Online here: This point is crucial: If there is not a smooth, gradually rising, easily found evolutionary pathway leading to a biological system within a reasonable time, Darwinian processes won’t work. In this book we’ll examine just how demanding a requirement that is. (pg. 7) No wonder that guy Behe had to be sidelined and disinvited.
This from the Onion to start your day: Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat ‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say FEBRUARY 17, 2011 | ISSUE 47•07 As their colleagues huddled together and whispered behind them, researchers from Australia and Japan explained how one 6-foot-tall goat with a hominid skeletal structure spawned numerous goat-human hybrids over a period of 1.8 million years. In a series of PowerPoint slides, they then showed that our ancestors used their prehensile upper lips to perform basic agricultural tasks and stomped out crude pottery with their cloven feet, theories that team members stopped reading aloud to the assembled audience almost immediately after reaching the words “cloven feet.” “Okay, so I’m reading this Read More ›
In the March edition of Scientific American, Gary Stix will explain The Neuroscience of True GritWhen tragedy strikes, most of us ultimately rebound surprisingly well. Where does such resilience come from? Scientific American New Issue Alert here. Prediction: Reading this will tell us a laudable amount of neuroscience and a little about true grit. The latter is difficult to quantify because it is, if you like, a psychological wave function. What caused the Romanian rebellion against Ceaucescu to spread from street to street, after decades of the iron rod? What caused the Montgomery bus boycott, after decades of passive acceptance of segregation? What causes an abuse victim to finally have “had enough” and start fighting back? Multiple causes, to be Read More ›
(crossfiled to Shut up, you losers, and just pay) About the latest “origin of religion” book, Damon Linker writes, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering W.W. Norton & Company, 252 pp., $26.95 Who will save science from the scientists? I often ponder that question when I peruse the writings of evolutionary psychologists—and did so once again as I read Jesse Bering’s new book, which is at once marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating. [ … ] The first thing to be said about this account is that it is an example of evolutionary psychology at its very worst: shifting abruptly between experimental data about modern civilized human beings and groundless speculation Read More ›
If your boss has been called into a meeting, have a look at this: DARWIN, DESIGN & THOMAS AQUINAS The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: In a typical discussion of Darwinian evolution, Christian philosophy, and intelligent design, one is likely to hear that St. Thomas had no problem with secondary causes operating in nature and that St. Augustine knew that the Bible is “not a science textbook.” Both of these assertions are true, as far as they go. But unfortunately, such platitudes only obscure deeper sources of tension between Darwinism and Thomistic thought. Here I would like to explore three intimately related sources of tension: the problem of essences, the problem of transformism, Read More ›
Here is a pdf of that famous article.
Some years back, ID critic Dave Thomas used to tout the power of genetic algorithms for their ability of solve the Steiner Problem, which basically tries to minimize distance of paths that connect nodes on a two-dimensional surface (last I looked, he’s still making this line of criticism — see here). In fact, none of his criticisms hit the mark — the information problem that he claims to resolve in evolutionary terms merely pushes the design problem deeper, as the peer-reviewed research at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab makes clear (go to the publications page there). Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see Read More ›
“’Thinking caps’ are pseudoscience masquerading as neuroscience” (Guardian, 2011 Feb 16), neuroscientist Chris Chambers and colleagues charge, and they feed a growing academic obsession with sound bites and impact: Anyone who has followed recent media reports that electrical brain stimulation “sparks bright ideas” or “unshackles the genius within” could be forgiven for believing that we stand on the frontier of a brave new world. As James Gallagher of the BBC put it, “Are we entering the era of the thinking cap – a device to supercharge our brains?” The answer, we would suggest, is a categorical no. Such speculations begin and end in the colourful realm of science fiction. But we are also in danger of entering the era of Read More ›
My good friend Frank Turek is organizing a conference for training apologetics instructors this August. The dates have just been nailed down and I’ll be speaking there on, what else, ID. Frank’s best known book, co-authored with Norm Geisler, is I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH FAITH TO BE AN ATHEIST. It’s an insightful and fun book. ID is clearly a factor here in undermining faith in atheism. For conference details, go here.
The recently released Religion Versus Science: Where Both Sides Go Wrong in the Great Evolution Debate, by Buddhist University of Wyoming geology prof Ron Frost offers, In Religion Versus Science Frost posits that the big mistake creationists make is to attack the evolutionary facts rather than the materialistic way that these facts are used to describe evolution. His goal in this remarkable book is to present a view of evolution that will be compatible with both the scientific evidence for evolution and the core teachings of the world’s major religions.After studying and practicing Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Frost became very aware that aspects of his mind occurred from outside his ego. He realized that acceptance of a transcendent aspect Read More ›
In part 1 of this series, I laid out what I see as some key differences between Thomism and ID. In this post I want to focus on why Thomists should nevertheless support ID – even while granting some or all of the most common criticisms Thomists have of ID.
In order to do that, though, I’m going to have to be a little hair-splitting – particularly, I want to explain just what I mean by “support ID”. I think there’s a few ways this “support” can manifest – some easier to achieve than others, and some harder.
… nice kids at Baylor begin to sound like Lady Gaga and look like the broom closet before Tidy Up day: “The video contradicts the idea that science is straightforward,” Shim said. “For a lot of jobs, I think, time in equals output, but in science you have to sit there and struggle. Endless troubleshooting and repetition are just part of the job.” Though stripped of the original music video’s glossy sterility and the mechanized precision of Gaga’s cultish knot of backup dancers, Bad Project remains, in fact, really bad —- but endearingly so. Clad in safety gear with an ill-fitting blonde wig mounted atop her head, Wiese is the video’s centerpiece, her cheerless expression channeling the disillusionment of aggrieved Read More ›
For example, “That’s when the doctor called and didn’t know what to say to us,” Britton said in a telephone interview. “No one had ever seen it before. And then we’d go to the neurologists and they’d say, ‘That’s impossible.’ ‘He has the MRI of a vegetable,’ one of the doctors said to us.” Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain. “There are some very bright, specialized people across the country and in Europe that have put their minds to this dilemma and are continuing to do so, and we haven’t come up with an answer,” Dr. Adre du Plessis, chief of Fetal and Transitional Medicine at Read More ›
Did this whiz past me last month? From Science (Science 28 January 2011): Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the ClassroomMichael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer Just over 5 years ago, the scientific community turned its attention to a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued their Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to overturn a policy explicitly legitimizing intelligent design creationism. The case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, followed a familiar script: Local citizens wanted their religious values validated by the science curriculum; prominent academics testified to the scientific consensus on evolution; and creationists lost decisively. Intelligent design was not science, held the court, but rather an effort to advance a religious view via public schools, a violation of the U.S. Read More ›
In the person of Rabbi Moshe Averick, whose book, Nonsense of the Highest Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, has merited the attention of someone or other at Richard Dawkins’s Foundation’s Web site, who is looking for help in refuting the Reb. Moshe offers, “Turns out Richard Dawkins’ watchmaker has 20/20 vision after all.” In his turn, the Reb also identifies a Dawkins schoolboy howler, in the opinion of colleagues: An “all ya gotta do is … ” origin of life. On the same page, we also learn from Robert Shapiro: SHAPIRO: Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book, but the place where he absolutely blew it was in a section on the origin of life. He took all Read More ›