New Scientist aims to prove it with this animation. You need the illusion of free ill but that’s all it is. Any idea why so many people need you and me to believe that? What follows? Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Christian Darwinism is the ultimate oxymoron. Its thesis is: accidentally on purpose, and intentionally designed with no intention or design. Let’s face it, either the Christian worldview is correct or the Darwinian worldview is correct in this particular debate. The two views are completely, irrevocably, and catastrophically irreconcilable on many levels. The big problem for Christian Darwinists is that rigorous scientific investigation, empirical evidence, basic combinatorial mathematics, and what is now known from cutting-edge information theory, renders the Darwinian mechanism completely impotent to produce anything but the utterly trivial in the history of life. I ask myself, Where does this bizarre Christian Darwinism self-contradictory reasoning come from? I think I have an answer. The Darwinian establishment has been remarkably successful Read More ›

… we hope readers will agree with us that the relevant part of our origins is not the story of how we acquired the specific details of our body plan – ten fingers, two ears, one nose – or how we lack a marsupial pouch to carry our newborns, or why potty-training takes so long. Nothing about these details is critical to what makes us human. Our humanness is embedded more holistically in our less tangible aspects and could certainly be embodied in creatures that looked nothing like us. [ … ] Many may find this thought unsettling and strangely at odds with their understanding of creation, which celebrates that God created us “in his image.”We suggest that this is Read More ›

This paper in RNA argues the case:

Pseudogenes: Pseudo-functional or key regulators in health and disease? Read More ›

Strangely enough, “wimpy” was early 20th century British slang for a hamburger, which somewhere in the 1930’s became American slang for an ineffectual person, to the consternation of the OED. My kids, courtesy of Dollar Tree, have been exposed to pre-WWII Popeye cartoons, in which a character named “Wimpy” has a British accent and an addiction to hamburgers. He also accomplishes a lot while appearing quite ineffectual, getting Popeye to do all the hard work for him. If we view Popeye as a stereotype for the US, many of these pre-WWII cartoons can be reinterpreted as complex political commentary. Commentary that now extends to cosmology and astrophysics. When cosmologists could not explain why galaxies formed out of the the hot Read More ›

UPDATE:
Professor Feser has drawn my attention to a remark he made in a recent post:

The dispute between Thomism on the one hand and Paley (and ID theory) on the other is not over whether God is in some sense the “designer” of the universe and of living things – both sides agree that He is – but rather over what exactly it means to say that He is, and in particular over the metaphysics of life and of creation.

In the interests of truthfulness and accuracy, I shall place this remark at the top of my post. I find it immensely heartening, as it means that the gap between Professors Dembski and Feser is much narrower than I had imagined. I would also like to assure Professor Feser that I have no intention of mis-representing his views, and I apologize for any implication on my part that Feser does not regard God as the designer of living things.

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I have written this post in the hope of achieving a rapprochement of sorts between the Thomistic philosopher Professor Edward Feser and the Intelligent Design movement, which Feser has criticized in his books, The Last Superstition and Aquinas, and also in his blog posts (see here for a round-up of Feser’s online writings on Intelligent Design).

To be specific: Feser has frequently accused the Intelligent Design movement of holding the same mechanistic view of life as the neo-Darwinian evolutionists whose views they criticize – a view which Feser, as an Aristotelian Thomist, rejects as radically mistaken, as it ignores the fact that a living thing possesses certain built-in goals which are wholly contained within it and which benefit it. Now, Intelligent Design proponents have a wide range of views, and I have previously argued, on several occasions, that the Intelligent Design movement is not tied to any mechanistic philosophy. Feser insists, however, that the whole case for ID, which Professor William Dembski makes in his book, The Design Revolution, is based on a faulty analogy between living organisms (such as oak trees) and human artifacts (such as ships). Feser argues that on the contrary, the teleology of an oak tree is fundamentally different from that of a ship (as indeed it is) and that therefore the analogy is a bad one (which it is not). Hence the title of this post. In this essay, I will be arguing that Feser has in fact innocently misread Professor Dembski’s views on teleology. The misreading is a pardonable one, but I would like to propose a more charitable and (I believe) more sensible construal of Dembski’s views on the subject. In particular, the point which Feser thinks Dembski was making about ships and oak trees is quite a different one from the point he was actually making. I shall also argue that a living thing’s being designed is perfectly compatible with it having built-in, goal-directed processes that terminate in and benefit the living thing itself (i.e. immanent final causation, in Aristotelian terminology).

