Here’s the trailer for the new book, Theistic Evolution, with a foreword by sociologist Steve Fuller, who studies ID professionally. The Problem with Theistic Evolution from Crossway on Vimeo. Here’s the outline of chapters. Amazon is currently offering a 28% discount (November 30). Note: News posting will be light till this evening due to other deadlines. See also: Do claims about “front-loading” design make theistic evolution viable? An engineer offers some thoughts. and Physicist Lee Spetner weighs in on the Adam and Eve controversy Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. Keep your scorecard handy.

From Will Dunham at Reuters, Genetic data from the skeletal remains of seven people who lived centuries ago in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province is offering intriguing new evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, is older than previously believed. Scientists said on Thursday they sequenced the genomes of the seven individuals including a boy who lived as a hunter-gatherer at Ballito Bay roughly 2,000 years ago. In doing so, they were able to estimate that the evolutionary split between Homo sapiens and ancestral human groups occurred 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. Until recently, the prevailing belief was that Homo sapiens arose a bit before 200,000 years ago. The new study and fossil discoveries from Morocco announced in June indicate a much Read More ›

The Antikythera mechanism is a fascinating object (thanks, EA . . . ), one that is often called the “first” [Analogue] Computer. It was recovered from a Roman shipwreck (likely c. 50 – 80 BC) near the island of that name, and the origin of the mechanism has been a challenge ever since a key observation described thusly by Wiki inadvertently speaking against interest: The Antikythera mechanism was discovered in 45 metres (148 ft) of water in the Antikythera shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera. The wreck was found in April 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers, who retrieved numerous large artefacts, including bronze and marble statues, pottery, unique glassware, jewellery, coins, and the mechanism. All Read More ›

Here is the abstract from a Nature Review: Genetics paper:

The recent increase in genomic data is revealing an unexpected perspective of gene loss as a pervasive source of genetic variation that can cause adaptive phenotypic diversity. This novel perspective of gene loss is raising new fundamental questions. How relevant has gene loss been in the divergence of phyla? How do genes change from being essential to dispensable and finally to being lost? Is gene loss mostly neutral, or can it be an effective way of adaptation? These questions are addressed, and insights are discussed from genomic studies of gene loss in populations and their relevance in evolutionary biology and biomedicine.

Many years ago, I predicted that modern genome sequencing would eventually prove one side of the argument to be right. This review article indicates that ID is the correct side of the argument. What they describe is essentially what ID scientist, Michael Behe, has termed the “First Principle of Adaptation.” (Which says that the organism will basicaly ‘break something’ or remove something in order to adapt) This paper ought to be the death-knell of Darwinism, and, of course, “neo-Darwinism,” but, even the authors who report this new “perspective” have not changed their Darwinian perspective. Somehow, they will find a way to tell us that the Darwinian ‘narrative’ always had room in it for this kind of discovery. As Max Planck said, and I paraphrase, “a theory does not prove itself right; it’s just that the scientists who opposed it eventually die.” Read More ›

On Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Introduction The structuralist view, of course, has the advantage of being consistent with the fossil record. That record does not show, as Darwin suggested, a finely graduated organic chain between major Types. Instead, it shows abrupt appearance of various Types followed by stasis. Again, using the pentadactyl limb as an example, Denton has no doubt that the limb evolved from the fins of fish. Yet the fossil record simply does not support the view that the evolution of the limb from the fin occurred gradually over eons of time. The fossil record is instead conspicuous for the absence of transitional forms from fish fin to pentadactyl limb. This means one of Read More ›

This is the third of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. This is a good time in our discussion to note that the title of Denton’s book has resulted in considerable unnecessary confusion, because far from believing that “evolution” as such is a theory in crisis, as we have seen, Denton is a firm believer in evolution defined as descent with modification.  Denton believes that the specific evolutionary theory of Neo-Darwinism is in crisis, and he wanted to title his book “Neo-Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis,” but his publisher prevailed upon him to use the more widely used, but far less accurate, term. In Chapter 3 Denton notes that everyone agrees Read More ›

John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, would surely have been banned by the United Methodist Church leadership from presenting his views on Intelligent Design at the church’s General Conference in May 2016, were he alive today. His crime? Not only was he unapologetically pro-Intelligent Design, but he also denounced the theory of evolution as godless. In a recent post over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Flannery alluded to Wesley’s pro-ID views. In this post, I intend to remove all possible doubt, by supplying chapter and verse from Wesley’s own writings. (For those readers who haven’t been following the controversy over the United Methodist Church leadership’s decision to bar the Discovery Institute from sponsoring an information table at the Read More ›

