It appears that Ken Miller is contacting people about how I got the copy of that check for $7000 that Playboy Enterprises made out to Michael Ruse for writing a pro-evolution anti-ID article (go here for an image of the check). He could simply have asked me. Hef is actually a long-time Chicago buddy of mine (he and my Dad were at the UofI in Champaign-Urbana after WWII). Hef showed it to me the last time I was at the Mansion. Read More ›

Uncommon Descent began in the summer of 2005 as my personal blog. Before that, I had a personal website, designinference.com. The latter site began in 2002 and was a place for my longer writings. But by 2005, blogging was the rage, and I jumped in with both feet at Uncommon Descent. The very name was at once a play on Darwin’s idea of common descent, but also a play on descent being a homophone of dissent. In 2004, I had edited an anthology for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute titled Uncommon Dissent, so the name Uncommon Descent tied in with my then current interests and activities. And it clearly called to mind that living organisms have an origin beyond the naturalistic causes of Darwinism, indeed, Read More ›

Here’s a definition of exaptation: a trait, feature, or structure of an organism or taxonomic group that takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution. – Merriam-Webster In other words, a feature that once served one purpose now serves another. How is that not intelligent? The earliest ancestors of turtles likely evolved shells not for protection, but to serve as platforms for burrowing underground. Legs seem neatly adapted for locomotion on land, but leg-like limbs were present in a 375-million-year-old fish known as Tiktaalik, and were likely used for propping the fish up in shallow water. There are exaptations in genes, too. A gene called Distal-less controls coloration on Read More ›

Fr. Michael Chaberek author of Aquinas and Evolution, has built a website, Aquinas/Design to advance a philosophically responsible Catholic view on the question of design in nature: Thomistic evolutionists maintain that Aquinas’s philosophy/theology is incompatible with the modern theory of intelligent design (ID). At the same time they say it can be reconciled with neo-Darwinism. This may seem odd even for a non-Christian. There may be different reasons why Thomistic evolutionists chose to counter ID: Some may be ignorant of it, some may fear “the scientific community” and “the scientific consensus.” Still others may actually believe that arguments for ID somehow threaten the old Thomistic arguments for God’s existence known as the Five Ways. However, Thomistic evolutionists have never worked Read More ›

At PhilEvents: Recent epistemology has seen an explosion of interest in disagreement and other related questions in social epistemology. While much progress has been made on abstract and general epistemological issues relating to disagreement, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how, if at all, these lessons can be applied to disagreement within science in particular. Furthermore, several aspects of the topic go beyond merely applying lessons from analytic epistemology. For example, scientific disagreement is unlike many ordinary cases of disagreement in that there is often little reason to think that the disagreement is due to a simple mistake by one of the parties of the type often appealed to in the epistemology of disagreement literature. Rather, if there is Read More ›

From Daniel Muth at Living Church, reviewing Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: I am fairly certain that there are thoughtful and potentially influential intellectual movements that have been subjected to more shameful and inexcusable misrepresentation and ill treatment than Intelligent Design (ID), but the list is not long (Roman Catholic teaching on artificial birth control comes to mind). To be fair, ID theorists have invited critique in no small part by tending to hold theirs out as a valid area of scientific research while mainly publishing popular books rather than peer-reviewed articles. If their intention was not to be lumped in with creationists, it has not worked. From the disastrous Dover School Board lawsuit to the propaganda screeds of the New Read More ›

From Tom Woodward at Themelios, in a review of Richard Weikart’s Death of Humanity: there is throughout the book a proper sense of what I call “deep-shock” to see what these secular thinkers have actually said in writing. Many of the vignettes and quotes from secular crusaders moved me, stopping me in my mental tracks. These shocks were hammer blows of reality—wake up calls that prompted me to jot my reaction and resolve on the margins of many pages. One shock, from US Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was especially stunning. Holmes, in commenting on a recently published book he had read, said, “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate Read More ›

Recently, Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse spoke on this theme at the Oxford Brookes Philosophy Public Lectures: Christianity and Darwinism have very different understandings of the nature and causes of war. However, beneath the surfaces, there are some surprising similarities, not the least a debt to Saint Augustine’s claims about original sin. This talk uncovers these and other pertinent facts, arguing that we are not dealing with a religion versus science debate but more a religion versus religion debate. Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. More. The lecture follows on his 2016 book, Darwinism as Religion. Ruse has always been honest about that. For example, in 2000, he wrote: “Evolution is promoted by its Read More ›

Darwinian Ken Miller is promoting his new book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will. In a guest column at Scientific American, he claims that the use of the term “Darwinism” is a slur against science: A number of purposes are served by reducing an entire scientific field to an “ism” based on the name of its founder. The first is obvious. Evolution then becomes an ideology, not a field of science. This view is on full display at the lavishly appointed Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where visitors are assured that scientific data can be interpreted in two ways—from a Darwinist perspective, or from a creationist point of view. Because both depend only Read More ›