Hats off to VJTorley for vindicating claims I’ve made about neutral theory (non-Darwinian evolution) for almost the last eight years at UD. He found this by PZ Myers: M]aybe we should be honest from the very beginning about the complexity of modern evolutionary theory and how it has grown to be very different from what Darwin knew. First thing you have to know: the revolution is over. Neutral and nearly neutral theory won. Fixation The Neutral Theory’s Achilles Heel Oh you mean PZ you all weren’t honest from the very beginning. 🙂 Just kidding! I would argue a slightly different Achilles heel, not the rate of “fixation” (awful term as it suggests improvement when in fact it could just as Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran thinks macroevolution isn’t terribly hard to understand, if you take the time to do some reading on the subject. He also thinks that Professor James Tour, the world-famous organic chemist who has declared that he doesn’t understand macroevolution, is lazy and opinionated. Professor Moran singled out Professor Tour for attack in a recent post titled, A chemist who doesn’t understand evolution. (Before I continue, I’d like to thank Professor Moran for linking to my article, A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution, in his post.) Here’s a relevant excerpt from Moran’s post: Normally you’d have to be an expert on evolution in order to claim that all other experts are Read More ›

While most people agree that simple laws/rules per se cannot create information, some believe that algorithms are capable to do that. This seems an odd idea, because algorithms, i.e. sets of instructions, after all can be considered complex laws/rules, or set of rules, sort of generalizations of rules. The usual and simplest example some evolutionists offer to prove that algorithms can produce information is a stochastic algorithm that, by randomly choosing characters from the English alphabet, in a number of trials, finally outputs the phrase “methinks it is like a weasel” (or whatever else phrase with meaning). This way it seems to them that information is produced by randomness + laws, or even created from nothing. Let’s admit for the Read More ›

The second law says when a cold object is in contact with a hot object, the two objects will eventually arrive at the same temperature, and once in equilibrium, one object will not become spontaneously colder again without an external agent. This illustrates that undirected natural forces will favor certain configurations of matter and energy and that the configurations cannot be undone without an external agent. Here is another simpler illustration. Start out with tray of fair coins in the all-heads configuration. Shake the tray or do something so as to get the coins flipping. You’ll notice it never reverts back to all heads. In fact for a large set of fair coins, the law of large numbers says the Read More ›

“It is CSI that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium” (Intelligent Design, pag. 159) HT: niwrad For those wanting to understand Maxwell’s demon, here is a great video! [youtube tqgvqeLybik] How does this apply to No Free Lunch? In my essay “simplified illustration of no free lunch“, I describe how a Darwinist could get a free lunch if the Darwinian mechanism could create necessary information out of thin air. Instead of the free energy that Maxwell’s demon could supposedly make, I invited a Darwinist to show he could get free information with his Darwinian demon, and thus a free lunch worth $100 from me. Of course, he failed. 🙂 The problem for Darwinism, like Read More ›

Suppose I constructed a Rube Goldberg machine to do the simple task of turning on a light. Suppose the Rube Goldberg machine were irreducibly complex, being composed of 10,000 components such that if even one component were removed, the Rube Goldberg machine would no longer function. Are the components really essential to turning on a light in the ultimate sense or are the only essential in the sense that the extravagant Rube Goldberg machine would fail without it? The correct answer is that the components are not essential in the ultimate sense since there are simpler mechanisms to turn on lights (aka a “light switch”). The components are “essential” to the turning on of light only in as much as Read More ›

Longtime design objector AF has just issued an inadvertently revealing challenge in the Info by accident thread: AF, 224: >> And in the spirit of Carthago delenda est if anyone has a testable hypothesis of “Intelligent Design”, that would be good, too!>> This is brazen, and utterly revealing. Cato’s “Carthage must fall” was a declaration of implacable ruthless enmity that led to the final destruction of Carthage through a third war in a century, on a flimsy excuse. Here is my response at 225 (images added): KF, 225: >> AF has been at UD from the beginning. Eight years. He therefore full well knows — it having been stated in his presence umpteen times — that, for instance, a clear Read More ›

Evolutionists reluctantly admit most evolution is free of selection and therefore non-Darwinian (neutral evolution). When pressed, they’ll say neutral drift is real, but they don’t like it when the dots are connected in a way that demonstrates neutral evolution refutes Darwinism, that there is a contradiction between Dawkins’ vision and neutral evolution! The way Darwinists deal with this violation of the law of non-contradiction is to pretend no contradiction exists. They’ll obfuscate and fog the issue with myriad technical terms and irrelevancies so that the illusion of non-contradiction is protected from public view. Confusion and the illusion of some higher knowledge are their friends, clarity and education of the public are their enemies. If Dawkins had been faithful to the Read More ›

Darwin’s lack of systematic thinking began to show its ugly head as the discipline of population genetics progressed. Darwinism’s contradictions appear when we consider the paradox of interference selection, the ability to blend favorable traits, and existence of widespread protein polymorphisms. At the molecular level, Kimura, Ohta, Jukes, King, Nei and others mathematically demonstrated most evolution must be neutral. Why is that? And why do man-made Genetic Algorithms defending Darwin avoid the issues raised by the neutralists, and further, why is it that creationists are the building certain computer models based on population genetic literature and not Darwinists?! Instead Darwinists like Dawkins and the Avida-ists build Genetic Algorithms that actually dispense with the core findings of population genetics and neutral Read More ›

Our colleague Elizabeth Liddle has described the process of human design as trial and error, tinkering and iteration. Like Dawkins, she has argued nature (like human designers) is able to construct biological designs via trial and error, tinkering and iteration. However, when nature is properly compared and contrasted with the way humans go about creating designs, it is apparent Dawkins’ claim of a blind watchmaker is false. I refer to Elizabeth’s description because she articulated some aspects of the blind watchmaker hypothesis better than Dawkins, but in so doing actually helped highlight why Dawkins’ blind watchmaker is refuted by the evidence. [this is a follow up post to Selection falsely called a mechanism when it should be called an outcome] Read More ›

For the sake of argument, let us assume, as Michael Denton did, that there is universal common ancestry. The problem, both in terms of comparative anatomy and biochemistry, is that an unprejudiced view of the data suggests we didn’t evolve from fish. When I brought the topic up earlier in Taxonomic nested hierarchies don’t support Darwinism, in the course of my arguments in that thread, it became ever more apparent even at the molecular level, it was hard to justify the claim that we evolved from fish. Linnaeus and other creationists perceived Platonic forms we know by names today such as: Vetebrates, Mammals, Primates, and Humans. These forms defy the story that we evolved from fish. Again, let us suppose Read More ›

Superficially, the phrase “survival of the fittest” seems undeniably true, but in the proximal and ultimate sense it is false. If this claim is false then Darwinism is also false. The notion of “survival of the fittest” is an illusion in the general sense though seemingly true in the Darwinian sense. Critical oversights in Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and in Dennett’s algorithm can be demonstrated. Finally, population genetics can be used to critique Dawkins Weasel, Avida and various other fallacious computer simulations that are used in promoting the falsehoods of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism. To demonstrate that “survival of the fittest is false” it is sufficient but not necessary to demonstrate “death of the fittest is Read More ›

It has been eight years since the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, that took the lives of over 230,000 people. In his December 14, 2012 post, Today We Grieve With Those Who Grieve, Barry Arrington wisely warned against the vain enterprise of trying to “make sense of this senselessness,” and he quoted from the essay, Tsunami and Theodicy by theologian David Bentley Hart, who forthrightly asserts that we have no right to “console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come Read More ›