ID critics often complain that ID advocates go ON AND ON (and ON) worrying about Weasel-type models of evolution, as illustrations of how undirected variation and selection can rapidly converge to apparently designed outcomes. No one takes such models seriously as biology, the critics say. Weasels are toys with a strictly limited teaching purpose. Over to the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Looks like a weasel in the tall grass: Suppose that we are trying to find a specific unknown word of L letters, each of the letters having been chosen from an alphabet of K letters. We want to find the word by means of a sequence of rounds of guessing letters. Read More ›

Astronomer Martin Gaskell, the latest victim of the gluttonous, one-minded, two-headed dragon known as “Evolution Promotion” and “Religious Persecution,” depending on which head one is referring to on the modern beast, has apparently been Expelled due to his critical remarks on evolution and for being “potentially evangelical.” Indeed, Mr. Gaskell was provoking both heads of this modern monster. How? By talking. You see, the beast hates words in plain language with real meaning that describe the eternal enemy called truth. The short, abrupt words with all the sense of sunlight sting its sensitive ears, which need the dark and gray smooth sounds of ambiguities and soft soap of appeasements.  This monstrosity has been spotted at several universities.  The latest sighting was in Kentucky:

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Gaskell had given lectures to campus religious groups around the country in which he said that while he has no problem reconciling the Bible with the theory of evolution, he believes the theory has major flaws. And he recommended students read theory critics in the intelligent-design movement.

That stance alarmed UK science professors and, the university acknowledges, played a role in the job going to another candidate.

Now a federal judge says Gaskell has a right to a jury trial over his allegation that he lost the job because he is a Christian and “potentially evangelical.”

Read More ›

Fifty years ago molecular biologists began to uncover the inner workings of the cell and one of their profound discoveries was that genetic information, stored in the double helix DNA molecule, was translated according to a code to produce a string of amino acids which, after being hitched to each other like train cars, folded up to produce a protein that did something useful in the cell. Interestingly, a given protein’s amino acid sequence was found to have some degree of flexibility. Hemoglobin proteins, for instance, across different species revealed quite a few changes to the sequence while still functioning as a hemoglobin.  Read more

jurassicmac has more to say in response to my “Gravity Does Not Account for Itself.”  He writes: I never said that gravity accounted for itself. Gravity explains the motion of the planets. In that same way, the laws of the universe that make evolution possible don’t account for themselves; but they do explain the current state of life. By your reasoning, it seems as if we could never ‘explain’ anything if we could always push the question back a step and say ‘Well, you can’t explain your explanation!’ Just so.  In his great “Abolition of Man” C.S. Lewis wrote: But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go Read More ›

Apparently, Jerry Coyne is now attacking me, re Behe’s recent paper. To judge from his blog post’s title, he has me confused with Discovery Institute.* (Behe’s paper is available for free download here.) . Dr. Coyne claims that Behe’s findings apply only to artificial selection in the lab. But, at the feet of the great Richard Dawkins, I learned that artificial selection like human breeding of dogs, has proved Behe both wrong and ridiculous, in Edge of Evolution. That is precisely because dog breeding is equivalent to the process that applies throughout nature: Don’t evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument over irreducible Read More ›

Recently, biochemist Michael Behe published an article in Quarterly Review of Biology, titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” arguing that “the most common adaptive changes seen … are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function.” So, not only must the long, slow process of Darwinian evolution create every exotic form of life in the blink of a geological eye, but it must do so by losing or modifying what a life form already has. This, apparently, got evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s recent attention: Anyway, Behe reviews the last four decades of work on experimental evolution in bacteria and viruses (phage), and finds that nearly all the adaptive mutations in these Read More ›

We continue to examine the work of authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos in their biology textbook, The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008). In their chapter on evolution and natural selection, these accomplished evolutionists begin by (1) misrepresenting the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution and biological variation here, (2) making a non scientific, metaphysical, truth claim that just happens to mandate the truth of evolution here, (3) making the grossly false statement that the fossils themselves are a factual observation that macroevolution has occurred here and here, (4) making a series of misrepresentations by carefully selecting the evidence to provide to the student and protecting it with circular reasoning here, (5) misrepresenting the molecular evidence here, (6) presenting Read More ›

From The Scientist (8th October2010): Science tarot A whimsical deck of cards shuffles the worlds of logic and mythology On a Thursday night in San Francisco, three elaborately costumed women sit in a lively hall giving tarot readings. One wears ornamental snakes in her hair, and another sports a headdress with oversized purple eyeballs. This isn’t your everyday divinatory gathering — they’re at the California Academy of Sciences, surrounded by glass cases of stuffed antelopes and lions. And instead of knights and kings, their cards display images of mitochondria, neurotransmitters, and Darwin. This unusual scene is the launch party of Science Tarot, a collaboration between science communicators, artists, and other creative thinkers who have produced a science-inspired deck of tarot Read More ›

Jerry Coyne is always fun. He has the distinction of being a Darwinist who is perfectly honest about the war between Darwinism and any belief in the uniqueness of humans – many examples here, and such relief from any contact with Christian Darwinists.

Recently, he commented on an article in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, “The truth wears off: is there something wrong with the scientific method?”.

Basically, Lehrer says, an initial demonstration in science tends to weaken or disappear when attempts are made to replicate it:

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily falling. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineties. Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested again and again. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts are losing their truth.Read more here [some more there, but you must pay for the rest].

