Over the past few months, I noticed objectors to design theory dismissing or studiously ignoring a simple — much simpler than a clock — macroscopic example of Functionally Specific, Complex Organisation and/or associated Information (FSCO/I) and its empirically observed source, the ABU-Garcia Ambassadeur 6500 C3 fishing reel: Yes, FSCO/I is real, and has a known cause. {Added, Feb 6} It seems a few other clearly paradigmatic cases will help rivet the point, such as the organisation of a petroleum refinery: . . . or the wireframe view of a rifle ‘scope (which itself has many carefully arranged components): . . . or a calculator circuit: . . . or the wireframe for a gear tooth (showing how complex and exactingly Read More ›

An article in Salon caught my eye while looking at other things online: Saturday, Jan 3, 2015 10:00 AM -0400 God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified A young MIT professor is finishing Darwin’s task — and threatening to undo everything the wacky right holds dear Paul Rosenberg The triumphalistic tone and immediate leap to a socio-cultural and/or aggressive materialistic agenda backed up by denigratory caricatures, published in a seemingly respectable magazine, already speak inadvertent volumes. But the lead-in to the piece (leaving off some rhetorical points-scoring off the bogeymen Mr Rosenberg particularly targets and evidently views as insane) is where the other shoe, proverbially, drops: Darwin also didn’t have Read More ›

The latest cluster of dismissive talking points on the design inference pivot on caricatures describing invisible fairy-tale like supernatural entities. These need to be answered for record, and so let me headline a comment post that addresses these in the context of the agit-prop message dominance rhetorical tactics they represent, augmenting a bit using the facilities provided for a WP blog post: _____________ >>we need to understand some agit-prop rhetorical strategies that are at work: 1: Notice how the focus has been pulled away from the central issue put on the table across the ’70′s by Orgel and Wicken, ORGEL, 1973: . . . In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the Read More ›

The United Kingdom has now banned the teaching of “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution” at all schools receiving public funding, including academies and free schools (see also here). In science classes, alternative beliefs about origins may not be presented to pupils “as a scientific theory”; however, discussion of these beliefs is permitted in religious education classes, “as long as it is not presented as a valid alternative to established scientific theory.” The new guidelines (which readers may access here) “explicitly require that pupils are taught about the theory of evolution,” without specifying which theory of Read More ›

In a series of recent posts, RDFish has made several penetrating criticisms of the Intelligent Design project, which can be summarized as follows: (i) the ID project does not currently possess an operational definition of “intelligence” which is genuinely informative and at the same time, suitable for use in scientific research; (ii) the explanatory filter used by the Intelligent Design community assumes that intelligence is something distinct from law and/or chance – in other words, it commits itself in advance to a belief in contra-casual libertarian free will (the view that when intelligent agents make a decision, they are always capable of acting otherwise), a view which is appealing to “common sense,” but which is highly controversial on both scientific Read More ›

Jean Claude Perez is a self-organizational theorist, he is not a creationist. He has also published papers with an occasional visitor to UD, Andras Pellionisz. If the mathematical/musical patterns Perez has found in DNA are improbable relative to laws of physics and chemistry, then he may have found yet another design feature of DNA, and this feature is found by combining coding DNA with non-coding DNA and viewing it holistically. Here is the simplest explanation I found of his work: When cells replicate, they count the total number of letters in the DNA strand of the daughter cell. If the letter counts don’t match certain exact ratios, the cell knows that an error has been made. So it abandons the Read More ›

As has been noted, sometimes people come to UD looking for answers to questions about what they have been taught regarding “Evolution”; typically in the context of indoctrination under the Lewontinian ideological a priori materialism that he outlined thusly in his infamous 1997 NYRB article: [T]he problem is to get [the general public] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations [–> note the implicit bias, polarising rhetoric and refusal to address the real alternative posed by design theory, — which was already topical in those days some months after Behe’s first book on Irreducible complexity. Namely, assessing natural (= chance and/or necessity) vs ART-ificial alternative causes on empirically tested reliable signs] of the world, the demons that exist only in their Read More ›

