The University of Chicago has released some videos of the lectures given on Darwin Day 2009:  Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago)–Speciation: Problems and Prospects Paul Sereno (University of Chicago)–Dinosaurs: Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Darwin to the Present David Jablonski (University of Chicago)–Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology: The Revitalized Partnership Neil Shubin (University of Chicago)–Great Transformations in Life: Insights from Genes & Fossils Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago)–Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design

The editor of the Indian Journal AntiMatters is a German physicist, Ulrich Mohrhoff, a long-time resident of India who has published numerous scientific papers on quantum mechanics. Since he had published an article based on chapter 5 of my new Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning… in AntiMatters (and also my “Epilogue”), we asked him if he would write an endorsement for the new book. He declined, saying while he appreciated my critiques of Darwinism, “it is preposterous to assert that ID is the alternative to materialism.” (I believe this was specifically referring to the introduction to my chapter 6, where I claim that the strongest argument for ID is to clearly state the alternative view, [materialism].) I quoted Read More ›

Biologos has a review of William Dembski’s new book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by Stephen Ashley Blake, with an introduction by Darrel Falk.

From Falk’s introduction:

My theological background is Wesleyan. Theological scholars in the Wesleyan tradition are rarely troubled by death before the Fall. It’s a non-issue for most Wesleyans, but it is an issue for many evangelicals. In fact, this one concept may be the most significant barrier blocking many evangelicals from accepting an old earth and coming to grips with the reality of evolution. Dembski, in this book, leaves the realm of math and biology. This time he dons his theological hat and lays out a view that ought to generate much conversation among those troubled by death before the Fall.

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In his evolution apologetic, Science on Trial, Douglas Futuyma argued that the idea that the species were created is obviously false because they not well designed. Evolution, concluded Futuyma, must be true. For instance, Futuyma pointed out that photosynthesis is immensely useful, yet no higher animals have this mechanism. But new research is finding just that. The green sea slug, it seems, is part animal and part plant. As one report explained:  Read more

The burden of proof rests with BW proponents, not ID proponents. For those with inquisitive minds, I suggest checking out David Berlinski’s comments here, starting at 41 minutes. As everyone with any sense knows, David Berlinski — a mindless, born-again, Christian religious fanatic — is masquerading as a secular Jewish mathematician while attempting to impose a theocracy and destroy the entire foundation of modern science. I have, on several occasions at UD, proposed that simple mathematical analysis of the available probabilistic resources — even making unrealistically optimistic probabilistic assumptions at every turn — renders totally absurd the claim that the mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection can account for what we find in living systems beyond the utterly Read More ›

In 1734 Daniel Bernoulli used cutting edge statistical methods of his day to prove that our solar system must have evolved as a result of a single cause. He who would deny this, concluded the scientist-mathematician, “must reject all the truths, which we know by induction.” Bernoulli’s high confidence was, of course, unwarranted as later years would reveal. But today, almost three centuries later, little has changed.  Read more

In Part 1 we argued that Origin-of-life (OOL) was indistinguishable from creationism, but distinguishable from panspermia. In Part 2, we argued that panspermia had not, in fact, solved the problem of OOL by positing infinite space or eternal time. However, we pointed out that panspermia at least recognized that there was a coupling between space-time and OOL, a coupling we identify with the Fourier Transform. In contrast, most OOL theories suppose life began at two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space (microscopic coacervate, etc.) and a line of serially encoded information (DNA, enzyme, etc.) Our goal for this post, is to elucidate what this FT does to the traditional OOL theory, how this transform Read More ›

In “Triumph of Maya,” New English Review (May 10), Mark Antony Signorelli addresses the poverty of current cultural Darwinism, critiquing it from a Hindu perspective:

When I speak here of Darwinism, I am not referring to the scientific theory of evolution as it is currently expounded, which is a matter for scientists to debate; I am referring to the apotheosis of that scientific theory into an all-explanatory, totalizing doctrine, with all sort of implications of a necessarily philosophical purport. This is the true Darwinism to which I refer,[iv] and which has spread like a pestilence through the corridors of Western academia. Of course, in this respect, Darwinism merely displays that positivism, or scientism, which is one of the grand and stupid prejudices of the modern mind, and arguably lies at the root of all the others. The belief that because science has explained some things well, it can explain all things well, and that therefore the only legitimate form of inquiry partakes of scientific methodology, pervades our era, though nobody now so much as pretends to offer a rational defense of such assumptions. On the occasion that such a defense was attempted, it was a crashing failure. The logical positivists, those masters of sterility, gathered amidst the pallor of early twentieth century decadence for the express purpose of restraining men’s thoughts, for all time, to the wholly material and observable. … Clutching this blatantly self-refuting doctrine in their little withered fists, they warned men that henceforth there would be no more metaphysics. These were men who believed that prakriti [material] was all, and who wished to cajole their fellow man into the like conviction, yet their project ended in such a perfect and irremediable failure that their efforts remain as a kind of startling monument to the absurdity of philosophical presumption. And still, the ranks of the academic materialists are filled with haughty men convinced that the general position of the logical positivists, so nakedly erroneous, is a self-evident truth. We still routinely read the claim, made or insinuated by authors whom we are supposed to take seriously, that metaphysics is a passé and useless discipline, as though a complete and systematic explanation of the universe were possible without a metaphysics, any more than a satisfactory account of wages were possible without an economics, or an explanation of tragedy without a poetics. The Darwinians unreflective belief that scientific explanations alone are valid, then, is hardly unique to themselves, but one which they clearly caught from the linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists with whom they rub shoulders in the dining halls and faculty meetings of our desolate universities.

Funny thing, I just got done proofreading an academic article that exactly fits Signorelli’s description.

For one thing, the authors have an itch to argue away consciousness, a sure sign of trouble. Read More ›

I have just been re-reading R. G. Collingwoods “Essay on Metaphysics”, and am now more that ever convinced that Collingwood’s perspective is incredibly important to the ID debate. Collingwood was a mid-20th Century British Philosopher who was WaynFlete Professor of Metaphysical Sciences at Oxford University, and who worked himself to death. He published many works – all of them in style that is incredibly easy to read, but very challenging to the reader. Unlike many philosophers he was very interested in the natural sciences, and documented the course of Western science in his “Idea of Nature”. Yet, in his last days he warned that natural science, as now conceived in the West, will ultimately destroy Western Civilization. And this would Read More ›

Bit late with the coffee wagon, I admit. Other issues to deal with. We are told in the queen of the “National Enquirer” science press that Neanderthals are not the only ‘apes’ humans bred with. Every father on this list wants his daughter to date and later marry a Neanderthal, right? Oh, wait, This just in: Most fathers don’t even want their daughters to date, let alone marry, a guy who plays the guitar in the subway for a living, let alone …like, there was a time when one of a father’s jobs was to check out suitors for his daughters’ hands. Girls can be unduly influenced by romantic issues, but good fathers tend to ask boring stuff like “What Read More ›

In my previous post, I suggested that we can learn from panspermia how to avoid the Origin-of-life (OOL) problem–by spreading it out. In the case of materialists from Epicurus to Hoyle, this was accomplished by making time eternal. If you have eternity to do something, they argue, why even the most improbable will necessarily occur. One can also make a spatial version of this argument by saying if the universe is infinite, then somewhere the improbable will necessarily occur. Sounds good, but… Does this argument work? Not the way they intend it to. For one thing, most cosmologists believe the universe to have begun in a Big Bang, which severely restricts the amount of time available for any improbable object. Read More ›

A previous blog drew attention to Glial (or Muller) cells that conduct light from the surface of the eye’s retina to the photoreceptor cells. These cells provide a low-scattering passage for light from the retinal surface to the photoreceptor cells, thus acting as optical fibres. Their function was reported to “mediate the image transfer through the vertebrate retina with minimal distortion and low loss”. New research in this area has increased knowledge of their functionality after constructing a light-guiding model of the retina outside the fovea. As a result, the “retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images”. For more, go here.

John Avise commences his paper with a quotation from Michael Behe affirming that research into the molecular workings of the cell leads unambiguously to the conclusion: “design!” To counter this, Avise presents the human genome as clear evidence for non-sentient design. He thinks that conventional evolutionary mechanisms are perfectly capable of explaining complexity, declaring: “it is not my intent here to repeat the voluminous evidence for how natural selection in conjunction with other nonsentient evolutionary forces can yield complex adaptations”. Instead, he suggests that the decision as to whether the design is intelligent or non-sentient can be made by looking at the imperfections and flaws evident in the cell’s molecular systems. “Both a Creator God and natural selection are powerful Read More ›

Evolutionists are always pointing out that evolution is a lousy process. Our aching backs, useless wisdom teeth, and backward wiring in our retinas are, they say, consequences of evolution’s ineptitude. It is hardly the sort of thing that a designer would want to copy. Would you want to fly on an aircraft if its design was inspired by such a haphazard process? Of course not. And who can argue with the evolutionist’s logic. If life is the result of the random interplay of the laws of thermodynamics, motion, electromagnetism, gravity and so forth, then we would hardly expect anything that works very well, if at all. But if all this is true, then what about nature’s dazzling designs? If evolution Read More ›