Science

Take a look at Ross McKitrick’s recent remarks on the subject of position statements from professional societies: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/11/23/should-scientific-societies-issue-position-statements-by-ross-mckitrick He argues against the practice of societies issuing position statements. This has direct application to the ID debate and the public statements issued by the AAAS, NAS, AAS, etc. Here are two particularly insightful paragraphs from McKitrick’s post: Official statements celebrate group think and conformity. They effectively demote members who disagree with some or all of the statement to second-class status within their profession, regardless of the quality of their own individual work or their reasons for disagreement. And they create divisions and alienation within the profession. Having issued a party line, it cannot be a surprise that partisanship emerges, with all Read More ›

Steven Pinker has published an interesting op-ed in today’s Harvard Crimson, criticizing the current report of Harvard’s committee on general education. If one could reformulate Pinker’s dogmatic pronouncements as questions to be examined, this would be a good essay. For example, What is faith? Is Earth truly an undistinguished speck in the cosmos, or is there something special about it? How is the paramount value of “reason” affected if the mind and its thoughts are merely products of chemical activity in the brain? Opinion –Less Faith, More Reason Published by The Harvard Crimson On 10/27/2006 4:36:48 AM By STEVEN PINKER … [T]he picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding Read More ›

There’s a hilarious typo in the illustration accompanying the article on the recent Salk Institute evangelical atheism conference that appeared on the front page of the Science Times today. The fact that this got by the author and the editors at the NYT speaks volumes about the broader cultural illiteracy of the science-worshipping, liberal literary establishment. The conference itself was remarkable — I include the opening paragraphs of the Times story and a link below. ====================================================== November 21, 2006 A Free-for-All on Science and Religion By GEORGE JOHNSON Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist Read More ›

Obviously this new think-tank is not about science as such but about pushing a materialistic, Darwin-undergirded conception of science. Question: Did Kurtz ever get the memo from the NCSE that evolution is religiously neutral? Mission statement: A Global Federation committed to science, reason, free inquiry, secularism, and planetary ethics Source: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=221 By Center for Inquiry PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Nathan Bupp Phone: (716) 636-4869 x 218 E-mail: nbupp@centerforinquiry.net Washington, D.C. (November 14, 2006)—The Center for Inquiry/Transnational, a think tank devoted to promoting reason and science in all areas of human interest, announced today that it is opening a new Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. This initiative will mark an unprecedented drive to bring a rigorous defense Read More ›

Anyone who writes “Is your Earth still flat?” is trading on an anti-Christian myth promoted by late-nineteenth century Darwinists. Although many of you probably already know this, it’s worth repeating periodically. Below is the text of a handout distributed at the 2002 Ohio School Board Debate between Kenneth Miller, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells. THE FLAT EARTH MYTH “The earth isn’t flat – end of story.” So says Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “We don’t have to have classes or be sensitive to the issues of those who believe that, because they’re wrong.” Defenders of Darwinian evolution sometimes compare their critics to believers in a flat earth. According to the Read More ›

Touchstone now has Jonathan Witt’s review of Francis Collins’ The Language of God in their online archive: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=19-08-032-f.

From the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works… Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics Washington DC – One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism. Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on Read More ›

Accepted July 2006

Physics of Life Reviews

[Update: thanks to Todd for a link to the full paper:]

Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models

[Update: IDers Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and R.L. Olsen were cited as well!! They wrote the book in 1984 which is considered the beginning of the modern ID movement. Also, critical remarks were made indirectly of Dawkins.]

Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models

by David Abel and Jack Trevors

Self-ordering phenomena should not be confused with self-organization. Self-ordering events occur spontaneously according to natural “law propensities and are purely physicodynamic. Crystallization and the spontaneously forming dissipative structures of Prigogine are examples of self-ordering. Self-ordering phenomena involve no decision nodes, no dynamically-inert configurable switches, no logic gates, no steering toward algorithmic success or “computational halting”.
Read More ›

Interesting article in WIRED on the unholy trinity Dawkins-Dennett-Harris. Their atheist extremism may be selling books but is it winning converts? . . . The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking. Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith. . . MORE: Read More ›

Blogger David Anderson, who has a first-class degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, is putting a bit of pressure on the British Centre for Science Education, quite successfully, it seems. He has uncovered good evidence that they have been less than forthright in the course of some recent parliamentary lobbying: http://bcse-revealed.blogspot.com

http://www.ffame.org/sbenner/cochembiol8.672-689.pdf

The opening discussion:

To decide whether life has a common chemical plan, we must decide what life is. A panel assembled by NASA in 1994 was one of many groups to ponder this question. The panel defined life as a ‘chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ [16]. This definition, which follows an earlier definition by Sagan [17], will be used here. Read More ›

Check out this great looking website (if only the content matched in quality): http://richarddawkins.net. Anybody who is willing and able to upgrade the look, feel, and functionality of this site (Uncommon Descent) to match that of the Dawkins site will receive three of my books autographed. What a deal. Think it over.

In his 2003 paper, “How far are we from a quantum theory of gravity?” especially p. 49. Lee Smolin invokes the no free lunch theorem to argue that in searching for the minimum of a complicated but unknown potential there is no chance of doing better than a random search unless the search algorithm has built into it some very definite information about the function itself. The paper is widely available online (e.g., http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0303/0303185.pdf). There’s not much difference here between Smolin’s argument against string theory and ID arguments against natural selection. I have yet to read the new books by Woit and Smolin, but I’m told it is astonishing how closely the controversies over string theory reflect the controversies of Read More ›

A news brief in Scientific American (subscriber only, no link) alerted me to the following article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060601091313.htm Summarized: Core sediments retrieved by three icebreakers recently analyzed reveal the following: -North Pole’s temperature 55 million years ago: 23C/73F (today it is -20C/-4F) -Concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 55mya was 2000 ppm (today it is 380 ppm) -Global average temperature 55mya under above conditions was 5C/9F degrees C higher than today (in Sciam News Brief only, Science Daily says tropics remained liveable). Obviously, the earth recovered, if it was even “harmed”. I post this because so-called global warming is blamed on human activities by the worst kind of consensus pseudoscience (Darwinian evolution is consensus pseudoscience as well) and is projected Read More ›

Yes, this is the same Chris Mooney who attacks ID and has written THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE: Chris Mooney ’99 recently spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA). Mooney, who is copresident and a founding member of the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics, addressed the issue of discrimination against those who don’t believe in God. Mooney interned with the CFA over the summer, where he helped draft the organization’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.” Source: http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/campusnotes.html.