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The Design of Life

Intelligent design book by mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells

Today at Design of Life: The Avalon explosion: Another intricate, Darwin-busting puzzle

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the history of life shows no steady Darwinian march of progress, and the recent discovery about the Avalon explosion is yet another blow to an idea that is kept alive only by ideology, not evidence (and perhaps because the Darwin bicentennial budgets have already been spent?): Excerpts:

Because the Ediacaran creatures are so little known, the significance of their sudden appearance and disappearance is often overlooked: Many scientists have been hoping to find a smooth, orderly transition from the earliest cyanobacteria to the Cambrian creatures, precisely the sort of transition that Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts. But the Ediacarans are not only no help to their theory, they are actually quite a setback. An entire complex fauna came into existence quite suddenly (in terms of geological time), and just as suddenly disappeared. Worse, the Ediacarans are NOT ancestors of the Cambrians.

[ … ]

There was no road between Avalon and Cambria at all. The most remarkable thing about Avalon life is that it strutted its strange stuff a while and then, as far as we know, just disappeared, as did the trilobite and the dinosaur.

For more go here.

Also:

Today at the Post-Darwinist:

Physicists’ latest toy: The large hadron collider – gateway to other universes? Read More ›

Today at The Design of Life: Can animals do math?

How much should we believe of what we read about animal number sense? Hype aside, the evidence points away from the assumption that abstract mathematics is simply the outcome of squabbles over bones. There is a gap that is simply not bridged by the studies of animal number sense, nor do available studies shed much light on the gap. For more, go here.

Questions in evolution: How do jellyfish, crustaceans and beetles just suddenly appear?

Animals suddenly appear … and after that nothing much happens. Why? How? Read the latest post, linked above, at The Design of Life blog and help me think about this. (Currently, I am learning to cope with the fact that Alley Oop has been lying to me for, like, tens of thousands of years, so I can use the help wth thinking.) The comments facility has been enabled, but for best results, read the blog FAQs first.

Design of Life: Molecular clock – right twice a day?

2006 and 2007 have been years in which a number of key science papers addressed things we know – that ain’t so. One story is the serious challenges to the long contested “molecular clock” theory. [ … ] In the science literature, many adjustments are offered to make the fossil record and molecular data match. Of course, some adjustment is certainly inevitable, but after a while a question arises. One can live with a clock that is routinely ten minutes slow. But if it is variably slow, slower at some times than others, there may come a point when one asks, why consult a clock anyway? Or, more to the point, should this device properly be called a clock? Read Read More ›

Debates in evolution: What if the tape of life were replayed? Would humans result?

Stephen Jay Gould, the great American paleontologist, liked to say – particularly in A Wonderful Life, that if the tape of evolution were replayed a million times, a species like ours would not necessarily evolve. He made this point in, and a debate rages to this day about whether he meant chance, as Daniel Dennett claims, or contingency, as Michael Shermer claims. Biochemist Michael Denton of the University of Otago in New Zealand has an interesting take on the question in Nature’s Destiny: Go here for more.

Today at Design of Life: Channel your inner fish?

Tiktaalik, an early fossil fish with sturdy forefins, helps illustrate the difference between the approach of scientists who are convinced Darwinists and that of scientists who view the problems of evolution primarily in terms of information theory (intelligent design).

The Darwinist says, There! – we have found a missing link, so now we KNOW! what happened (because our theory explains everything).

An information theorist I consulted had an entirely different approach to the problem. He said that we do not know what happened, because we do not know how the information that produced this change came to be in the system. We have observed only the change itself, not the arrival of the information (which is the key point).

Go here for more.

Ann Coulter on legacy media obsessions with US presidential candidate Huckabee’s views on evolution. Read More ›

Darwinist Negative-Review Spam Campaign Backfires at Amazon

Last week, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence In Biological Systems was in the 17,000-20,000 range at Amazon.com. Since the Darwinist-sponsored negative-review spam campaign (with “reviews” written mostly by people who obviously had not read the book), and as of this writing, the book is sitting at about 3,000, and is: #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology #1 in Books > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology

EXPELLED Sticker Contest

In my last post, I mentioned the prospect that THE DESIGN OF LIFE would, with the help of our Darwinist friends, become a companion volume to Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (www.expelledthe movie.com — check out also www.getexpelled.com). In the event that THE DESIGN OF LIFE becomes such a companion volume, a colleague sent me a sticker that could be put on it. Here is that sticker: I like it, but frankly I think we can do better. I’m therefore offering a $100 prize to anyone who can come up with a better sticker (receipt of payment for the prize cedes copyright to me). The sticker needs to be posted online as a jpeg with a link in the Read More ›

