By now you have probably heard about so-called junk DNA. In recent decades the genomes of a growing number of species have been mapped out. Not surprisingly, scientists did not understand how many of these DNA sequences worked. For instance, repetitive sequences are common, but what do they do? As these data accumulated evolutionists increasingly viewed such sequences as useless junk. Then, years later, various functions began to emerge as our knowledge grew. This junk DNA story is the latest version of what seems like a repeating bad dream that goes like this. Scientists discover something new in biology but don’t understand it. Evolutionists, unaware that they are staring at a design whose complexity dwarfs their puny understanding, decide it Read More ›

We have been occasionally graced at UD by visits of DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz who wrote:

the issue of “Junk” DNA itself is much more vital for human kind, since hundreds of millions are dying of “Junk DNA diseases” while the urgency of plunging into active research is overlooked because on ANY ideological grounds.

Those looking at

http://www.junkdna.com/junkdna_diseases.html

will realize that for those to whom SCIENCE of “junk” DNA is still not the “mainstream” are socially guilty because of putting priority on ideology over survival.

Hundreds of millions of patients don’t appreciate delay of medicine by ideology.

DNA Researcher Andras Pellionisz

Darwinists like Falk, Miller, Ayala, and Dawkins have generally argued DNA is mostly “junk”, the by-product of mindless Darwinian processes. The pro-junk, anti-mind Darwinist position is what Dr. Pellonisz has labeled a “socially guilty” position.

Personally, I’m ambivalent to the question of whether these Darwinists are socially guility or not. The point remains, however, that the issue of “junk” DNA is of great medical significance.
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An archaeologist has been studying stone spheres in Costa Rica and has concluded they were designed. According to PhysOrg, he doesn’t know who made the spheres, when they were made, or why they were made. Why is he jumping to a conclusion of intelligent design? He should be considering natural explanations. There are plenty of natural forces that can make a sphere and even simulate hammer marks.  By concluding design, he has brought the scientific investigation of these stones to a standstill. To be a scientist, you can’t take the easy way out and assume design every time you see something you can’t explain. Some designer, too; some of the stones are up to two inches out of round.  Who Read More ›

It is no surprise that there are scientific problems with evolution. Its predictions are continually turning out to be false. It undoubtedly ranks number one in faulty expectations. For instance, one of its primary predictions, common descent, has badly failed. The reconciliation of the molecular and the visible, morphological, features has been a major problem in trying to resolve the evolutionary tree. The molecular and morphological features often indicate “strikingly different” evolutionary trees that cannot be explained as due to different methods being used.  Read more

Controversial American lawyer and commentator descended on Canada, facing predictable demands from current and future tax burdens (= university admin and students who know a “free” breadbasket when they see one) that she be charged with/censored for hate speech. More here.

Latest here: Coulter files human rights complaint in Canada. I hope exposing the shakedown scandal to the world will have a good effect.

Now this: Also, the anti-Coulter disgrace to Canada (like, we can’t think for ourselves, and need these people to do it for us? We don’t need anyone to do our thinking for us, but if we did, why the present and future tax burdens at universities?) Also, Original post. Update here. Just so you know what happens here when you hit the entitlement mob in the breadbasket.

One reason why Coulter got hated was setting straight the issues in the intelligent design controversy, against a host of tax burdens and foundation burdens. (Generally, reader, you are paying for Darwinism through your taxes or foregone taxes because the outfit is supposedly a charity, no matter how much ridiculous nonsense it fronts.)

It is true that Coulter doesn’t mince words about what she thinks. But so? If you don’t think she is worth listening to, don’t listen to her. Go home, have a hot chocolate, and watch the hockey game. Anyway, chill out.

A friend writes to say, advising one of her supporters,

I think – seriously – he should claim as her “identifiable group”… “American.” It would be a fantastic way to get Canadians to face up to their chronic, rapid anti-Americanism in a public forum

I think Five feet of Fury is right, on the evidence. In Canada, to benefit from the “human rights” shakedown, you need to claim to belong to an identifiable group.

Americans are an identifiable group. They even have birth certificates, passports, and driver’s licences to prove it.

