Robert Hazen delivered a talk at Guillermo Gonzalez school entitled: Why Intelligent Design is Not Science. Guillermo gives a thoughtful response in the Ames Tribune here.

Hazen has participated in 2 IDEA events at GMU including one where Jonathan Wells spoke. He’s very respectful in his treatment of IDists, and has said he is open to being proven wrong. He spoke at our IDEA meeting in October 2005 before CBS News camera crews and 90 people (but the news report has never aired). In attendance were my former professor James Trefil (who debated Dembski 2 weeks later) and famous OOL researcher Harold Morowitz.

Read More ›

George Montañez, Assistant Professor in the Computer Sciences Department\ at Harvey Mudd College, has just published a unified model of specified complexity: Abstract:A mathematical theory of complex specified information is introduced which unifies several prior methods of computing specified complexity. Similar to how the exponential family of probability distributions have dissimilar surface forms yet share a common underlying mathematical identity, we define a model that allows us to cast Dembski’s semiotic specified complexity, Ewert et al.’s algorithmic specified complexity, Hazen et al.’s functional information, and Behe’s irreducible complexity into a common mathematical form. Adding additional constraints, we introduce canonical specified complexity models, for which one-sided conservation bounds are given, showing that large specified complexity values are unlikely under any given Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: The Dutch Origins Center, a virtual project, has been led by Nobel laureate Ben Feringa (2016, Chemistry)—-keynote speaker of this week’s two-day conference. The project is a Dutch national initiative involving 17 of the country’s universities and institutes. … Curiously, Steve Benner’s $5.4M Templeton-funded Origins project isn’t represented, but inorganic chemist Lee Cronin—-who’s developing a “Universal Life Detector” with big bucks from Templeton—- will address this week’s gathering. Cronin, based at the University of Glasgow, has been attempting to make matter come alive. One of most notable presenters at the event is astrobiologist Bob Hazen, who told me he is “very sympathetic to people who see echoes of biology in mineralogy”. Hazen explained his perspective Read More ›

Make it look like you are working… From Time and Date, how much eclipse you can see from where you live and the date of the next eclipse (moon). Here’s a compendium of historical eclipse information from LiveScience, including: One of the greatest eclipse observers in history was the Persian scholar Ibn al-Haytham, also known by the Latinized version of his name, Alhazen. Born in Basra, in what in now Iraq, Al-Haytham spent most of his life in the Egyptian city of Cairo during the Fatimid Caliphate in the 11th century A.D. His great invention was named “Al-Bayt al-Muthlim” in Arabic (which translates to “the dark room” in English) — the earliest known “camera obscura,” where a bright external image, such Read More ›

A friend asked about this common intelligent design concept. Specified complexity, also called complex specified information (CSI): Life shows evidence of complex, aperiodic, and specified information in its key functional macromolecules, and the only other example we know of such function-specifying complex information are artifacts designed by intelligent agents. A chance origin of life would exceed the universal probability bound (UPB) set by the scope of the universe; hence design is a factor in the origin and development of life. Contrary to a commonly encountered (and usually dismissive) opinion, this concept is neither original to Dr Dembski nor to the design theory movement. Its first recognized use was by noted Origin of Life researcher, Leslie Orgel, in 1973: Living organisms are Read More ›

From Nautilus: The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven God might just as well have begun with a toaster oven. A few years ago at a yard sale, Nicholas Hud spotted a good candidate: A vintage General Electric model, chrome-plated with wood-grain panels, nestled in an old yellowed box, practically unused. The perfect appliance for cooking up the chemical precursors of life, he thought. He bought it for $5. Trivia: In Canada, he could have got it “As Is” for $2. At home in his basement, with the help of his college-age son, he cut a rectangular hole in the oven’s backside, through which an automated sliding table (recycled from an old document scanner) could move a tray Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New research predicts that Earth has more than 1,500 undiscovered minerals and that the exact mineral diversity of our planet is unique and could not be duplicated anywhere in the cosmos. Wouldn’t that b bad news to the cosmos-a-minute/fund us!! crowd? Minerals form from novel combinations of elements. These combinations can be facilitated by both geological activity, including volcanoes, plate tectonics, and water-rock interactions, and biological activity, such as chemical reactions with oxygen and organic material. Nearly a decade ago, Hazen developed the idea that the diversity explosion of planet’s minerals from the dozen present at the birth of our Solar System to the nearly 5,000 types existing today arose primarily from the rise of life. More than Read More ›

Imagine that scientists discovered the best documentary evidence for God’s existence that anyone could possibly hope for: messages in the DNA of each and every human cell, saying “Made by Yahweh.” Imagine that a notorious New Atheist and a well-known Catholic philosopher are both asked by journalists what they make of this evidence. The New Atheist shocks everyone by announcing that he now (provisionally) accepts that there is a God. “Sure, aliens might have made those messages,” he concedes. “But it’s not likely, is it? For the time being, I’m going with the hypothesis that God did it. This looks like pretty good evidence to me.” The Catholic philosopher is asked what he makes of the new discovery. To everyone’s Read More ›

[This is an essay I wrote originally for a creationist audience which I cross posted at Insight and Inspiration from CEU (where comments are shut off, but comments are invited here at UD however). I post it here at UD unchanged because the ID community might be able to glean some useful information from it even though it was originally written for a creationist audience. ] When I watched the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate, I lamented, “Why Lord do we not have an Isaac Newton of today defending your creation?” In years gone by, Christians were at the forefront of intellectual advancement in science, technology, medicine, literature, art, music, etc. I lamented, “dear Lord, why has this happened? Read More ›