Cornelius G. Hunter, known for his books Darwin’s God and Darwin’s Proof as well as Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, has just put up a new website about Darwian Evolution. Entitled Darwin’s Predictions, this site is “living document” in that Hunter intends to update the information as needed. Read More ›
Here’s a podcast on why consensus is meaningless in a field like science.
But honestly, I don’t know why John West bothers to explain it. It shouldn’t need explaining.
Consensus is meaningless in any field where being right means hitting a target.
You can cure cancer? Who cares whether people who can’t cure cancer disagree with you?
You can put a man on Mars? Who cares about the people who said it couldn’t be done?
Would you rather be part of the 95% consensus that didn’t hit the bull’s eye, or the 5% non-consensus that did?
[ … ]
Yuh, I thought you’d say that ….
Also, just up at the Post-Darwinist Read More ›
To test the real difference that theodicy makes to ID, Timaeus posed a thought experiment (see post 33) involving a team of scientists of various religious persuasions who conclude that the malarial cell is a designed entity. However, the scientists’ ability to infer why a deity would have created such a malignant cell is impeded by their religious differences, which have no natural resolution. Moreover, Timaeus wonders, even if after much discussion these differences were somehow resolved into a common theodicy, to what extent would that theodicy have been based on their scientific work or, for that matter, the theodicy would be capable of justifying that work. The implied conclusion of this thought experiment is that theodicy is not a necessary feature of ID’s conceptual framework but a controversial add-on.
Originally written by uoflcard. I’d rather not distract from the main point of the other thread: HGT. So I created a separate thread for this topic, duplicating this info.
There is ‘Design’ in Nature, Biologist Argues
It is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read. A biologist says that the ID movement garners attention because it is appealing to believe there is design in nature. “To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of ‘design'”, he says. What the article and the biologist don’t explicitly say is basically they completely misuse the word “design”. Listen to his personal definition of design: Read More ›
Here’s the story from today’s London Telegraph, and here is a related, more in-depth piece on the same question from the latest New Scientist. While Darwin argued for a single Tree — probably the most powerful image he introduced into biological perception — he was always cagey about the structure of its root. Life was “originally breathed [‘by the Creator,’ added in the 2nd edition of the Origin] into a few forms or into one” (1859, 490). There’s a world of (inferential / phylogenetic) difference, however, between divinely created first life and naturally arising first life, when the single most important question in the latter scenario concerns the probability of abiogenesis. “A few forms” that independently evolved (say) ribosomal structure, Read More ›
In his inaugural adress, President Obama stated “We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” What I wish to focus on here is the beginning phrase, “We will restore science to its rightful place…” This is a follow-up to my earlier post on NOMA vs COMA.
What is science’s “rightful place” in our civilization and how do we determine it? Since he didn’t elaborate, its difficult to know precisely what President Obama had in mind when he made the comment, but, based on things he said during the campaign, I suspect part of what he had in mind was lifting the ban on stem cell research, among other things. It is not my purpose here to discuss whether or not that should happen, but to instead deal with the larger question mentioned above: what is science’s rightful place in our civilzation and how is that determined? Read More ›
In this instalment, I begin to address both Andrew Sibley’s and Timaeus’ (see post 33) questions concerning my interest in reviving a full-blooded (i.e. early modern) sense of theodicy, especially as part of the ID agenda. I will need another post to complete this task because more assumptions about theodicy in its original robust form need to be put on the table. My apologies if this does not seem blog-friendly but hopefully we’ll able to continue discussing in this medium issues that show the essential unity of concern among theologians, philosophers and scientists. With Sibley and Timaeus, I agree that to defend ID without recourse to philosophy and theology is to fight with one arm tied behind your back. Read More ›
An article entitled “Architectural Analysis and Intraoperative Measurements Demonstrate the Unique Design of the Multifidus Muscle for Lumbar Spine Stability,” in the current issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, nicely refutes Dobzhansky’s pontifical pronouncement that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
The abstract is available online, though the full text article requires a subscription. This errant concept has been discussed previously on UD by DonaldM, but I thought it worth revisiting when I saw this example of the absolute lack of any usefulness of any concept of evolution in understanding at least this type of biological form and function.
The most striking thing about this article from a heuristic standpoint is that understanding the muscle under study depends completely on a design perspective, and owes nothing to any understanding of evolution. This is implicity acknowledged by the authors in the wording of their descriptions and conclusions:
“The architectural design … demonstrates that the multifidus muscle is uniquely designed as a stabilizer to produce large forces.”
Most likely most of you will recall the late Stephen J. Gould’s principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria or NOMA. In sum, Gould espouses the notion that Science and Religion each have their own realms and hence their own respective magisterium and those boundaries need to be respected. NOMA could be stated more tersely as “science is science and religion and religion – one has nothing to do with the other” or something to that effect. In any case, the main idea of NOMA is for Religion and Science to tell each other “get outta my house!”
As a principle, NOMA has its problems, not the least of which is the question of which magisterium dictates the principle itself? If its either Science or Religion, then it is clearly self-refuting. If its something else, Gould doesn’t tell us what that is or why this third magisterium gets to dictate to Science and Religion where the boundaries are and put up the “Stay Out” signs.
In response, a friend of mine has proposed a different principle: COMA which stands for Completely Overlapping Magisteria. (Its tempting to say something like ‘put NOMA in a COMA’…but I’ll refrain. Read More ›
Hey, you’ve heard it all from the fashion mag at the local clip shop, … so, like, what can I add, really? Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys … come to think of it, why does neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock? Is this really science? Probably not, say a team of statisticians, who took a look at some of these studies. Basically, many of the claimed correlations were simply too high to be possible. That was because the “social neuroscience” people were cherry picking the data. Read More ›
The publications page at EvoInfo.org has just been updated. Two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles that Robert Marks and I did are now up online (both should be published later this year).* ——————————————————- “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success” William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II Abstract: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs on average as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Three measures to characterize the information required for successful search are (1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target Read More ›
In his review for The Sunday Times (January 11, 2009) of a new book on the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo of the Science Museum of London, John Carey begins by noting that Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton:
In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize.
pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it’s gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.
A physics professor at Princeton is the latest of hundreds and hundreds of scientists who’ve stepped up to the plate saying anthropogenic CO2 as the cause of global warming is bogus. Professor denies global warming theory “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.” In other news, what I said before is coming to pass. I wrote that when global cooling takes hold we’ll be left with only a fervent wish that more CO2 could warm it back up. Well, a newspaper editor in Flint Michigan has started praying Read More ›
The big mistake in Origin that Darwinists won’t admit is gradualism. Darwin explained that according to his theory we should expect to observe a continuum of living species each with only the slightest of variations between them. He postulated that we don’t observe this because the fittest species take over and the insensibly slight variants die off leaving species that are fully characteristic of their kind which then makes possible taxonomic classification by those characters. It’s in the full title in the latter half “The Preservation of Favored Races”. That left Darwin with explaining the fossil record which is indisputably a record of saltation. Species in the fossil record appear abruptly fully characteristic of their kind, persist unchanged for an Read More ›
Steve – I appreciate your work in thinking these issues through, and want to encourage you in your research into intelligent design. As your post was seemingly addressed to me I thought it best to reply with a new thread. Firstly, my concern is to address the possible pitfalls for the design argument that might occur by extending it too far, although I think it possible that some progress can be made in this direction with care. There are historical examples, and the danger is that we might only repeat the errors of previous times if we are not careful. I too have an interest in theodicy and I have discussed theodicy and ethical issues in my book Restoring the Ethics of Creation (my PhD supervisor wrote The Groaning of Creation). Read More ›