Also, there is a shameful history in Canada of using anti-Americanism to bolster national pride in order to support failing social and economic strategies. Read More ›

Scientists with an interest in developing design concepts and principles found in the natural world are not instinctively attracted by exhortations to expel design from Biology. However, developing a coherent academic framework that does justice to the design principles being studied has not attracted the attention it deserves. Consequently, many scholars in this field have absorbed views developed by people with a rather different agenda for design. McIntosh recognises there is a problem here, and sets out to provide an alternative perspective. “Many have taken the view that design is only an illusion in living systems, arguing that such ‘apparent design’ and accompanying complexity can be explained by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. [. . .] However, [. . .] the inference Read More ›

Anyone attempting to swat a fly will become aware of its remarkable aerodynamic capabilities. Its speed of response and ability to change direction abruptly far exceed our own powers as pursuers. The flight of insects has received considerable attention from researchers and some recent work was stimulated by the recognition of a gap in knowledge. The scientists realized that the previously-studied flight control system involving vision cannot be the explanation for how flies maintain stability in the face of unpredictable short disturbances. “Corrective behavior often takes advantage of vision. For fruit flies, however, reaction time to visual stimuli is at least 10 wingbeats, so these insects must employ faster sensory circuits to recover from short time-scale disturbances and instabilities.” [. Read More ›

Barry’s post on emergence has inspired me to re-link to my Feb 2008 Human Events article, which deals with the ultimate example of emergence in Nature (this is one of the essays in my new Discovery Institute Press book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design ): In a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran Read More ›

The basic idea behind evolution is rather simple: in times of difficulty not everyone survives, or at least not everyone reproduces. Those who are faster, bigger, taller, stronger, smarter, or whatever it is that makes for successful reproduction, will do just that. And those who lack the requisite capabilities will not reproduce, or not reproduce as prolifically. One way or another, the result is that, in those difficult times, future generations are more representative of the winners. The traits of the successful reproducers are passed on more often. This means the population undergoes a change—it evolves.  Read more

Evolutionary biologist Allen MacNeill, who appears frequently in the comments sections of our posts, makes the following comment to my previous post: Teleology must exist in any functional relationship, including those in biology. The question is not “is there teleology in biology”; no less an authority on evolutionary biology than the late Ernst Mayr (not to mention Franciso Ayala) emphatically stated “yes”! The real question (and the real focus of the dispute between EBers and IDers) is the answer to the question, “where does the teleology manifest in biology come from”? EBers such as Ernst Mayr assert that it is an emergent property of natural selection, whereas IDers assert that it comes from an “intelligent designer”. It has never been Read More ›

I have been informed about a couple of articles in the UK press recently. Guardian 19th March 2010 – Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong: What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? And from last year in Timesonline – The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin’s Legacy by Fern Elsdon-Baker

New research is confirming the evolutionary conundrum of early complexity. The research shows that a microbial eukaryote, Naegleria gruberi, shares a large number of genes in common with other eukaryotes. And why is this a problem? Evolutionists have resorted to many incredible just-so stories of convergence. From intricate spider web designs to entire vision systems, evolutionists have been forced to say such designs, because they are found repeated in distant species, have evolved more than once. And while the supposed independent evolution of these striking designs is silly, even these evolutionists have not yet said that similar genes evolve independently. Until and unless they resort to such a fantasy they must say that similar genes in different species have arisen Read More ›

March madness is upon us.  In that vein, I ask you to consider the following sentence:  “A basketball is round and orange.”  You read this sentence through a medium, probably a computer screen.  This means I had an idea, and I wrote out on my computer screen a representation of the idea in symbols (Latin letters forming English words arranged together into a sentence using the rules of English grammar and syntax).  I uploaded these symbols onto the uncommondescent.com website.  You downloaded the symbols to your computer and deciphered them.  Now a representation of the idea that was once in my head is in your head.  When you read my sentence you thought about a round orange basketball. Now consider this.  Read More ›

Imagine a Star Trek movie in which two strikingly similar planets are discovered. The planets are in different corners of the universe, yet their coastlines, mountain ranges, inhabitants and cultures are amazingly alike. Or again, imagine a new, yet fully-formed, planet is discovered. The planet was not there a few years earlier, but there it is, complete with inhabitants and civilizations. These two phenomena–convergence and rapid appearance–are common in biology and, needless to say, they contradict evolutionary expectations. These surprises are not often seriously reckoned with. Evolutionists do not engage the implications of these findings, and sometimes they even avoid or deny the findings altogether.  Read more