Review Of Probability’s Nature And Nature’s Probability – Lite, by Donald Johnson
ISBN: 978-0-9823554-4-2

The biggest news, in my view, is that there is even a Top Ten. I myself cannot keep up with all the people who want me to look at their intelligent design projects. It’s not that I don’t care, but I am only one little old hack, and there are only so many hours in a day.

It’s been difficult to keep journalists in this area; they tend to get scared off by aggressive Darwinists fronting their tax-funded, establishment line. And every weekend “relationships” news editor has endless time for “evolution” nonsense. But word leaks out. As executive director Dennis Wagner comments,

“I would never have predicted that an atheist [Thomas Nagel] would name a book about intelligent design as one of the top books of 2009, while another atheist [Bradley Monton] would write a book defending intelligent design? This is a sign that open minds in the academic and scientific communities are beginning to take the evidence for intelligent design seriously.”

Mind you, these two above mentioned are intelligent atheists. Nagel, for example, wrote the brilliant paper, “What is it like to be a bat?”, exploring the mystery of animal minds. They restore my faith in human nature; I used to think all atheists were the sort of people who fill my In Box with vitriol – I had good reasons for thinking that, but it is not necessarily true as a consequence …

It’s one thing not to believe in God; quite another to actually believe in the selfish gene, the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, or how “evolution” explains why people vote for Sarah Palin or Al Gore.

So – ta-DA!! – here is the winner: Read More ›

The twentieth century unveiled the world of molecular biology, including DNA, the genetic code, proteins, and the molecular basis for modern genetics. Such findings, according to Neo Darwinists, nicely supported evolution. Evolutionary change was fueled by variation arising from genetic mutations. How the genes, and their supporting cast, arose in the first place was a more difficult question. But given their existence the evolutionary narrative was held with great confidence. This straightforward narrative is now understood, however, to be too simplistic. For instance, we now understand that biological variation often arises not from changes in the genes but rather from changes in the expression levels of the genes. Even those celebrated beaks of Darwin’s finches appear to be changing via Read More ›

Ruse asks us to believe that morality is subjective, a product of our genes. We only believe it is objective because our genes determine that is better for us. Let’s be frank, atheism kills morality, and any attempt to get it up and running in a godless system is futile. He writes in this article;

God is dead. Long live morality: Morality is something fashioned by natural selection. That doesn’t diminish its usefulness, or its comfort

‘God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good….Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection….Morality is just a matter of emotions…So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.’

There a number of angles to respond to Ruse. Firstly, what is moral? It isn’t enough to say that evolution can make us moral, we have to ask what is good morality. Read More ›

I once had a discussion with an evolutionist who, not surprisingly, claimed that evolution is fact. “Have you ever seen a sea lion try to move across a beach?” It is obviously not a good design, he argued, and so must have evolved. The sea lion’s “design is not intelligent, but rather is a product of evolution,” he concluded, for “design would attempt to produce something that works well, if it is intelligent design, and this does not work well and so is not intelligent design.”  Read more

I would like to encourage ID supporters that can attend a conference in Boston’s North Shore this summer to attend the following conference being offered by Biologos: BioLogos-Gordon College Conference 2010: “A Dialog on Creation” The BioLogos Foundation will offer summer courses in science-and-religion starting in the summer of 2010. These courses provide short 1–3 week overviews of the key ideas in developing a sophisticated and mature understanding of life’s origins in an explicitly Christian context. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of science-and-religion who will lead discussions of these core concepts. The BioLogos-Gordon workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore questions at the intersection of science & faith. In this inaugural BioLogos workshop, Read More ›

(Note: These are the key books, not science or media news. The Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments are here, the Top Ten Darwin and Design Media News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments on the latter are here. Also, to get the links, you must go here.) My comments follow. 2. Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record (DVD). The final film in Illustra Media’s long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, Darwin’s Dilemma, was released in September 2009 and quickly made headlines when it was barred from public viewing by the California Science Center. The documentary examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian Read More ›

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a polymath of no mean skill. Mathematicians bemoan the fact that he spent his later years doing physics, and physicists wish he had started earlier. One of his contributions was the derivation and proofs for the bell-shaped curve known as a “Gaussian” or “normal” distribution. It is the result of a random process in which small steps are taken in any direction. So universal is the “Gaussian” in all areas of life that it is taken to be prima facie evidence of a random process. Only in recent years have people addressed situations that can deviate from a Gaussian. For example, one of the criteria that produce a Gaussian, is that the probability of a Read More ›

