Berkowitz has an insightful piece on the new new atheists. Here is an excerpt: . . . But one stunning new development under the sun is that promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business. According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism’s newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger’s “God: Read More ›

The tagline for the article from PhysOrg.com that I link to here, was “Nano propellers pump with proper chemistry.” Despite no mention being made of it, my immediate thought was: “Their design is based on what biological systems already do.” Then, perusing the article, after all the talk about what Petr Král is doing in his Univ. of Illinois lab, about how this pump works, etc, etc., we find the following: Král’s laboratory studies how biological systems, like tiny flagella that move bacteria, offer clues for building motors, motile systems and other nanoscale devices in a hybrid environment that combines biological and inorganic chemistry. I find it almost infuriating that there are labs like Petr Kral’s all over the world Read More ›

Over what now, you wonder, could the Pharyngula – usually as placid as a sea of glass – be freaking? Actually over something kind of stale. Years ago, at the Post-Darwinist, I blogged on the fact that one of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s friends (yes, he of Wonderful Life AND The Simpsons) said that Gould would never have signed the Darwin lobby’s Steves list (all the Steves in science that the Darwin lobby can find who agree with them). Pivar had his own take on evolution, which he thinks is much closer to what the original Steve really meant. And now his take is back for another run, too. Go here for the rest. Also, more fun today at the Mindful Hack, Read More ›

Devoid of real arguments, Ken Miller has resorted to unsavory rhetoric and misrepresentations in his attempt to discredit the fine work of biochemist Michael Behe. Behe has finally responded to Miller’s antics at Amazon:

Response to Miller Part I

Response to Miller Part II

Regrettably, that’s Miller’s own special style. He doesn’t just sneer and thump his chest, as some other Darwinists do. He uses less savory tactics, too….
…
Call it the principle of malignant reading. He’s been doing it for years with the arguments of Darwin’s Black Box, and he continues it in this review.

Read More ›

The links to Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab have recently changed. To simplify linking to the lab, click on www.evolutionaryinformatics.org.

Audiophiles, go here for Jason Rennie’s excellent Darwin or Design audiobook, which you can listen to on line or buy. Rennie, of Australia’s ScPhi show has done a marvellous job of assembling a cast of dozens of key contributors to the intelligent design controversy. He offers such point men as P.Z. Myers, Sean Carroll, and Nick Matzke in one corner and Mike Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Mike Gene in the other – and tons of your other faves – including top Canadian science fiction author Rob Sawyer. (Well, if he isn’t yet one of your faves, make it so.) Sal Cordova explains what ID is here. I talk about the media and ID here, predicting the past and postdicting the Read More ›

Malcolm Chisholm tells me that he has worked the bugs out of a new game called the Richard Dawkins Mutation Challenge. I’m not much good with games, so I am hoping others will try it and tell me what they think. It is especially timely in light of this.

As I announced a few weeks ago on this blog, Robert Marks and I have been collaborating on some papers on the mathematical foundations of ID at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (these papers are currently under review with mainstream peer-reviewed journals): ecs.baylor.edu/…/Research/EILab. We have also just finished a paper debunking the statistics of James Cameron et al. (go to www.jesusfamilytomb.org), who have claimed both in a documentary on the Discovery Channel and in a book titled The Jesus Family Tomb that the pattern of names in a tomb found outside Jerusalem matches names in Jesus’ family so closely that it is highly probable that this is in fact the family tomb of the New Testament Jesus. Since “Jesus son of Read More ›

Behe’s Edge of Evolution: A turning point in the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy Before dealing with Edge of Evolution, which I see as a turning point in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, permit me to briefly sketch the cultural landscape in which it has just appeared: … , two factors have protected Darwin as he approaches his 200th birthday – his friends and his enemies. 2. The Edge of Evolution: What exactly does Behe say about Darwinism? In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe was concerned to show that some elegant structures in life are beyond the reach of random mutation and natural selection (= Darwinism). In The Edge of Evolution , he seeks to draw up “reasonable, general Read More ›

No, not lysergic acid diethylamide, but LS-Dyna, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated engineering computer simulation program, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, originally for the development of nuclear weapons. I’m studying LS-Dyna feverishly, since my company is sending me off to LS-Dyna school in Livermore, CA at the end of this month.

I have a lot of experience writing computer simulations of the reasoning process in intellectual games such as checkers and chess, and nearly as much experience developing software for guided-airdrop systems, which involves a lot of simulation work. But LS-Dyna has been a real eye-opener.
Read More ›

Recently, PZ Myers accused me of lying about the views of molecular evolutionist W. Ford Doolittle in a debate on Canadian public television. Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates: All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor. I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life, you’d find that same image. Moreover, if someone asked you to summarize the arguments for the single-Tree topology, you’d say (for instance) that multiple independent originations of the same basic biochemistry — e.g., the 64 trinucleotide genetic code — are too unlikely. Read More ›

There is a Clash of the Titans going on between world renowned evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and biochemist Michael Behe. Behe is making toast out of Coyne in the recent exchanges as documented over at Amazon. Here are 4 relevant links. Enjoy: Response to Critics: Jerry Coyne Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 1 Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 2 Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 3 PS Earlier, Bill pointed out the apparent convergence of features between Jerry Coyne and Herman Munster here. I think I have also discovered yet another convergence, one between Jerry Coyne and toast.

[slight correction and update follows]
Read More ›

In Intelligent Design: Strengths, Weaknesses,
and the Differences John Morris, president of ICR, writes:

The differences between Biblical creationism and the IDM should become clear. As an unashamedly Christian/creationist organization, ICR is concerned with the reputation of our God and desires to point all men back to Him. We are not in this work merely to do good science, although this is of great importance to us. We care that students and society are brainwashed away from a relationship with their Creator/Savior. While all creationists necessarily believe in intelligent design, not all ID proponents believe in God. ID is strictly a non-Christian movement, and while ICR values and supports their work, we cannot join them.

Good grief. Is thermodynamics or statistical mechanics Biblical or non-Biblical? If these disciplines can’t be shown to be Biblical, then is Morris suggesting these ideas can’t be defended or studied or promoted by the ICR? Given that Maxwell (a creationist) and Boltzmann (a Darwinist) were pioneers in the formulation of statistical mechanics and atomic theory, I suppose by John Morris’s standards, these great theories are non-Christian theories, therefore the ICR can’t join in their promotion and study.

I suppose the ICR would have issue with James Clerk Maxwell (likely a YEC himself), whose famous equations have ushered in the modern world. His famous equations require an old universe. Thus, if the ICR had it’s way, a great scientific discovery would be rejected on account that it was “unbiblical”.
Read More ›

Well everyone, actually. David Tyler discusses the recent startling admission that the claim that humans share 99% of our genes with chimpanzees has long been known to be wrong: For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. “Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.” However, this “given” is about to be discarded. Apparently, it is now OK to openly acknowledge that those who are involved in this research have never been comfortable that the 1% Read More ›