Well, whether it is or not, that’s where it is going, in April, when the Expelled film opens.

DESIGN OF LIFE: You interviewed 150 scientists for your film. I wonder if that’s a record. I gather an effort has been made to discredit the film on the grounds that the anti-ID folk were misrepresented, basically that you tricked them into taking part.

MATHIS: … But they’ve become very used to only one side. Apparently they didn’t understand that we were really going to do just what we said we were going to do.  

Part One: Intelligent design hits Hollywood in April. Will Hollywood hit back?

Part Two: Questions? Real journalists ask no questions!

Part Three: Doubts? Real scientists never have doubts!

Since I’m here anyway, and so are you:

Today at the Mindful Hack

Belief in free will keeps us honest

Fearful universities: Why be afraid of the thinking mind?

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The lesson is this: The myth of invincibility is just that — a myth. Also bear in mind that Darwinism’s record isn’t nearly as good as the New England Patriots’ going into Super Bowl XLII.

I’ve been informed that the peanut gallery (Panda’s Thumb) is accusing me of covering something up for deleting my very brief post about the Simmons/Myers debate. I made the posting a few hours before the debate and included a hotlink so people could listen to it live. I’d intended at the time of writing to remove it after the debate was over as the live link would no longer be working. UD author Doctor David A. Cook had a more in depth article that included the same live link. No coverup. Here’s the link to the archived debate. A link to the archive is also in DA Cook’s orginal post. Simmons vs. Myers Debate

Looking at the big picture over the past seven years (when I first started to take the intelligent design controversy seriously), one item stands out: The behaviour of the promoters of Darwinian evolution.

It is exactly what one might predict of people who think they don’t have a good case.

First, they suppress alternative cases, as I wrote earlier, as follows: Read More ›

Two interesting articles in the Southern Baptist Texan about Ben Stein’s EXPELLED:

Baptist Professors Featured in New Film
Written by Jerry Pierce | Managing Editor
Posted Monday, January 28, 2008

DALLAS­ — Two professors with ties to Baptist higher education are featured in an upcoming big-screen documentary that aims to expose the scientific establishment’s scorn toward academics who question Darwinian evolution.

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is scheduled for theaters in April and stars comedic actor and conservative activist Ben Stein as he travels the world interviewing intelligent design (ID) proponents whose careers have been threatened, as well as prominent neo-Darwinists who hold ID in contempt, including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion.”

A rough cut of the film, screened Jan. 10 in Dallas, featured interviews with William Dembski, a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading ID proponent whose books include “The Design Inference” and “No Free Lunch,” and Robert Marks, who holds the title of distinguished professor of engineering at Baylor University.

Marks is a co-laborer of Dembski’s whose ID research raised the ire of Baylor’s administration last year.

Dembski’s trials at Baylor from 1999-2005 are not documented in the film­among other things, he drew the wrath of the science, philosophy and religion departments early in his tenure there when it was learned that he was heading up an ID think tank on campus­but Dembski appears several times on screen as an ID apologist.

Dembski told the Southern Baptist TEXAN that those who most need to see the movie are “parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God.” Read More ›

Do our beliefs about free will change our behavior? It seems they do. Here researchers primed some subjects to believe that our behavior is wholly determined by environment and genes, and that free will is a myth. (This is a theme of Dawkins who says that punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down) Those subjects acted less ethically than those not primed. Beliefs influence behavior. What would a similar experiment show if the belief challenged was that there is Design behind the universe and life? Do people act the same after reading and believing “The God Delusion”? None of this addresses the actual truth of the belief, just whether believing it changes behavior. Fascinating!