I normally don’t write reviews of slanderous articles, but Pennock’s article piqued my curiosity by claiming that ID-founder, Phillip Johnson, is a Post-Modern Fundamentalist Creationist. Since most Fundamentalists would deny any relation to PoMo, and most Presbyterians would deny being Fundamentalists, I had to read the article, and once I began to read the article, I had to post a response. So here goes. Pennock starts out with the worst name-calling he can think of, calling Johnson “illegitimate” and a “bastard” child of his two worst nemeses: fundamentalism and post-modernism. Then on page 4 he whines that Johnson is name-calling when he says Darwinism is a creation-myth. Somehow I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a cool-headed, Read More ›

Some say that journals should be more open to controversial subjects, while their peers disagree. If these two groups were to start a peer reviewed journal consisting of what ought to comprise the peer review process, it would never get off the ground, due entirely to peer disagreement. In this case it is two people and their respective advisory boards that disagree. The journal Medical Hypotheses has an editor named Bruce G. Charlton, who consults, on occasion, an editorial advisory board as to what should be published in the journal and what shouldn’t. His point of view is that he is a chooser, not a changer, as to what journal entries are to be published. He doesn’t re-write the song after it’s been recorded, he only decided whether it should be played on the air. This isn’t satisfactory to Elsevier, who has asked Charlton to either resign immediately or implement a series of changes, including a traditional peer-review system, according to this article at The Scientist.com.

In addition to instituting a peer-review system, an external advisory board assembled by Elsevier also recommends that articles on controversial subjects, such as any that support racism, not be considered for publication.

The journal’s editor-in-chief Bruce Charlton told The Scientist that such changes are “vehemently opposed” by the editorial advisory board, as well as at least 150 scientists who have published in the journal.

Read More ›

It would not be easy to overestimate the impact of evolution. It is probably the most influential idea in the history of modern science. In addition to science, Darwin’s legacy persists in medicine, education, media, law, public policy and of course religion. All of this highlights the enormous responsibility shouldered by life scientists. Their scientific opinion makes a difference far outside their daily circles. They can shed light or allow ignorance to fester in a wide range of fields. Unfortunately too many misrepresent science, or more often simply look the other way while the science is twisted. The result is increasing levels of ignorance. Consider this message I received:  Read more

The mollusc, known as the scaly-foot gastropod, has been known for about a decade. It was discovered living in the deep sea near the Kairei Indian hydrothermal vent field on the Central Indian Ridge. The natural environment for the animal is harsh. There are extremes of temperatures, high pressures and high acidity levels that can easily damage shells of calcium carbonate. Brachyuran crabs live in the vicinity and these “are known to compress gastropod mollusc shells between their chela” with loads of up to 60N. “To understand how the valiant gastropod holds up to these trials, Christine Ortiz of MIT and her colleagues used nanoscale experiments and computer simulations to dig in to the shell’s structure. Many other species’ shells Read More ›

You have probably heard about the multiverse–the idea that the universe is really a large number of universes. The multiverse helps to explain why our particular universe seems so special. Our universe seems to be a finely tuned machine and the evolution of life would require low probability events. Is our universe special? The multiverse helps to deflect such thinking. If there is a large number of universes, then perhaps each has a different set of natural laws. And perhaps intelligent life can only be supported by a very particular set of laws. So the only life forms that would exist to observe their universe would be those that live in special universes. Presto, we’re not special and fine tuning Read More ›

The heroics of the cell’s DNA repair system are well known, but new research is adding yet another incredible facet to the story. Experimentalists tagged DNA repair proteins with nanocrystals that light up. They then observed how they interact with DNA molecules. As reported:  Read more

Rick Sternberg, PhD PhD is one of the finest and most courageous evolutionary biologists on the planet. He recently has come to the defense of Stephen Meyer by Asking Darrel Falk to Pick a Number

Rick points out a peculiar claim by Darrel Falk which can be falsified:

almost certainly much, if not most, of the DNA plays no role, and in many cases can be harmful

Darrel Falk
Professor of Biology

Sternberg counters with an implicit wager after first providing some insights:

I have long questioned the assumption that most genomic DNA sequences are “nonsensical” or “junk.” And given the data that have emerged over the past seven or so years, a functionalist view of genome has robust empirical support. It is for this reason that I think many of the arguments presented by the Biologos Foundation are “wrong on many counts,” to borrow a phrase from Darrel Falk.

Read More ›