The Upside of Amazon Manipulation

THE DESIGN OF LIFE is being shamelessly manipulated by the Darwinists at Amazon (go here). Not only are they posting negative reviews that give no indication that the reviewers have read the book but they are also voting up their negative reviews so that these are the first to be seen by potential buyers. The following 1-star review, posted 8 hours ago, illustrates the Darwinists’ level of discourse at Amazon: By E. Duran (San Jose, CA USA) – See all my reviews I just finished reading this book without vomiting. I had to go back and read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” again to remove the bad taste out of my mouth. This is the whole review, unedited and unabridged. Even Read More ›

One thing about Darwinists – they are consistent. They really do NOT believe in information

Bill Dembski has drawn my attention to the Darwinists who vote up negative reviews at Amazon of Design of Life, his textbook supplement with Jonathan Wells, on whose behalf I blog at Design of Life blog. He writes, The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give evidence of the reviewer having read the book. Yet the three reviews placed front and center by Amazon are the one-star reviews and none of the five-star reviews appear there. That’s because the Darwinists keep voting up the negative reviews and voting down the positive reviews. Please go to the link right now, look at the reviews, and vote on them (toward the bottom Read More ›

What would happen to science if Darwin ceased to be God?

Recently, I received and published this comment on this post about Oxford mathematician John Lennox’s book, God’s Undertaker, from “curwen”:

As an historian, with some background in the cultural and social history of Darwinism, I’m interested in how philosophy effects scientific practice. In my search for current material on the subject, I ran across this post, and became interested in your blog.

I am interested in your opinion on this: in what ways would scientific practice change if materialism, as a philosophy of science, was eventually replaced by design? In other words, would research and experiment be structured differently? Would standards of evidence change? Does Lennox comment on this? I apologize if this is something you’ve already dealt with at length, so even if you responded with relevant posts that would be helpful.

I told curwen that it is an excellent question, and I’d answer it.

I am also going to ask around and post other answers.* (Meanwhile, here is mine below.) Read More ›

Dembski interviewed over Design of Life

Friday Five: William A. Dembski by Devon Williams, associate editor, CitizenLink.org ‘Are there patterns in biological systems that would point us to intelligence?’ Leading scientist and mathematician William A. Dembski has devoted years to researching intelligent design. He is a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and has been featured on the front page of The New York Times. He has appeared on numerous radio and television broadcasts, including Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and ABC’s Nightline. Dembski talked to CitizenLink about his latest book, The Design of Life — which he co-authored with Jonathan Wells. 1. What is intelligent design? The study of patterns in nature that are best explained by intelligence. But the focus is Read More ›

Amazon reviews for THE DESIGN OF LIFE

An interesting thing is happening at Amazon.com under the reviews for THE DESIGN OF LIFE (go here). As of this writing, there are nine 5-star reviews and only one 1-star review (from the inimitable John Kwok). Essentially what’s happening is that the Darwinists aren’t even bothering to read the book. If they actually did, then there might be more actual reviews from them. But there just aren’t any. The one review from Kwok is from a man who gives no evidence of having read the book. The kicker is this, however: The Darwinian sympathizers are simply logging in and voting up the 1-star review and voting down the 5-star reviews (in answer to the yes|no question “was this review helpful Read More ›

Darwinists in real time – a reflection

Since the revelations from Monday’s press conference in Iowa regarding the true reason for Guillermo Gonzalez’s tenure denial, I have been studying the comments of Darwinists, to this and this post. The comments intrigue me for a reason I will explain in a moment.

Some commenters are no longer with us, but they were not the ones that intrigued me.*

I’ve already covered Maya at 8, 10, and 12 here, arguing a case against Gonzalez, even though the substance of the story is that we now KNOW that her assertions have nothing to do with the real reason he was denied tenure.

Oh, and at 15, she asserts, “The concern is not about Gonzalez’s politics or religion but about his ability to serve as a science educator.”

So … a man can write a textbook in astronomy, as Gonzalez has done, but cannot serve as a science educator? What definition of “science” is being used here, and what is its relevance to reality?

And getawitness, at 18, then compares astronomy to Near East Studies, of all things. NES is notorious for suspicion of severe compromise due to financing from Middle Eastern interests! I won’t permit a long, useless combox thread on whether or not those accusations are true; it’s the comparison itself that raises an eyebrow.

Just when I thought I had heard everything, Read More ›