Coyne writes in “The ‘decline effect’: can we demonstrate anything in science?”

I tend to agree with Lehrer about studies in my own field of evolutionary biology. Almost no findings are replicated, there’s a premium on publishing positive results, and, unlike some other areas, findings in evolutionary biology don’t necessarily build on each other: workers usually don’t have to repeat other people’s work as a basis for their own. (I’m speaking here mostly of experimental work, not things like studies of transitional fossils.) Ditto for ecology. Yet that doesn’t mean that everything is arbitrary. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the reason why male interspecific hybrids in Drosophila are sterile while females aren’t (“Haldane’s rule”) reflects genes whose effects on hybrid sterility are recessive. That’s been demonstrated by several workers. And I’m even more sure that humans are more closely related to chimps than to orangutans. Nevertheless, when a single new finding appears, I often find myself wondering if it would stand up if somebody repeated the study, or did it in another species.

Good thing to wonder about. Time more people wondered about that. Breath of fresh air. Read More ›

or

Something I wrote recently seems to have sparked quite the little discussion. (Dang! Everybody talks to Barry, nobody talks to me … 🙂 )

Briefly, I noted that a friend’s post had been removed from a Christian Darwinist site because the moderator felt that he had intimated that Theodosius Dobzhansky was not a Christian. (He was not a Christian by any reasonable standard.)

How can one tell if a person is a Christian, many wanted to know. Isn’t that just making a judgement (judge not, lest ye be …)?

Barry Arrington made the excellent point that asking the person to affirm the Creed may be setting the bar a little high.

Fair enough: When I have used the Creed that way, I aimed to sort out situations where the person darn well knows what the Creed says and how it may differ from his private convictions. And I had good reasons for asking; otherwise, I wouldn’t bother. I have neither time nor inclination for hunting down heresies. (And none of this is written with prejudice to any other religion. It’s just that salesdarwinists currently target confused Christians more than other confused folk. So, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others, please pardon us Christians as we set the record straight.)

We must say something when someone like Dobzhansky is fronted as a “Christian” to advance the Darwinist cause. I don’t object in principle to other rational criteria for assessing whether someone is a Christian, ones such as Barry offered. The main thing to see here is that a person cannot in good faith believe two doctrines that oppose each other at the most basic level.

Darwinism opposes Christianity in a much more serious way than is generally recognized: The Darwinist must – and usually does – believe that Christianity accidentally evolved amid the noise of neurons and it spread via natural selection.

Thus it was that man created God.

Now, if the Darwinist also believes that Read More ›

Here’s da proof. (Note: Frosty the Snowman on the Northwest Mantel in the East Room. White House photo by Susan Sterner.)

A friend drew my attention to this video essay: “The animators of life”, New York Times (November 15, 2010): Building on decades of research and mountains of data, scientists and animators are now recreating in vivid and sometimes jaw-dropping detail the complex inner machinery of living cells. Essentially, the Darwinists’ problem isn’t with us. It is twofold: an ever-intensifying blizzard of disconfirming evidence from nature, plus the bad fortune to be working at a time when the Internet brings that information to people who are not inoculated against it. Essentially, time and chance do not create high levels of information through ruthless competition. Darwinism is a form of magic, and has the same success rate as the others. Here’s a Read More ›

Mike Behe, widely hated author of Edge of Evolution has been on the road recently, in Britain. Behe’s most recent heresy has been to detail what Darwinism can and can’t do, as shown in experiments and evidence. For some reason, that man has a problem with rehabilitating magic and calling it Darwinian evolution – but that is just what heretics are like. Apparently, he got quite a bit of response, and not only from Darwin’s rice bowls. Here’s a radio program with a British Christian Darwinist, Keith Fox. Go here for the mp3 podcast and here for Itunes. The skinny: It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features Read More ›

In response to my last post jurassicmac writes: “Darwinism has nothing to say about God other than that natural processes seem to be sufficient to account for life. I find it odd that the same amount of vitriol isn’t directed at Laplace for showing that the orbits of planets can be explained without invoking supernatural intervention. Darwin did for biology what Laplace (and Newton) did for astronomy: provide an explanatory framework. Why is Darwin vilified and Laplace not?” It is true that Laplace refined Newton’s calculations and finally showed that the orbits of the planets can be accounted for by a “scientific law,” in this case, the law of gravity. But what is a “scientific law”? It nothing but an Read More ›

I commend to you Denyse O’Leary’s excellent post below concerning whether famous Darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) was a Christian.  O’Leary demonstrates that while there is certainly no doubt about the “Darwinist” part, there is plenty of room to be skeptical about the “Christian” part. 

The problem with claiming that a Spinozan mystic like Dobzhansky was a Christian is that the claim does violence to language.  The word “Christian” classifies.  In other words some people are in the class “Christian” and some people are not.  If this were not so, the classification would cease to classify and become meaningless.  “Christian” is not simply a synonym for “agreeable fellow.”  The word has substantive content and divides people according to their religious beliefs.  

What I have said so far is uncontroversial.  Some people are Christians and some people are not.  Who could disagree with that?  The problem comes when we try to sort people into or out of the class.  Here we are faced with at least two problems:  (1) where is the border of the class; and (2) how do we know which side of the border any particular person is on? Read More ›