(To comment, go here) As we continue to mark up the Wikipedia introductory remarks on ID in its dismissive article, the next focal issue on failure to achieve the vaunted NPOV or carry out responsibilities of truthfulness, warrant and fairness,  is: Intelligent design is viewed as a pseudoscience by the scientific community, because it lacks empirical support, offers no tenable hypotheses, and aims to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes. I will contend  — as can be seen from last time — that: a: on the contrary, the design inference on tested and reliable empirical signs such as FSCO/I is empirically credible and well supported, thus b: it is itself a tenable hypothesis (all laws of Read More ›

My intention in writing this post is to clear Rev. William Paley of two charges that have been leveled against him: first, that the God he argues for is different in certain vital respects from the God of classical theism, and second, that Paley’s design argument leads us to a false God: not a Creator, but a mere cosmic architect, who is a powerful but finite being, differing from us merely in degree. Both of these charges have been hurled against Paley by Associate Professor Edward Feser (who surely needs no introduction here) and by Professor Christopher F. J. Martin, of the University of St. Thomas, Department of Philosophy and Center for Thomistic Studies, in Houston, Texas. These are grave Read More ›

If falsifiability is essential in science then perhaps evolutionary theory belongs in a different box. Repeatedly evolution sustains contradictory evidence without missing a beat and the latest example is the next step in the long story of horizontal transfer of genomic material. Once evolutionary theory held that when the species were compared they would form an evolutionary tree, common descent, pattern. And when the genes of bacteria violated this pattern, it was said they had been horizontally transferred—a complicated mechanism that allows bacteria to trade genetic material with each other rather than merely inheriting it. Suddenly the framework of evolutionary theory was much more fluid as most any genetic pattern could be explained. The horizontal gene transfer explanation was used Read More ›

Carl Woese, world-renowned microbiologist and discoverer of the Archae (the third domain of life), has died at the age of 84, following a battle with Pancreatic cancer. The University of Illinois website reports, Carl R. Woese, who overturned one of the major dogmas of biology with the discovery of Archaea, the third domain of life, passed away following complications from pancreatic cancer at the age of 84. Carl was a professor of Microbiology and a faculty member of the Institute for Genomic Biology. No single individual has had a greater impact on the vitality of life at the IGB. Carl was truly a man of vision, creativity and passion, with a deep love of this university. He enjoyed deep respect from Read More ›

The central nervous system is constantly sending electronic impulses called action potentials which are propagated along nerve cells via the finely-tuned actions of various proteins that are located in the nerve cell’s membrane. First, there is a membrane protein that simultaneously pumps potassium ions into the cell and sodium ions out of the cell. This sets up a chemical gradient across the membrane. There is more potassium inside the cell than outside, and there is more sodium outside than inside. Also, there are more negatively charged ions inside the cell so there is a voltage drop (50-100 millivolt) across the membrane. In addition to the sodium-potassium pump, there are also sodium channels and potassium channels. These membrane proteins allow sodium Read More ›

As we continue to mark up the Wiki article on ID, the next thing to notice is how the anonymous contributors have projected unto ID,  an accusation of trying to redefine science and its methods in service to supernaturalistic creationism: Intelligent design (ID) is a form of creationism promulgated by the Discovery Institute . . . . Scientific acceptance of Intelligent Design would require redefining science to allow supernatural explanations of observed phenomena, an approach its proponents describe as theistic realism or theistic science. It puts forth a number of arguments in support of the existence of a designer, the most prominent of which are irreducible complexity and specified complexity.[5] The scientific community rejects the extension of science to include Read More ›

In my previous post on Rev. William Paley’s argument from design, I showed that the argument was carefully formulated to rebut Hume’s criticisms of design arguments that were current in his day. I also demonstrated that Paley’s argument was not (as is commonly believed) an argument from analogy; that it was not intended to be an inductive, probabilistic argument but a deductive proof; and that it was intended to establish the existence of a Deity Who is no absentee landlord or impersonal Force, but a living, personal Being Who continually maintains Nature in existence and keeps the various systems in the universe running, in addition to having designed them. In this post, I’m going to address another myth about William Read More ›

