart from a few introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.” I am told the list includes some other relative unknowns, as well as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking (on the cover), Michael Griffin (head of NASA), James Hansen (global warming guru), E. O. Wilson (sociobiologist and evolutionist), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders), Neil deGrasse Tyson (PBS Nova), Harold Varmus (NIH), and J. Craig Ventner (human genome).

The selection panel has good reason for its view of Forrest. For a man with little formal science training, Mims has done an astonishing amount of research that has been published in a variety of journals. He has written many popular articles, as well as books. He is probably best known for the books and lab kits on electronics projects that he had developed for Radio Shack over the years. He even has a claim to minor historical fame as a co-founder of MITS, Inc., which introduced the Altair 8800, the first microcomputer, in 1975.

Encouraged by her family, his daughter Sarah Mims had a journal publication while still a high school student.

However, Forrest told me yesterday that when he was first told by a Discover editor to expect his name to come up, he worried that it was a vulgar hit piece, retailing the “Scientific American” affair or the “Eric Pianka” episode. Read More ›

A friend alerts me to this interesting article, “Does Nature Suggest Transcendence?”, by Neil D. Broom in The Global Spiral (a Metanexus publication). Broom is Professor of Materials Science at the University of Auckland New Zealand.

My friend describes the article as “broadly pro-ID” – and I would be inclined to agree, except that I would not want Broom to be assailed by a horde of ass hats demanding that he recant. It’s the sort of article you must read to get the benefit of his careful thought, especially because it is adorned by well-chosen photographs and drawings:

… can natural selection be so easily dismissed as a wholly material, unconscious, purposeless process? I think it is fair to say that at one popular level the expression natural selection serves as a kind of mantra, an almost magical utterance that quickly allays any doubts a skeptic might entertain. It is uttered with power and authority when any kind of biological achievement required to be explained, and in the currency of a wholly material world. My argument is that the claim that natural selection explains the extraordinary (read life processes) while drawing only on the ordinary (read material processes), is not only bad science, it is also contradicted by the very narrative the materialist seems compelled to employ to present his or her story of life.

 
Referencing British biologist’s comparison of natural selection to engineers in a soap factory, he writes, Read More ›

Adam Rutherford from Nature shows he is blinded even to an understanding of the difference between ID  and creationism. In his teacher’s TV rant he calls for the re-education of the 18% of UK science teachers not convinced that Darwinism has, in his words, “withstood all attacks”. Commenting on the same survey, UK Daily Telegraph defines ID as “the theory that the universe shows signs of having been designed rather than evolving” In their failure to even grasp the basic definition of ID, these people are, the words of Richard Dawkins, “either stupid, ignorant or dare I say it, evil.” Teachers.tv video

Some kind readers may have noticed that we have been changing things around a bit here at Uncommon Descent. We are retooling the blog to serve you, our community, better, and will let you know of key developments as they come on stream.

Wikipedia’s Intelligent Design article was recommended for review on continuing as a Featured Article on Oct. 15. See the Discussion on Intelligent Design on whether it reaches Wikipedia’s Featured Article Criteria See the previous FAR of 24 July 2007. Specific Suggestions from FAR have been added to the ongoing Discussion on ID. This provides for outside “eyes” to help bring objectivity to the discussion. Note that: “FARs may run as long as several months if work is progressing, so there’s no need to consider “temporary delisting.”” Further constructive comments and editing effort would appear to be welcome. The editor Marskell is now asking for official comments on FARC status. Note the distinction between comments in the FAR section and whether Read More ›

Friend Malcolm Chisholm, who has a wonderful approach to information (= he reads a lot) writes to tell me of a book written by Alfred Russel Wallace (Darwin’s co-theorist) on the question of the habitability of Mars:

It is called “Is Mars Habitable?” It was written in 1907 when Wallace was living in Broadstone, Dorset (where I went to school).

Wallace takes on Percival Lowell, a supreme icon of American astronomy. Lowell thought there were Martians and they used canals etc. Wallace blows up this theory, ending the book with the statement:

“Mars, therefore, is not only uninhabited by intelligent beings such as Mr. Lowell postulates, but is absolutely UNINHABITABLE.”

Remember that Wallace has been derided for his beliefs in ID and spiritualism. Yet he was obviously not afraid to go against the scientific speculative spirit of the age.

Indeed. The introduction to the 1907 edition, scanned online, editor Charles H. Smith notes,

For many years one of Wallace’s least remembered books, Is Mars Habitable? is increasingly being recognized as one of the first examples of the proper application of the scientific method to the study of extraterrestrial atmospheres and geography–that is, as one of the pioneer works in the field of exobiology.

Here is Wallace’s conclusion: Read More ›

What think you?

P.-M. Binder of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Hilo
thinks that David Wolpert, writing in Physica D (Wolpert, D. H. Physica D 237, 1257–1281 (2008) has demonstrated “that the entire physical Universe cannot be fully understood by any single inference system that exists within it”:

In proving his theorems,Wolpert defines U as the space of all world-lines (sequences of events) in the Universe that are consistent with the laws of physics. He then defines strong inference as the ability of one machine to predict the total conclusion function of another machine for all possible set-ups. Finally, he uses ‘Cantor diagonalization’ (Box 1) to prove, among others, the following two statements:

(1) Let C1 be any strong inference machine for U. There is another machine, C2, that cannot
be strongly inferred by C1.
(2) No two strong inference machines can be strongly inferred from each other.

The first of these statements posits that there is a portion of ‘knowledge space’ (that inferable by C2) that is not available to any C1 machine. The second is a statement about the non-equivalence of inference machines; it implies that, at most, only one machine at one instant in time can infer all others. The two statements together imply that, at best, there can be only a ‘theory of almost everything’.

Memo to LaPlace’s demon: Get a job, Mr. Know-it-all.

Citation: Nature 455, 884-885 (16 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/455884a; Published online 15 October 2008
Abstract:

A provocative contribution to the logic of science extends the theorems of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, and bears on thinking about prediction, the standard model of particles, and quantum gravity. (paywall)

Also just up at Colliding Universes: Read More ›