Readers of these pages are familiar with the logical fallacy known as Miller’s Mendacity.  From our glossary: Miller’s Mendacity is a particular type of strawman fallacy frequently employed by Darwinists. It invariably consists of the following two steps: 1. Erect the strawman: The Darwinist falsely declares that intelligent design is based on the following assertion: If something is improbable it must have been designed. 2. Demolish the strawman: The Darwinist then demonstrates an improbable event that was obviously not designed (such as dealing a particular hand of cards from a randomized deck), and declares “ID is demolished because I have just demonstrated an extremely improbable event that was obviously not designed.” Miller’s Mendacity is named for Brown University biochemist Ken Read More ›

Professor Kenneth Miller, the acclaimed author of Finding Darwin’s God, was recently interviewed by Swedish magician and skeptic Samuel Varg for a three-part series on faith, science and magic. Here’s the 33-minute interview, which Varg posted on Youtube: Who is Samuel Varg? Two weeks ago, Matt Young of Panda’s Thumb put up a post about the interview, in which Varg described his background as follows: You want my background? OK. I’m a Swedish guy, and I’m 31 years old. When I was around 17, I became involved in creationism and bought that whole concept of this black-and-white worldview with evolution as a big lie. Around 20 I started to look into the actual debate and wanted to know “the enemy,” Read More ›

Part 1:  Jerad’s DDS (“Darwinist Derangement Syndrome”) Sometimes one just has to stop, gape and stare at the things Darwinists say.   Consider Jerad’s response to Sal’s 500 coin flip post.  He says:  “If I got 500 heads in a row I’d be very surprised and suspicious. I might even get the coin checked. But it could happen.”  Later he says that if asked about 500 heads in a row he would respond:  “I would NOT say it was ‘inconsistent with fair coins.’”  Then this:  “All we are saying is that any particular sequence is equally unlikely and that 500 heads is just one of those particular sequences.”  No Jerad.  You are wrong. Stunningly, glaringly, gobsmackingly wrong, and it beggars belief Read More ›

Could proteins have developed naturally on Earth, without any intelligent guidance? The late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) thought not, and one can immediately grasp why, just by looking at the picture above, which shows the protein hexokinase, with much smaller molecules of ATP and the simplest sugar, glucose, shown in the top right corner for comparison (image courtesy of Tim Vickers and Wikipedia). Briefly, Hoyle argued that since a protein is typically made up of at least 100 or so amino acids, of which there are 20 kinds, the number of possible amino acid sequences of length 100 is astronomically large. Among these, the proportion that are able to fold up and perform a biologically useful task as proteins Read More ›

( To comment, kindly go here) Last time, we showed how Wikipedia’s article on Intelligent Design flagrantly distorts the history of the origins of ID as a modern movement. Today, our focus is on a subtler distortion: From the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents were supported by the Discovery Institute, which, together with its Center for Science and Culture, planned and funded the “intelligent design movement”.[16][n 1] They advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”, and that the school district’s Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a highly critical post entitled, Ken Miller, confused, finds free will in quantum mechanics, in which he attacks Professor Miller’s invocation of quantum physics to rescue free will. In a recent Youtube video, made on March 23 of this year at the New York Academy of Sciences, and featuring theologians John Haught and Nancey Murphy, Professor Miller elaborated his views: At its finest level, matter has an inherent unpredictability, which certainly doesn’t explain free will, but certainly gives the lie to the notion that any inherent mechanical system is ultimately predictable. And I don’t think we are predictable: I think that capacity to make choices is ultimately wired into the circuity of our brain, Read More ›

In reflecting on the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case over which he presided, federal judge John Jones recalls that he “was taken to school.” Ever since his liberal arts days at Dickinson College, Jones has never doubted evolution. But his knowledge of the biological details, what little there was to begin with, was by 2005 quite stale. All that changed in the Kitzmiller case where Jones learned from various expert witnesses. It was, Jones recalled, “the equivalent of a degree in this area.” And Jones is confident his new knowledge served him well. “Folks who disagree with my opinion will tell you I never got it right,” he explains, “but I’m confident that I did.” Did Read More ›

A few weeks ago, the NCSE’s youtube channel uploaded a 2002 debate featuring our very own William Dembski and Michael Behe, each of whom presented a short description of their contribution to the science of ID, before being cross-examined by Michigan State University philosopher Robert Pennock, and Brown University biologist, Kenneth Miller. The debate was chaired by the ever-impartial Eugenie Scott, of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Miller brought up the traditional arguments which he has become so renowned for, alleging that Behe’s claims regarding irreducible complexity were false on the basis that 10 proteins homologous to a complement of those present in the flagellar system could be found in the Type-III Secretary System. When Behe attempted to Read More ›

We have been occasionally graced at UD by visits of DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz who wrote:

the issue of “Junk” DNA itself is much more vital for human kind, since hundreds of millions are dying of “Junk DNA diseases” while the urgency of plunging into active research is overlooked because on ANY ideological grounds.

Those looking at

http://www.junkdna.com/junkdna_diseases.html

will realize that for those to whom SCIENCE of “junk” DNA is still not the “mainstream” are socially guilty because of putting priority on ideology over survival.

Hundreds of millions of patients don’t appreciate delay of medicine by ideology.

DNA Researcher Andras Pellionisz

Darwinists like Falk, Miller, Ayala, and Dawkins have generally argued DNA is mostly “junk”, the by-product of mindless Darwinian processes. The pro-junk, anti-mind Darwinist position is what Dr. Pellonisz has labeled a “socially guilty” position.

Personally, I’m ambivalent to the question of whether these Darwinists are socially guility or not. The point remains, however, that the issue of “junk” DNA is of great medical significance.
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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 ›

“Evolution” is defined so broadly as to prevent refutation. That requires that the whale of “macroevolution” (simple organism to human beings) must be swallowed along with the gnat of “microevolution” – any mutation or change = “evolution”.

Now Kenneth Miller is attempting to transform the Design vs Evolution argument, by claiming nature reveals “evolutionary design” – purely based on “nature” – without an intelligent cause.
Will the public recognize this as an oxymoron?
OR
Will it welcomed as the Trojan horse that undermines Intelligent Design?
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There Is ‘Design’ In Nature, Biologist Argues

“ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2008) — Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller has to hand one victory to the “intelligent design” crowd. They know how to frame an issue. “The idea that there is ‘design’ in nature is very appealing,” Miller said. “People want to believe that life isn’t purposeless and random. That’s why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support.”

“To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of ‘design’ and the sense of purpose and value inherent in a scientific understanding of nature,” he said.
In a Feb. 17, 2008 symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston,* Miller will argue that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. . . “

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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.

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A Simpler Origin for Life

“My own PhD thesis advisor, Robert B. Woodward, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliant syntheses of quinine, cholesterol, chlorophyll and many other substances. It mattered little if kilograms of starting material were required to produce milligrams of product. The point was the demonstration that humans could produce, however inefficiently, substances found in nature. Unfortunately, neither chemists nor laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA.”

–From Scientific American, by Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry and senior research scientist at New York University, author or co-author of over 125 publications, primarily in the area of DNA chemistry.

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