Mathematics

When we think of design, we normally think of biology or perhaps physics, but usually not mathematics. How can we see design in something that could not be any different than it is? I don’t know if mathematics could have been different than it is, but as a mathematician, I still see design in mathematics, and plenty of it. The non-mathematician, who may think of mathematics as consisting only of arithmetic and perhaps algebra and geometry, could never imagine the richness that is here, waiting to be discovered, in the many fields and subfields of mathematics. How could he imagine that there are enough interesting and challenging problems to keep thousands of mathematicians busy and entertained throughout their lifetimes? Many Read More ›

Previously [1], I argued that not only may a universe with infinite probabilistic resources undermine ID, it will definitely undermines science. Science operates by fitting models to data using statistical hypothesis testing with an assumption of regularity between the past, present, and future. However, given the possible permutations of physical histories, the majority are mostly random. Thus, a priori, the most rational position is that all detection of order cannot imply anything beyond the bare detection, and most certainly implies nothing about continued order in the future or that order existed in the past.

Furthermore, since such detections of order encompass any observations we may make, we have no other means of determining a posteriori whether science’s assumption of regularity is valid to any degree whatsoever. And, as the probabilistic resources increase the problem only gets worse. This is the mathematical basis for Hume’s problem of induction. Fortunately, ID provides a way out of this conundrum. Read More ›

Here, from Etereae Studios. The part they don’t cover is “life,” but no one does.

At Creation-Evolution Headlines, we learn (July 11, 2011):

Plants perform a wonder that has attracted the admiration of scholars from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to modern times: the ability to reproduce mathematically perfect patterns. This ability, called phyllotaxis, can be described mathematically with the Fibonacci Series and the Golden Angle. The beautiful spirals in sunflowers, artichokes, cacti, dandelion heads and other plants continue to fascinate children and adults today, but those are not the only examples. Leaves on a stem can emerge in phyllotactic patterns like a spiral staircase, and depending on the environment, plants can switch patterns at different stages in development. Read More ›

Granville Sewell, math prof, satirist of silly ideas, and apology recipient (from math journal), has this to say about Darwinists’ attempt to rescue their theory from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Organization always decrees, left to itself. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as it is “compensated” somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. [ … ] According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting Read More ›

Editor’s note: ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law’’

An article, ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law,’’ by Dr. Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at University of Texas at El Paso, was submitted on October 21, 2010 to the Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters. Dr. Sewell’s article was peerreviewed and accepted for publication on January 19, 2011.

On March 2, 2011, the Editor-in-Chief of Applied Mathematics Letters, Dr. Ervin Rodin, decided to withdraw the articlewithout consultation with the author, not because of any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors,but because the Editor-in-Chief subsequently concluded that the content was more philosophical than mathematical and, as such, not appropriate for a technical mathematics journal such as Applied Mathematics Letters.

The Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters and its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rodin, provide their sincere and heartfelt apologies to Dr. Sewell for any inconvenience or embarrassment that may have been caused by their unilateral withdrawal of his article, and wish Dr. Sewell the best in the future and welcome Dr. Sewell’s submission of future articles for possible publication.

Dr. Sewell’s article as accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters can be viewed at:

http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf.

It is on line, but it’s only free if you have a science direct subscription.

Further:

Breaking, breaking: ID friendly math prof gets apology and damages from journal Read More ›

Math journal retracted one of our UD authors’ accepted article only because Darwinist blogger complained

A brief, lay-friendly, look at Sewell’s stifled paper is here. Comment on it’s significance here.

This just in: Granville Sewell on the controversy.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Here, John G. West reports (Evolution News & Views, June 7, 2011) that University of Texas, El Paso math professor Granville Sewell has receive an apology and $10,000 because Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just before publication, based on the say so of a Darwinist blogger:

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.  Read More ›

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency. Read More ›

About this odd recent job posting (math fix for neo-Darwinism), Doug Axe at Biologic Institute offers “Oxford seeks mathemagician” (May 5th, 2011): Scientists employ different rhetorical strategies to accomplish different things. That shouldn’t be surprising, perhaps, but for some it is. The reason is that while the public is very familiar with rhetorical shiftiness in some occupations, they tend to see only one side of science—the confident, assertive, authoritative, we-know-what-we’re-talking-about side. Science-speak often comes across with a hint of arrogance, but since science itself depends on the goodwill of the public for its very existence, it usually corrects itself on those occasions when it oversteps its bounds.There are a few peculiar exceptions though, … But the question has been raised: Read More ›

Here at MercatorNet, William West asks, “Has science buried God?” and answers, “No, far from it, an Oxford professor insists” (5 May 2011). He is reviewing the work of serious Christian Oxford mathematician and ID sympathizer John Lennox.

Lennox goes through all the theories put forward to give credence to the idea that all of this could have happened by chance and, as a mathematician, indicates that such scenarios are basically laughable. He says that the conclusion that a super intellect is at work in the creation of life may not be verified by scientific “induction” or experiment, but it is a valid inference to the best explanation (“abduction”).

He points out that the probability of a purely random origin for any sequence of even the most basic biological significance is “so small as to be negligible”: “It could therefore be argued that the molecular biology of the cell shows the same order of fine-tuning that we saw in connection with physics and cosmology.” Read More ›

Oxford is hiring a mathematician to try to rescue Darwinism. Because it was the math that got Darwinism into trouble in the first place:

The concept of fitness optimization is routinely used by field biologists, and first-year biology undergraduates are frequently taught that natural selection leads to organisms that maximize their fitness. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) promoted a conceptual integration of modern evolutionary theory in which genes are viewed as optimising agents, which is extremely influential and widespread today and encompasses inclusive fitness theory and evolutionarily stable strategies as well as general optimality ideas. However, mathematical population geneticists mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind. Read More ›