Sources note that, while Darwin stalwart Jerry Coyne has his hands full critiquing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, his colleague Eric Davidson … dismisses Coyne’s view of macroevolution as a “lethal error” and neo-Darwinism as “erroneously” assuming things, in E. Davidson, “Evolutionary bioscience as regulatory systems biology,” Developmental Biology 2011, in press: Of the first of these approaches (e.g., Hoekstra and Coyne, 2007), I shall have nothing to say, as mechanistic developmental biology has shown that its fundamental concepts are largely irrelevant to the process by which the body plan is formed in ontogeny.  In addition it gives rise to lethal errors in respect to evolutionary process.  

Intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski and and Christian Darwinist Karl Giberson at Patheos. Some of Giberson’s views are featured here and here. Details to come.

Recently, I observed a thread at a Christian apologetics site, CARM, “Francis *******g Beckwith”/”most snaky Christian theologian,” which really did not reflect well on the site’s goals.

jpark320, a thoughtful CARM volunteer, wrote to point out that

First the link to the “trolled’ CARM site is on their forums, not an official article that was posted from the staff.Second there is not enough manpower to keep watch over every single forum people can make. It is the double of sword of allowing people to freely express their thoughts (the side of the sword that hurts…)

So it should be easy to monitor “flame wars” and “trolling” here given the limited number of post and that only official UD people can make those posts.

I replied at 5:

jpark320, thanks for clarification. However, I am not sure that the service CARM is providing in hosting “FB/snaky” needs doing.

Anyone can start a blog at Blogger for free in five minutes and start trashing just about anyone from there, and get all their friends to do it too.

So why facilitate – and in some measure, take responsibility for – what happens anyway with no intervention?

Incidentally, one needn’t be “official UD people” to post here, just Read More ›

Well, I seem to have done it again, inspiring much debate concerning the philosophical and theological implications of materialistic Darwinism versus design and theism. Disclosure: I am a former militant, Dawkins-style atheist, but now one of those dreadful born-again Christians who attends a semi-charismatic church every Sunday, plays keyboards in the praise band with much joy and fulfillment, and is actively engaged in Christian apologetics. ID was a major factor in my conversion, but it was by no means the only one. I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace R&D. My professional specialties include designing guidance, navigation and control software for precision-guided airdrop systems, and finite-element analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems. One my hobbies for many years Read More ›

Some of the biggest names in textbooks. For example, the standards passed two years ago that permit keeping one’s brain in gear while listening to tales of evolution garnered: Biology Pre-Adoption Samples Chemistry Pre-Adoption Samples IPC Pre-Adoption Samples Physics-Pre-Adoption Samples Look ma!: No broomstick.

After a laundry list of stuff in nature that is bad for humans (so?), we are told, “We must not, of course, ascribe the origin of these sinister features of the natural world to God.” (P. 133). Instead, Science has shown with remarkable clarity that nature has built-in creative powers. (P. 134) But if nature exists by the will of God, how exactly does that get God off the hook? (quotations from: Karl W. Giberson and Francis S. Collins, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2011.)

Following up his comments on the stunning half billion years of changelessness (stasis) demonstrated by the pterobranch, David Tyler now addresses the unchanging cricket, one of whose fossils was found from 100 million years ago: He comments on howthe fact that many life forms seem motionless in time is handled in the science literature: It is of interest to note how living fossils are described. Sometimes, they are “some of evolution’s greatest survivors”, and the splay-footed cricket is “obviously doing something right”. The Economist reporter says that the insect illustrates the “first rule of natural selection”: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” LiveScience took a different view, making the point that the animal has been “stuck in time for the Read More ›

Here’s the Web site for Jonathan Wells’ The Myth of Junk DNA . You can read an excerpt here, and articles here Here’s the Uncommon Descent interview with Wells. Here’s the vid.

  Maybe: ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2011) – A sky with two suns is a favourite image for science fiction films, but how would a binary star system affect life  evolving on an orbiting planet? Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St Andrews has studied what plants might be like on an Earth-like  planet with two or three suns and found that they may appear black or grey. [ … ] “If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis. The temperature of a star determines its colour and, hence, the colour of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colours of their star-light, plants Read More ›

And the French react the way they do to British cuisine …

New Zealand journalist Suzan Mazur interviews French scientist Vincent Fleury, who investigates origin of form with experiments involving cellular flow. The topic of P.Z. Myers, dean of American Darwinism and darling of Nature, came up:

Suzan Mazur: PZ Myers, the Howard Stern of sciencebloggers, recently reviewed your paper Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist’s point of view, which was published in The European Physical Journal: Applied Physics. It appears Myers is increasingly doing a pas de deux with the physical approach to evolutionary science, trying to reposition himself now that a paradigm shift is afoot. In essence, so he can maybe say, well I knew it all the time.