In Part One of my series on methodological naturalism, I addressed the question: Is methodological naturalism a defining feature of science?. In Part Two, I rebut the oft-heard claim that even as far back as the Middle Ages, natural philosophers espoused a form of methodological naturalism. Proponents of this claim commonly cite passages in the works of medieval natural philosophers, which sound as if they are supporting this principle. I show that in fact, they were supporting two other methodological principles, which when combined, lead to conclusions which could easily be mistaken for methodological naturalism by a careless reader. Because these philosophers followed Aristotle in (i) defining science as the systematic study of natural bodies in motion, and (ii) limiting Read More ›

Highlights: Methodological naturalism is widely regarded as a cardinal rule of scientific methodology. This methodological principle excludes all references to the supernatural from scientific discourse: it says that God-talk has no place in science. In Part One of this series, after carefully distinguishing methodological naturalism from six other principles, I argue that methodological naturalism is properly defined as an injunction: when doing science, we should assume that natural causes are sufficient to account for all observed phenomena, and for precisely this reason, all talk of the supernatural is banished from science. The Intelligent Design movement makes no pronouncements about who the Designer of Nature is, but deliberately leaves open the possibility that the Designer is a supernatural Being (i.e. God). Read More ›

Since this has popped up a lot in the last few weeks, I wanted to repost an old post of mine describing the relationship between ID and Common Descent. I think it is pretty much as relevant now as when I originally posted it almost 6 years ago.
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Paula Kirby is one of the more thoughtful contemporary critics of religion. A few years ago, I was much struck by a remark she made in one of her essays, that even Christians don’t all believe in the same God. This, to my mind, is a much more powerful argument against religious faith than the puerile “One God further” objection which is frequently hurled against believers by the New Atheists, and which has been ably refuted by Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent, and also by the Thomist philosopher (and former atheist), Professor Edward Feser (see here and here). In all fairness, I have to acknowledge that there is some truth to Paula Kirby’s contention: even within a single Christian denomination, Read More ›

Let us follow an example being discussed in UD comment threads in recent days, of comparing two piles of “dirt”. (U/D, I add — on advice, a sample from ES, as a PS.) CASE A: The volcanic dome of Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills Volcano, a few miles south of where I am composing this post . . . CASE B: Another pile of “dirt” . . . Q: Is there an observable, material difference between these two piles that can allow an observer to infer as to causal source, even if s/he has not seen the causal process in action directly? A: Yes, and it is patent. A child will instantly and reliably recognise the difference, as will the most primitive Read More ›

Here’s a news article from Phys.Org on a lamprey study. Actually it’s a study concerning phylogenetics and using gene regulatory mechanisms to figure out the relationships that exist. It turns out that in the lamprey, which is part of the Cambrian explosion, the same kind of hind brain gene regulatory mechanisms are in place as in “jawed” vertebrates, including mammals. From the article: The team at Stowers, collaborating with Marianne Bronner, Ph.D., professor of biology at Caltech, focused on the sea lamprey because the fossil record shows that its ancestors emerged from Cambrian silt approximately 500 million years ago, 100 million years before jawed fish ever swam onto the scene. The question was, could the hindbrain gene regulatory network that Read More ›

Imagine that scientists discovered the best documentary evidence for God’s existence that anyone could possibly hope for: messages in the DNA of each and every human cell, saying “Made by Yahweh.” Imagine that a notorious New Atheist and a well-known Catholic philosopher are both asked by journalists what they make of this evidence. The New Atheist shocks everyone by announcing that he now (provisionally) accepts that there is a God. “Sure, aliens might have made those messages,” he concedes. “But it’s not likely, is it? For the time being, I’m going with the hypothesis that God did it. This looks like pretty good evidence to me.” The Catholic philosopher is asked what he makes of the new discovery. To everyone’s Read More ›

The writer, philosopher and home-maker Lydia McGrew makes some very sensible points about Intelligent Design arguments in a recent post on her blog, titled, Special agent intention as an explanation (May 12, 2014), which cogently rebuts the claim (made by some critics) that ID rejects the notion of God as the necessary Cause of created things. She writes: All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense “go beyond” making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular “going beyond” was “front-loaded” into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn’t be considered a miracle. Read More ›