Fred Hoyle was an atheist, but also a freethinker who embraced intelligent design. I have just been re-reading his 1983 book, The Intelligent Universe, and I think Hoyle’s viewpoint deserves a more honest consideration than it usually receives. Hoyle was a very famous Cambridge (UK) physicist, astronomer, and cosmologist. He supported the idea of an eternal universe and worked out how it might be possible – a theory called The Steady State. He did not like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a notion he famously deprecated in public using the term “Big Bang”. The name stuck. Eventually, so much evidence accumulated for the Big Bang that Hoyle was left almost alone in holding to the idea of Read More ›

Wouldn’t be any surprise around here. I wonder if my next Uncommon Descent contest should be about why “it ain’t so, even though it looks like it.”

Evolution Deceit, an interesting Turkish creationist book, is good at assembling and clearly explaining the arguments against Darwinism that you can be pretty sure the average lay person will not hear from conventional TV nature programs. It does, however, get some Western intellectual history wrong. This example attracted my attention, of course: Quoting British journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. – Deceit, p. 164, The End of Christendom (Grand Read More ›

At African Ota Benga – the missed link, I posted a comment I thought I would enlarge on:

In my experience, in order to avoid acknowledging Darwinism’s contributions to racism, typical Darwinists perform a little two-step: Darwin = good non-racist; Haeckel = bad racist.

So we blame the “bad” German [WWII losers] for what every “good” British/North American Darwinist [WWII winners] really thought.

And for all I know, what every actual living Darwinist really thinks today. Read More ›

At ID_The_Future Casey Luskin interviews Rich Akin from Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity. Dr. Akin shares why he founded this organization for ID-supporting doctors and the misinformation about his organization on Wikipedia. To listen as Dr. Akin explains more about PSSI International, go here.

Given how routinely evolution fails to explain biology, it is remarkable that scientists still believe in the nineteenth century idea. One of the many problems areas is adaptation. Evolution holds that populations adapt to environmental pressures via the natural selection of blind variations. If more fur is needed, and some individuals accidentally are endowed with mutations that confer a thicker coat of fur, then those individuals will have greater survival and reproduction rates. The thicker fur mutation will then become common in the population. This is the evolutionary notion of change. It is not what we find in biology. Under the hood, biology reveals far more complex and intelligent mechanisms for change, collectively referred to as epigenetic inheritance. You can Read More ›

In another thread a fellow who goes by Legendary made some rather derisive comments about a suggestion I once made, concerning making computer programs that purport to model biological evolution more realistic. The suggestion was half serious and half tongue-in-cheek, since it would be impractical.

My argument was as follows: Computer programs that purport to model biological evolution invariably isolate the effects of “mutations” to only those aspects of the “organism” that have a chance of helping the organism approach the desired goal (EQU in the case of Avida, for example). But this ignores an extremely important aspect of modeling living systems.

Random mutations, if they are truly random, will affect, and potentially damage, any aspect of the organism, including its ability to survive and reproduce. The computer program, OS, and hardware represent the features of the simulation that keep the organism alive and allow it to reproduce, but this is artificially isolated from the effects of mutations.
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Access Research Network (ARN) is offering a special on The Phillip Johnson DVD Collection, 10 DVD lectures, interviews and debates produced by ARN over the years at 50% off for the collection: www.arn.org/arnproducts/videos/v070.htm

Here’s an interesting example of the way that any non-materialist draws fire from materialist atheists.

Baylor prof Frank Beckwith had a big tenure fight a while back, possibly connected with his view that it is not unconstitutional to teach that the universe is intelligently designed in an American school setting and also that there is something wrong with killing our kids and then wondering who is going to work to pay our pensions.

And – while Beckwith does not endorse the ID view, and has often attacked it and its proponents – he was recently savaged at considerable length by conspirazoon Barbara Forrest (author of The Trojan Horse).

David DeWolf*, a Catholic and one of the evil Discovery Institute types, who currently star as the villains in a local potboiler, offered me some thoughts on the difficulties that Catholics like Beckwith and he may face.

It took me a while to get to his comments, so I wrote back advising him that there is no shortage of dump bears from hell here either.

But here are his thoughts:

*In an earlier version of this story, John West was misidientified as my correspondent, when David DeWolf was meant. Apologies to both.

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Check out the following review of Enrique Joven’s THE BOOK OF GOD AND PHYSICS, in which Joven specifically targets Seattle’s Discovery Institute: …The Jesuits aren’t the villains in this clash between God and physics. Joven’s target is the real-life Discovery Institute, an American think-tank that promotes the theory of intelligent design… FOR THE FULL REVIEW, CLICK HERE

The word ‘compaction’ is one that in my mind conjures up images of vacations long-passed when I would cram as many clothes as I could into the smallest suitcases I could find. Such a task has become even more irksome in recent years with the hefty restrictions in place that limit the amount of luggage we can now take onto airplanes. But in at least one context- that of DNA biology- compaction refers to something much more exquisite and desirable.

Benjamin Wiker’s   The Darwin Myth  was first available on Amazon.com on June 2; my book on natural selection’s co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace, titled Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution, first appeared on Amazon on February 16. My aim in pointing this out is only to say that had Dr. Wiker been well ahead of me instead of a little behind, I might have saved perhaps one-third of the 114 references in my work. In other words, in order to give Wallace some historical context it was absolutely essential to at least give a general assessment of Charles Darwin, the man who utterly eclipsed the younger naturalist.  How did Darwin develop his theory? What did it contribute? How are we to assess the man (Darwin) in relation to his theory (evolution)? How was Darwin’s theory unique and different from all others?  How do answers to these questions impact the current evolutionary debate today?  I tackled these same questions in my own work but found that they had to be answered from multiple sources (from several contemporary biographies and from primary resources available in Darwin’s published notebooks, his Autobiography [used with extreme caution!], and others). Search after search yielded no one-volume source that handled Darwin with the frank perspicacity that biology’s paterfamilias deserved.  With Wiker’s new book it has finally arrived!

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