In any philosophy of reality that is not ultimately self-defeating or internally contradictory, mind – unlabeled as anything else, matter or spiritual – must be primary. What is “matter” and what is “conceptual” and what is “spiritual” can only be organized from mind. Mind controls what is perceived, how it is perceived, and how those percepts are labeled and organized. Mind must be postulated as the unobserved observer, the uncaused cause simply to avoid a self-negating, self-conflicting worldview. It is the necessary postulate of all necessary postulates, because nothing else can come first. To say anything else comes first requires mind to consider and argue that case and then believe it to be true, demonstrating that without mind, you could Read More ›

There are many modern-day skeptics who apparently still subscribe to the myth that the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume soundly refuted Rev. William Paley’s argument from design on philosophical grounds, even before Darwin supposedly refuted it on scientific grounds (see here, here and here for examples). The supposition is absurdly anachronistic: Hume died in 1776, and his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, but Paley’s Natural Theology was not published until 1802, three years before Paley’s death in 1805. Some of the more intelligent skeptics, such as Julian Baggini, are aware of this fact, but still make the risibly absurd claim (see here) that Hume anticipated and refuted Paley’s argument from design. The truth, however, is the Read More ›

Yesterday, we saw how Wikipedia is one of the most influential sites on the Internet, how it vaunts itself on its commitment to NPOV, a neutral point of view: Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view. NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. This policy is nonnegotiable and all editors and articles must follow it. “Neutral point of view” is one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies. The other two are “Verifiability” and “No original research“. These Read More ›

The headline says it all: “Evolution by Splicing.” Evolutionists once believed that the species arose by mutations that altered the nucleotide sequences of protein-coding genes. But these genetic differences between species do not seem to be very significant. Next evolutionists thought perhaps the differing expression levels of the genes did the job. Perhaps it was quantity rather than quality that created the species. But again the expression level differences are not so great. Now evolutionists have a new mechanism, and it is yet another example of evolution’s reliance on complexity, serendipity and misrepresentation.  Read more

News has just put up a post with the Meyer lecture on intelligent design (with a close focus on the pivotal case, origin of life, the root of Darwin’s tree of life analogy).  I responded here, in light of the history of ideas issues raised by the lecture as well as the question of why origin of life  is so pivotal tot he whole question at stake, but in so doing I had occasion to visit the Wikipedia article on Intelligent Design. I saw that it had further mutated and evolved under intelligent direction into an even more strident tone than the last time I bothered to look or comment, and so I think it instructive to contrast two introductions Read More ›

You learned in your high school biology class that genes are copied, or transcribed, and that the transcript was used by the ribosome to synthesize a protein. But how does the cell know which genes to transcribe, which form of the gene to use, and when to transcribe it? These questions are answered by various mechanisms collectively referred to as gene regulation. The DNA region upstream of a gene may have various molecules and proteins attached which influence its expression, that DNA region and the histone proteins about which it is wrapped may have methyl groups or other small groups attached to them serving as signals, once transcribed the resulting mRNA transcript may be spliced into alternate forms, the mRNA transcript Read More ›

You’ve heard of “red in tooth and claw,” natural selection, and the survival of the fittest. As one evolutionist put it, “The death of unfit individuals is what causes a species to adapt and improve.” This is because evolutionary theory is founded on that Malthusian idea of limited resources. Life is a zero-sum game. And so when a chance mutation happens to confer a reproductive advantage to one individual, he and his descendants survive and propagate at the cost of others, who do not. It is evolution’s version of a final accounting, but in this Darwinian spreadsheet there is no forgiveness, just survival. Of the fittest that is, and death of the unfit.  Read more