This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents.

In the last installment, we talked about how Merlin tried to paint a whole range of semi-directed mutations as “evolutionarily random”, and how this falls short when compared to the motivation behind Darwinism in the first place – to remove any hints of teleology from biological description.

However, Merlin also describes what she would consider as evidence of directed mutation – a bias in mutations that produce exclusively adaptive mutations. In the previous installment I showed why this was an overly stringent requirement. However, even as a requirement, there are experiments showing that at least some directed mutations occur.
Read More ›

George Williams died September 8th, 2010. An evolutionist, he had insightful things to say about biology’s information problem. Commenting on the “separability of information and matter,” he wrote: “You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can’t do that with information and matter. Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise matter doesn’t have bytes. . . . This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains.” He saw that computer programmers transfer “information from one physical medium to another” and then “recover the same information in the original medium.”

Aircraft typically use air pressure measurements to determine their altitude above sea level. They may also use radar to directly measure their altitude above ground. Needless to say each approach is immensely complex. Insects also need to determine their altitude. Many do so by measuring how fast the ground passes beneath them. But new research has found that flies use a different method.  Read more

In this comment I included an essay I wrote in 1994 at the behest of a Christian friend, David Pounds, after my conversion from militant atheism to traditional Christianity. Dave encouraged me to write it, but it only chronicles one aspect of the journey (the most significant one). But there was another extremely significant aspect of this journey, which I cannot overemphasize, and that was reading Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, recommended to me by Dave. I was thoroughly schooled in traditional Darwinian orthodoxy, and never gave a thought to the possibility that there might be problems with it. It took me only a few hours over a couple of days to read the book, and my materialistic Read More ›

As regular readers of this blog know, Stephen Barr is no friend of ID.  But here he gets it right on Hawking’s recent foray into theology.  A sample: Physics scenarios and theories are merely mathematical stories. They may be fictional or describe some reality. And just as the words of a book by themselves can’t tell you whether it’s fact or fiction—let alone have the power to make the world they describe real—so with the equations of a physics scenario. As Hawking once understood, equations may turn out to be an accurate description of some reality, but cannot not confer reality on the things they describe. What Hawking called in his previous book the “usual approach of science” is in Read More ›

In 1996, palaeontologist Mike Benton published a fascinating analysis of tetrapod evolutionary data and concluded: “Competitive replacement has probably played a minor role in the history of tetrapods. In an assessment of the origins of 840 families of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, fewer than 26%, and probably fewer than 13%, were identified as candidate competitive replacements (CCR’s).” The alternative mechanism proposed was adaptation into new habitats. This finding was presented in the paper as bringing a different emphasis to our understanding of speciation than was brought by Darwin: “A classic view in evolution has been that many successful radiations of plant and animal groups in the Past have been mediated by competitive interactions. Newly successful groups are said to Read More ›

Evolution cannot be said to be absolutely true, but just about. Evolution could be false, but only if most everything we thought we knew is cleverly misleading us. Short of a massive cosmic conspiracy, evolution must be true. Either Darwin was right, or this is one of those Bobby Ewing dreams. This is how certain evolutionists are of their idea that all life (and everything else by the way) just happened to come together. But how can evolutionists be so certain when there are so many problems with their idea?  Read more

In the twentieth century evolutionists resisted the idea of a “Big Bang” beginning of the universe. They wanted a universe that had no beginning but the evidence did not cooperate but rather increasingly pointed to the Big Bang model. Now cosmologists, such as Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics Stephen Hawking, say the Big Bang is no longer a problem to understand. It turns out the universe blasted itself into existence spontaneously,” as one science writer put it. Or as a leading physicist explained, a consequence of general relativity is that “universes are free! It costs precisely zero energy (and zero anything else) to make an entire universe. From that perspective, perhaps it’s not surprising that the universe did come Read More ›

Jonathan Jones has found a new role for Richard Dawkins—as a foil against which to prop up Charles Darwin. Dawkins is strident and clever where Darwin was thoughtful and straightforward.  Read more

This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents.

Merlin spends a large part of the paper trying to establish what does and does not constitute a directed mutation. Merlin, I think, fails in her attempt to properly differentiate Darwinian and Lamarckian mutations because she has not taken into account the main purpose of Darwinism as described in Part II of this essay. To recap, the entire point of Darwinism was to frame biology as to extricate itself from final causes. Therefore, any mode of genetic adaptation which fails to do so is non-Darwinian.

Explaining Away Apparent Purposefulness

Merlin, it seems, is somewhat aware of this, as she tries to explain away any apparent purposefulness within mutational mechanisms. She says,
Read More ›

The debate is happening today, Sept. 7th, at the Fixed Point Foundation.

Our next debate features famed atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Dr. David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.  The question being debated: What are the implications of a purely secular society?  It promises to be a formidable clash of titans.  In addition to being highly entertaining and witty, these two men have a serious message they want to communicate.

The Does Religion Poison Everything? Debate begins at 7 p.m., September 7.

The luncheon, reception, and debate all take place at the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel:

Read More ›

A few weeks ago, the NCSE’s youtube channel uploaded a 2002 debate featuring our very own William Dembski and Michael Behe, each of whom presented a short description of their contribution to the science of ID, before being cross-examined by Michigan State University philosopher Robert Pennock, and Brown University biologist, Kenneth Miller. The debate was chaired by the ever-impartial Eugenie Scott, of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Miller brought up the traditional arguments which he has become so renowned for, alleging that Behe’s claims regarding irreducible complexity were false on the basis that 10 proteins homologous to a complement of those present in the flagellar system could be found in the Type-III Secretary System. When Behe attempted to Read More ›

Details here.

Late last year, the eminent Christian philosopher and proponent of intelligent design, William Lane Craig, crossed swords in debate with the avid apologist for Darwinian evolution, Francisco Ayala, of the Biologos Foundation. The debate was chaired by philosopher of physics Bradley Monton of the University of Colorado, an ID sympathizer, though a convinced atheist himself. Monton is the author of the book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. A fascinating ID the Future interview with Professor Monton can be downloaded here. Following Dr. Ayala’s opening statement, Dr. Craig commenced his presentation by carefully setting out the definition of ID as the study of legitimate design inferences. Craig stipulated that, were Ayala to attempt to refute the inference Read More ›