The concession I’m seeking from Professor Feser is an acknowledgment that there is in fact nothing in Dembski’s writings that ties the Intelligent Design movement to the philosophy of mechanism, and that Professor Dembski’s writings, properly understood, are perfectly compatible with an Aristotelian-Thomistic view of what it means for something to be alive.
Read More ›

David Tyler reports that “The earliest pterobranch reveals stasis”: A modern-day pterobranch genus is Rhabdopleura. An informative description is provided here. Comparing the new fossil and Rhabdopleura leads to the exclamation: “You don’t look a day over 500 million years. You and Rhabdopleura could be sisters”. The detail has led to comments such as this from co-author Professor David Siveter: “Amazingly, it has exceptionally preserved soft tissues — including arms and tentacles used for feeding — giving unrivalled insight into the ancient biology of the group.” The significant finding is that the earliest fossil hemichordate zooid looks remarkably similar to Rhabdopleura.”Galeaplumosus abilus demonstrates stasis in pterobranch morphology, mode of coenecium construction, and probable feeding mechanism over 525 million years.” The Read More ›

I was recently engaged in correspondance with someone who told me that the theory of ID isn’t scientific because it doesn’t make scientific predictions. We’ve all heard it, right? Indeed, most of you are probably bored to tears having had to address, and respond to, this argument over and over, seemingly to no avail. As with so many things in this discussion, the constantly re-iterated response seems to repeatedly fall on deaf ears. So, I took a few moments to ‘brain storm’ and jot down those scientific predictions, made by ID, which immediately came to mind. This is what I came up with: Predictions In Astronomy/Cosmology ID predicts that the Universe had a beginning. ID predicts an increase (and not Read More ›

From Britain’s Truth in Science, reviews of how evolution is taught in textbooks from such sources as Oxford and Cambridge. For example, about “Biological Science 1 & 2 – Cambridge University Press”, we learn, This textbook has frequent caveats and disclaimers when explaining evolution, but also has dogmatic assertions, which sometimes makes the text highly confusing.  Not everyone sympathetic to design will agree with all of their criteria, but it is a great resource for what to expect.

… Expelled The late Karl Popper, universally regarded as a referee of what constitutes a valid scientific theory, complained that Darwinian selection is not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory because it can neither make predictions nor be rigorously tested abve the micro-level, where it is a mere truism. Unlike Einstein’s theory of gravity, the idea of evolution by natural selection is in principle not falsifiable. No matter what the complexity of an organism, a Darwinist can always make up an “adaptive” story explaining its origin. And when pressed to explain a severe problem like the usefulness of incipient organs, he can take refuge in the unobservable. This was Darwin’s own tactic in later editions of the Origin , where he Read More ›

This* paper suggests that geoscience education struggles with  quantitative vs. qualitative research methods:

Geoscience education and geocognition researchers are an interesting group. As geoscientists, we work in the world of natural processes, and we speak a language that quantifies and categorizes our observations in an orderly fashion. As education researchers, however, we enter a different world. Here, we often find ourselves confronted with problems and data that are difficult to measure, that resist experimentation, and that are quite often impossible to quantify. “Reality” may become fuzzy, multiplying from our expected single, objective version to something iterative and subjective. In these situations, we realize that our trusted tools of observation, experiment, and objectivity fail us, so we turn to the tools of qualitative inquiry to provide the insight that we seek. But here we hit some interesting, and often frustrating, hurdles.

First of all, it is an unfortunate fact that many of us have little or no formal training in qualitative research methods. Usually working in isolation, we enter an entirely new literature base; we engage with unfamiliar and, at times, uncomfortable ways of thinking and practicing. Each application of a new method or approach is, in a sense, a private re-invention of the wheel. The inevitable outcome of this private labor is that we tend to work in isolation—we are an archipelago, laboriously discussing in our publications the theory behind qualitative convention and justifying standard processes (“…is well established in the social and behavioral sciences…”). Having negotiated this challenging (but eminently rewarding!) process, we then find that our geoscientist peers are often highly skeptical of our methods, results, and interpretations. Sometimes skepticism becomes criticism without critique. The following comments, or variants of them, will be familiar to many geoscience education researchers:

• It’s all subjective!

• That’s not an interpretation! That’s just what you wanted to say! Read More ›

In “Human+: forecasting our future” (New Scientist, 15 April 2011), Cormac Sheridan takes us on a tour of metro retro speculation about the human future: The premise underlying Human+, the exhibition that opens today at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is that the future is knowable – even though everyone knows it’s not. As a species, we seem to be hard-wired to speculate on what’s going to happen next. Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman and his team have tapped into this tendency to put together a fascinating array of objects, creations and schemes, each of which explores some aspect of our engineered future. Gorman’s catalogue essay aptly describes the show as “an Alice-in-Wonderland world of pills, Read More ›

“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153 This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.

In “Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab” (New Scientist, 14 April 2011), Celeste Biever reports that the WIMPs (yes, yes,) wimped out: It’s just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe. After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn’t rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier Read More ›

In Salvo 15 (Winter 2010), Richard W. Stevens offers “What Gandalf Systems Tell Us About Intelligent Design”: I first saw Gandalf in 1974. No, not the wizard of The Lord of the Rings. This Gandalf was the colorful box attached to a PDP 11-40 computer, its lights blinking almost rhythmically amid a tangle of wires in the slightly dusty lab office. It had a label in faux Olde English lettering with that whimsical brand name.What was this device named Gandalf? It was a modem, an electronic machine that translates information from one symbolic form to another. A modem is a device that mod ulates (encodes) and demodulates (decodes). Modems allow computers to communicate with one another over telephone lines, cable Read More ›