[ … ]

Vincent Fleury: There are several issues. First of all, it’s the style of the man. When you read his blog, you read things like I’m a professor and if I had a student, I would have asked him to rewrite the paper in this and that way. Who is this man?

Suzan Mazur: Think Animal House and pimply adolescence. His audience, incidentally, includes some prominent evolutionary scientists — one of whom commented on your paper in the Pharyngula blog.

Vincent Fleury: Myers’ blog is constructed in a certain way. He writes reviews that are not that bad but then he opens it up to his hounds, half of whom are mad. Crazed! They finish the job. Read More ›

      Blogger Wintery Knight, a programmer by day, comments on neo-Darwinism’s view of how information gets encoded: Imagine a materialist CIO who thought that code was written by large numbers of monkeys pounding at keyboards instead of by engineers. He would be firing all the software engineers and replacing them with monkeys in order to generate better code. And he would call this method of generating new code “science”. It’s the scientific way of generating new information, he would say, and using software engineers to generate new code isn’t “science”. It’s what he learned at UC Berkeley and UW Madison! His professors of biology swear that it is true! It seems to me that there are incentives in Read More ›

“…liberals, when you mention Christ, they will bring up’Darwin.” True? False? No fair? On to something? Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury (“A blog. A lawsuit. A way of life. Posting daily since 2000. ‘Kathy Shaidle is one of the great virtuoso polemicists of our day’ – Mark Steyn.”)

We were all taught to look up to E. O. Wilson as the eminent, gentlemanly, Dear Pastor … Darwinist, not the “secular bigot” kind. And some were duly grateful.

So Wilson disowning his own kin selection theory was an almost incredible development. That theory – that caring for others can be explained by a desire to pass on our selfish genes – is the heart and soul of the “evolutionary” psychology he founded.* Which in turn is the heart and soul of pop science coverage of human psychology.

Leon Neyfakh  offers a look at what happened:

What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.

– “Where does good come from?: Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again”  (Boston Globe, April 17, 2011)

The cause of their dismay and anger is spelled out:

The puzzle of altruism is more than just a technical curiosity for evolutionary theorists. It amounts to a high-stakes inquiry into the nature of good. By identifying the mechanisms through which altruism and other advanced social behaviors have evolved in all kinds of living creatures — like ants, wasps, termites, and mole rats — we stand to gain a better understanding of the human race, and the evolutionary processes that helped us develop the capacity for collaboration, loyalty, and even morality. Figure out where altruism comes from, you might say, and you’ve figured out the magic ingredient that makes human civilization the wondrous, complex thing that it is. And perhaps this is the reason that the debate between Wilson and his critics, actually somewhat esoteric in substance, has become so heated.

It’s heated because the commander of the beachhead of materialist atheism into human psychology has abandoned the battle … Read More ›

On the other hand, … modern medicine owes nothing to Darwinism. For one thing, mortality from infectious diseases in the West began declining before 1859, due in large part to public health measures such as the provision of sewage disposal systems and safe water supplies.10 It also included personal hygiene, as the story of Hungarian obstetrician Ignác Semmelweis illustrates.While working in an Austrian hospital in 1847, Semmelweis noticed that the death rate of mothers from puerperal fever was much higher in wards run by medical students than in wards run by midwives. He also noticed that the medical students would go directly from the morgue tothe obstetric ward without washing their hands. By simply requiring the medical students to wash Read More ›

No, not here. Trolls are currently on the Ecosphere Critically Endangered list at UD –  and if you know of an inhabited cave, snitch. But look here: Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry offers this discussion forum: “The most snaky Christian theologian/philosopher I know of today is … ” is never mind who. Someone we’ve discussed here, as it happens. Yes, it’s just as bad when the ID guys are discussed and maybe worse. Hack journo asks (serious question): How do Christian sponsored apologetics sites (assuming this is actually one, and not a front) fall into the hands of “no intelligence required” trolls? Just askin’ is all.