NASA, the NY Times and most intelligent human beings apparently believe that it is possible to communicate across space – i.e., to detect signals that can be distinguished from natural causes and “noise”, which give evidence of other intelligent beings! e.g., Beatles songs vs quasar pulses and lightning pulses. ——————– NASA Says, ‘Hello, Universe. Meet the Beatles.’ By Patrick J. Lyons NY Times February 1, 2008, 4:47 pm . . . NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as Read More ›

  Former President Theodore Roosevelt, a man known for his typically frank-spoken style (a trait no doubt imbued from his Dutch Reformed roots) and who knew bad science as readily as he knew bad theology when he saw it, made bare the malignant social cancers of the modern age.  As the nation goes to select a new chief executive we should all look for the candor and insightfulness of the 26th President as shown below . . . __________ “There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.  No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain Read More ›

Here’s an addendum, dated 2.1.08, to Ian Musgrave’s challenge (go here for the original challenge): Dear Dr. Dembski There has been some confusion about the wording of the original challenge. I’ve re-written the contest rules slightly as some people were confused as to what designer they were supposed to detect. A reminder, to win, you have to: 1) Identify which sequences have been produced by a human designer 2) Describe how you identified the sequence as being designed (eg. I used PKZip to compress the sequences and ordered the output according to the following criteria) 3) Describe what the sequence does (eg. “This is the active site of a triose phosphate isomerise engineered into a riboprotein — this due to Read More ›

I have a challenge for Ian Musgrave. The sequences provided code for 80 amino acids. That’s almost certainly not a whole protein and not enough information to determine design/non-design. Indeed, none of the six sequences begin with a start codon which means we aren’t given enough information to even frame the sequence into codons. Ian states: Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. If this were for real we would know the species in which the Read More ›

I received the following email dated 1.31.08 from Ian Musgrave: Dear Dr. Dembski Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. For example the engineered mouse pox virus that turned lethal (Nature. 2001 May 17;411(6835):232-5 see also Nat Genet. 2001 Nov;29(3):253-6) and limits on the sequencing of the 1918 strain of the flu to stop flu from being weaponised (Fed Regist. 2005 Oct 20;70(202):61047-9,). A method that could reliably detect the action of human intelligent design in Read More ›

Here’s an article from PhysOrg saying something that has been said on this blog for years. The experimenters were working with gold crystals, trying to build different structures. Here’s some of what they write in this summary article: “He likens the process to building a house. Starting with basic materials such as bricks, wood, siding, stone and shingles, a construction team can build many different types of houses out of the same building blocks. In the Northwestern work, the DNA controls where the building blocks (the gold nanoparticles) are positioned in the final crystal structure, arranging the particles in a functional way. The DNA does all the heavy lifting so the researchers don’t have to.”

I was reading an exchange on anthropogenic global warming between Dr. George Somero, the David & Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at the Hopkins Marine Station (pro) and Dr. Roy Spencer, recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and principle research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (con) where the usual points were exchanged. I was struck by Spencer’s closing statement as being particularly applicable to the design vs. chance controversy regarding organic evolution. Spencer closed his response to the question of scientific consensus in anthropogenic global warming thusly: “Scientific ‘consensus’ is only resorted to when uncertainty exists.” Next time someone brings up the appeal to authority fallacy regarding evolution this is a great response to Read More ›

 (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University) From ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA. Rockefeller scientists have nailed down the first complete molecular picture of this huge, 450-protein pore and their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus itself first evolved. The group gathered and analyzed massive amounts of data to come up with a rough draft of the structure of the nuclear pore. The scientists’ results have given them a peek into the early evolution of eukaryotic cells. Compartmentalization was made possible by membranes and coating complexes, which act “like Read More ›

I’ve just received the following notice from PSSI (Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity), of which I am a member. I’m taking the liberty of posting it up here in case anyone else is interested in this debate. Fresh from our What Darwin Didn’t Know events in Spain, Dr. Geoff Simmons, author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links is scheduled to debate evolutionist PZ Myers, who runs the caustic pro-Darwinism blog Pharyngula. The one hour debate will begin at 1 PM PST tomorrow (Thursday) on radio station KKMS, AM 980 in Minneapolis. You can listen to the debate live on the web by logging onto http://kkms.com/LocalHosts/15/ and clicking on the Listen Live button at the top. Read More ›