In my last post, A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution, I wrote about Professor James Tour, who is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world – and a Darwin skeptic. Professor Tour is not an Intelligent Design proponent, but he is openly skeptical of macroevolution, which is generally defined as “evolution happening on a large scale, e.g. at or above the level of species, over geologic time, resulting in the formation of new taxonomic groups.” In 2001, Tour, along with over 700 other scientists, signed the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”, which read: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection Read More ›

In the ongoing thread on Dr Tour’s declaration of concern regarding macroevolution, Mr Matzke (late of NCSE) has popped up, declaring at 118 (in reply to Groovamos at 109): Here’s the issue. Picture, in your head, all 5000 mammal species currently living on the planet. Now think of how many individuals are in each species — some are almost extinct, some have populations of billions. Now think about how each of these individuals lives and reproduces and dies over the years. Now add in how all of these individuals compete with each other, each each other, etc. Continue this process for millions of years, with species splitting and going extinct, sometimes randomly, sometimes due to climate change, sometimes due to Read More ›

I am often amused by the Darwinists’ all-too-frequent use of the “no true Scotsman’ logical fallacy. Never heard of that fallacy you say? Let me explain.  Wikipedia defines the fallacy this way: No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule. Anthony Flew advanced the term using this example: Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how Read More ›

Geneticist Gerald R. Crabtree reviews evidence showing genomic mutations are degrading the 2000 to 5000 genes needed for our intellectual and emotional function:

New developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile. . . . Read More ›

When a cyanobacterium was found in the Sargasso Sea with predominantly sulfur, rather than the usual phosphorus, in its membrane, evolutionists naturally concluded that evolution had caused a switch from phospholipids to sulfolipids in that particular organism. And naturally evolutionists described their hypothesiswith the usual Aristotelian teleological language, using words such as “adaptation” and “strategy,” to hide the absurdity:  Read more

Because when evolutionists point the finger, there is always another side to the story. See if you can guess who is Person X and who is Person Y:  Read more

This week’s squabble between evolution professors might seem like great fun, but it is more likely to mislead than to inform. Austin Hughes at the University of South Carolina criticized the University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne for linking evolution and atheism and Coyne, in turn, wondered aloud if Hughes is in cognitive dissonance and is up to snuff as a scientist. There is plenty there to criticize but it is all a sidetrack. Don’t pay too much attention to such infighting because where it counts, Hughes and Coyne agree.  Read more

Max Andrews, a blogger and student of philosophy well known to many of us in the ID community, has launched a graduate/postgraduate peer-reviewed journal, which is scheduled for quarterly release and has the stated purpose “to invite dialogue concerning philosophy, theology, and science.” People of any religious affiliation or metaphysical persuasion — including Christians, theists, agnostics and atheists — are invited to submit articles to the journal.  You can download the first issue of the journal here.

Early this morning, near the Urals in Russia, HT Russia Today. (Has video.) Video, through Youtube: And, NASA has a projection of a close earth asteroid flyby at about 1 – 4 pm US Eastern Seaboard time, here: (I give more details and thoughts here.) END _____________ F/N: SLOOH gives a summary, here: {Embed fails} A day for the history books, ~ 1,000 people hurt (mostly by flying glass from the shock wave, NB in the Blitz in the 1940’s most of the dead in London were from flying glass . . . ) by a meteorite impact; never before in history. Let us trust the two reported as in critical condition do well. The coincidental timing with the near Read More ›

The brilliant Isaac Newton could harmonize Aristotle’s super- and sub-lunar worlds, show that nature’s laws were universal and in the process explain how the solar system worked, but the Cambridge professor could not explain how the solar system arose or how it will end. Most troublesome was his finding that the planets circling about the Sun formed one giant accident waiting to happen. One day the planets were liable to careen about and the only solution seemed to be an occasional divine finger to adjust the errant machine. That sent Newton’s continental nemesis Gottfried Leibniz into his own instability, for the Lutheran co-founder of calculus could not envision God creating a less than optimal world. Certainly not a world so Read More ›

A fierce argument has been raging over at Barry Arrington’s post, A dog is a chien is a perro is a hund, over whether the genetic code is really a semiotic code, or whether “code” is merely a scientific term of convenience in this case. In this post, I hope to clarify the issues and sharpen the discussion between the two sides. Let’s begin with Barry Arrington’s argument: An arrangement of signs is arbitrary when the identical purpose could be accomplished through a different arrangement of signs if the rules of the semiotic code were different… Here’s an example of an arbitrary arrangement of signs: DOG. This is the arrangement of signs English speakers use when they intend to represent Read More ›

In their honest moments evolutionists say all kinds of interesting things. How about this 1998 paper in which the evolutionists admit that “One of the most important omissions in recent evolutionary theory concerns how eukaryotes could emerge and evolve.” Evolution omitted how eukaryotes could emerge and evolve? That would be like physics omitting gravity, politics omitting elections or baseball omitting homeruns. Yet this paper came more than a century after evolutionists began insisting that it is beyond all reasonable doubt that the species, and that would be all the species, arose spontaneously.  Read more