I’d like to confess two things up-front. First, I know next to nothing about Kabbalah (an ancient Jewish mystical tradition which forms an integral part of the Oral tradition of Judaism). Second, I’m not a big fan of the “day-age” interpretation of Genesis, having been turned off it at the age of twelve, when I learned that birds appeared only 150 million years ago, long after the appearance of land animals (or even mammals, for that matter) – in other words, the reverse of the order in Genesis. But I’d be the first to admit that my own personal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 might well be wrong – in fact, I’m quite sure that it is wrong, in Read More ›

NOTE: This post has been updated with an Appendix – VJT. My post yesterday, Order is not the same thing as complexity: A response to Harry McCall (17 June 2013), seems to have generated a lively discussion, judging from the comments received to date. Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mark Frank has also written a thoughtful response titled, VJ Torley on Order versus Complexity. In today’s post, I’d like to clear up a few misconceptions that are still floating around. 1. In his opening paragraph, Mark Frank writes: To sum it up – a pattern has order if it can be generated from a few simple principles. It has complexity if it can’t. There are some well known problems with Read More ›

From ENV  — even as Dr Eugenie Scott of NCSE retires (having championed the ID is Creationism in a cheap tuxedo smear for years and years in the teeth of all correction . . . ) — we see a development, courtesy a whistle-blowing Law School student: The latest attempt to insert creationism into the classroom is what is known as the Theory of Intelligent Design. The theory is that all of the complex natural phenomena could not have happened randomly; there had to be a design and a designer. Since the concept of the designer does not require a biblical interpretation, its advocates believe that it could possibly pass constitutional muster. Some states have proposed that science standards be Read More ›

Albert Einstein, who was struck by the astonishing organization of the cosmos, said: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” and asked “How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” I have to deduce that Einstein hadn’t an understanding of traditional metaphysics. Otherwise he would neither have spoken about the comprehensibility of the universe as “the most incomprehensible thing” or a “miracle”, nor he would have been surprised that math is so “appropriate to the objects of reality”. In fact metaphysics postulates “universal intelligibility” (nothing is unknowable in principle). The comprehensibility of the world is Read More ›

In the past, Intelligent Design has been accused of being tied to a “watchmaker” model of the cosmos. In today’s post, I’m going to look at four different metaphors for the cosmos, all of which are highly relevant for Intelligent Design, and discuss their strengths and limitations. 1. Why Professor Dembski considers Paley’s watch to be a bad metaphor for the world, and why he thinks the lute is a better one Left: A Renaissance-era lute. Unlike a watch, a lute does not do anything unless a human being is playing it. For this reason, Professor William Dembski, a leading proponent of Intelligent Design, thinks that the lute is a much better metaphor for the world than a watch. Right: Read More ›

Going back to my undergraduate days, I have long been struck by the engineering elegance and intrinsic beauty of that familiar icon of intelligent design, the bacterial flagellar nano-motor. In tribute to this masterpiece of design, I have just published a detailed (31 pages, inclusive of references) literature review in which I describe the processes underlying its self-assembly and operations. My essay also attempts to evaluate the plausibility of such a system having evolved by natural selection. Here’s a short excerpt to whet your appetite. The bacterial flagellum is a reversible, self-assembling, rotary nano-motor associated with the majority of swimming bacteria. There exists a number of different models of this rotary motor (Pallen and Matzke, 2006; Soutourina and Bertin, 2003). Read More ›

As a member of the United Methodist Church, the recent four-part analysis of BioLogos by Thomas Cudworth sparked my interest. I have no special training in theology and certainly no office within the UMC, but common sense and my historical sense of the church prompted me to wonder, is this a legitimate application of Wesleyan theology or is it merely an attempt to gain standing for a Darwinian brand of theistic evolution by invoking the argumentum ad verecundiam? Here’s a view from the pew.