Physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised a young Max Planck not to go into physics, because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” With the clarity of hindsight we might say, “what a maroon.”  Standing on the cusp of a century in which the world of physics would be turned on its head – led by the very man to whom he was speaking – von Jolly thought everything important had already been discovered. Planck’s discoveries in quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of space and time were literally unimaginable to a man like von Jolly.  His “few holes” were the known unknowns of classical physics.  He had no idea Read More ›

When I posted my Heresy Against the Church of Darwin Must be Stamped Out!, I had no idea that this magazine cover would come out the following week.

Earlier today, I decided to check back at TSZ, to see if they have recovered from the recent regrettable hack attack. They are back up, at least in part. The following however, caught my eye: Intelligent design proponents make a negative argument for design.  According to them, the complexity and diversity of life cannot be accounted for by unguided evolution (henceforth referred to simply as ‘evolution’) or any other mindless natural process.  If it can’t be accounted for by evolution, they say, then we must invoke design . . . . What mysterious barrier do IDers think prevents microevolutionary change from accumulating until it becomes macroevolution?  It’s the deep blue sea, metaphorically speaking.  IDers contend that life occupies ‘islands of Read More ›

A new ID-friendly paper has just appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters. Reports the abstract, The Hoyle state plays a crucial role in the helium burning of stars that have reached the red giant stage. The close proximity of this state to the triple-alpha threshold is needed for the production of carbon, oxygen, and other elements necessary for life. We investigate whether this life-essential condition is robust or delicately fine-tuned by measuring its dependence on the fundamental constants of nature, specifically the light quark mass and the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. We show that there exist strong correlations between the alpha-particle binding energy and the various energies relevant to the triple-alpha process. We derive limits on the variation of Read More ›

In the movie Annie Hall Woody Allen is trapped in a long theater line right in front of a rather loud-mouthed fellow. What’s worse, the fellow is pompously expounding on the work of Marshall McLuhan even though he’s all wrong. Allen finally runs out of patience but the fellow won’t back down. So amazingly Allen produces Mr. McLuhan himself, right then and there, who authoritatively informs the fellow of his ignorance (click to view the video). That funny scene sometimes plays out in evolution discussions for there are a great many evolution experts who, like Mr. McLuhan, may drop in at any moment and smash the critic. But the denouement is not always quite as Allen scripted it.  Read more

Most people are aware that Sir Isaac Newton believed in God. But it may come as a surprise to many readers to learn that he was also an Intelligent Design advocate. What prompted me to write this post was a recent comment by Genomicus that while Newton’s remarks on the Bible were interesting, they were “irrelevant to the hypothesis that life was engineered by some intelligence(s).” Genomicus will be interested to know that Newton explicitly argued that all of the various kinds of living things in Nature were personally designed by God. For those wanting to know more about Newton’s views on God and science, I would heartily recommend an essay by Stephen Snobelen, a professor of the history of Read More ›

Two years ago I asked this question:  How Can We Know One Belief Selected for By Evolution is Superior to Another? I illustrated the conundrum faced by the evolutionary materialist (EM) with this little back and forth: Theist: You say there is no God. EM: Yes. Theist: Yet belief in God among many (if not most) humans persists. EM: I cannot deny that. Theist: How do you explain that? EM: Religious belief is an evolutionary adaption. Theist: But you say religious belief is false. EM: That’s correct. Theist: Let me get this straight. According to you, religious belief has at least two characteristics: (1) it is false; and (2) evolution selected for it. EM [looking a little pale now, because Read More ›

The genetic code was discovered about fifty years ago and it has been a challenge for evolution ever since. As we sawlast time it provides an example of evolution’s metaphysical reasoning. As Wikipedia puts it, “the genetic code used by all known forms of life is nearly universal with few minor variations. This suggests that a single evolutionary history underlies the origin of the genetic code.” That, of course, is false—at least from a scientific perspective. In science we may say hypothesis H predicts observation O, but not the reverse. O does not imply H. It doesn’t even suggest H. It merely doesn’t falsify H. To say anything more requires additional premises and, in this case, that is where the metaphysics comes into Read More ›

In the planetary science journal, Icarus, two scientists argue that the genetic code bears the hallmarks of an intelligent cause. Reports the abstract, It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms Read More ›

Tomás de Torquemada (1420 – 1498) was the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.  Steven Pinker has appointed himself as the Grand Inquisitor of the Church of Saint Charles the Bearded. As reported in these pages (see here and here), atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False has caused quite a stir.  The New Republic reports that Pinker has taken to cyberspace to stir up the Darwinist mob against Nagel.  Every whiff of heresy against the true faith must be ruthlessly stamped out.  Torquemada had his Auto-da-fé.  Pinker has his Twitter account. Irony alert.  We can be certain that Pinker is horrified by and wholly condemns Torquemada’s Read More ›

The basic idea of irreducible complexity developed by Michael Behe is simple and elegant.  Dr. Behe posits that a biological system such as the iconic bacterial flagellum (UD’s mascot – see the picture at the top of our homepage) is irreducibly complex if each part of the system is indispensable to function.  In other words, if one removes any part of an irreducibly complex system, one winds up not with degraded function but with no function at all. This idea is important to the debate over Neo-Darwinian Evolution (NDE), because NDE is grounded absolutely in the notion that every complex biological system evolved from a simpler precursor in a stepwise fashion in which each step provided a net fitness gain. Read More ›

Michael Denton (author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny) has just published a paper in the journal Bio-Complexity, entitled, The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis. Reports the abstract, Here I review the claim that the order of nature is uniquely suitable for life as it exists on earth (Terran life), and specifically for liv- ing beings similar to modern humans. I reassess Henderson’s claim from The Fitness of the Environment that the ensemble of core biochemicals that make up Terran life possess a unique synergistic fitness for the assembly of the complex chemical systems char- acteristic of life. I show that Henderson’s analysis is still remarkably consistent with the facts one century after it was Read More ›

One of the most common metaphysical premises in evolutionary theory is the claim that similarity implies common descent. If two species share similar genes then they must share a common ancestor, from which those genes originated. Evolutionists don’t think twice about this metaphysical claim. Among friends it is taken for granted and any challenges from creationists don’t matter to begin with. Why is this claim metaphysical? Because it doesn’t come from science. There is no scientific experiment or observation that tells us that biological similarity implies common descent. And yet, in a sure sign of metaphysics at work, evolutionists are certain of this premise. Similarity must arise as a consequence of common descent. This conclusion can be trumped only by Read More ›