When Michael Behe visited the UK, back in November, the Humanist Society of Scotland and the British Center for Science Education wrote up a list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Behe” which they subsequently distributed to their ranks of faithful followers. I responded, at the time, fairly thoroughly to the arguments made therein here (to which the BCSE retaliated fairly viciously here).

Since PZ Myers has been invited to visit Glasgow next week (one week from today to be specific), to lecture on the embryological evidence for Darwinism, I took it upon myself to draw up this list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers”. If you happen to be in the area, and are anticipating attending this event next Monday (which will take place in the Crystal Palace, 36 Jamaica Street, from 7pm), feel free to use the following questions as inspiration for the Q&A session which will follow the talk.

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Douglas Axe has posted a response to criticisms of his work from Arthur Hunt and Steve Matheson, regarding his 2004 JMB paper, on the Biologic Institute website. In August of 2004 I received an email inquiry from plant biologist Art Hunt. He had written a draft for a blog piece aimed at reviewing a research article of mine that had just appeared in the Journal of Molecular Biology [1], and he wanted to know whether he had understood my work correctly. He clearly aimed to refute claims that were beginning to surface that my paper supported intelligent design, but he also wanted to make sure he wasn’t misconstruing my work in the process. He didn’t expect me to oblige—“I will understand Read More ›

Doug Axe and Ann Gauger have a new peer-reviewed paper up at BIO-Complexity which provides a quantifiable measure of how many mutations are required for a relatively simple biological innovation – the functional conversion of one enzyme to that of its closest structural neighbor.

The authors argue that their results show that similarity of structure does not guarantee ease of interconversion, and that that goes to the root of all Darwinian trees based on such similarity.

Here’s the abstract: Read More ›

Recently, well-known biologist Lynn Margulis has been in the news, letting Discover Magazine know that Darwinism is vastly overrated as a theory of evolution.

That said, here are a couple of challenges noted for her own theory of endosymbiosis (some life forms evolved by swallowing others (bacteria might have swallowed mitochondria when the latter was an independent life form), which then became part of their inner workings, resulting in greater complexity): Read More ›

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

———————————————

Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

<<<<<>>>>>

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

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It would be very nice if there was a magic scanner that automatically gave you a readout of the total amount of complex specified information (CSI) in a system when you pointed it at that system, wouldn’t it? Of course, you’d want one that could calculate the CSI of any complex system – be it a bacterial flagellum, an ATP synthase enzyme, a Bach fugue, or the faces on Mt. Rushmore – by following some general algorithm. It would make CSI so much more scientifically rigorous, wouldn’t it? Or would it?

This essay is intended as a follow-up to the recent thread, On the calculation of CSI by Mathgrrl. It is meant to address some concerns about whether CSI is sufficiently objective to qualify as a bona fide scientific concept.

But first, some definitions. In The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas, 2008), Intelligent Design advocates William Dembski and Jonathan Wells define complex specified information (or CSI) as follows (p. 311):

Information that is both complex and specified. Synonymous with SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY.

Dembski and Wells then define specified complexity on page 320 as follows:

An event or object exhibits specified complexity provided that (1) the pattern to which it conforms is a highly improbable event (i.e. has high PROBABILISTIC COMPLEXITY) and (2) the pattern itself is easily described (i.e. has low DESCRIPTIVE COMPLEXITY).

In this post, I’m going to examine seven demands which Intelligent Design critics have made with regard to complex specified information (CSI):
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David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of Science and Technology in World History (Vols. 1 & 2) decided to dissent from Darwinism, because In 2008, I published a critique of intelligent design theory in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Science Reviews. I concluded that intelligent design cannot be construed as a scientific theory, and that the apparent goal of the intelligent design movement was to restore Christian theology as the queen of the sciences.But I also argued that to the extent creationists were highlighting areas in which scientific theory was inadequate they were doing better science than biologists. We ought to stop pretending that science has all the answers. Science is Read More ›

In a review of several recent science books, Dartmouth professor Alan Hirshfeld offers us a view of the Royal Society (former employer of sinner in the hands of an angry god, Michael Reiss), and similar societies, as engines of perpetual revolution (The Wall Street Journal) , opining “The Royal Society’s history of open-minded debate epitomizes science as a self-correcting process”: The group is more effective than the individual at sussing out weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations, and one of the vital contributions of Europe’s “natural philosophers” during the Enlightenment was the creation of societies to disseminate and evaluate their ideas. Such conclaves served as intellectual hubs before the rise of modern research universities and institutes, and remain important Read More ›

Recently, I purchased and read Daniel Fairbanks’ relatively recent (February 2010) book, Relics of Eden — The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA. There was a time when I would have been compelled by many of the arguments for common descent articulated in that book. I have always been skeptical, in large measure, of the proposition of the unlimited causal efficacy which is often so casually ascribed to the neo-Darwinian synthesis. But there was a time when I would have strongly favoured a paradigm consistent with common descent. More recently, however, a deeper delve into the scientific literature has given me cause for caution with respect to these types of argumentation, as compelling to the uninitiated as they may at first glance superficially appear. As with many modern popular science writers, Fairbanks provides a gripping read, and is a very effective communicator to a lay audience. Having read the book, however, it quickly became clear that, on multiple levels, Fairbanks was seemingly out of touch with much of the scientific literature which succeeds in providing potent counter-examples to many of the arguments for common descent which he raises (an example of which is detailed below).

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Some years back, ID critic Dave Thomas used to tout the power of genetic algorithms for their ability of solve the Steiner Problem, which basically tries to minimize distance of paths that connect nodes on a two-dimensional surface (last I looked, he’s still making this line of criticism — see here). In fact, none of his criticisms hit the mark — the information problem that he claims to resolve in evolutionary terms merely pushes the design problem deeper, as the peer-reviewed research at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab makes clear (go to the publications page there). Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see Read More ›

In “The challenge of the great cosmic unknowns” ( New Scientist 24 January 2011), Dan Falk reviews Richard Panek’s The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality: As he nears the present day, Panek weaves together two separate yet closely related storylines. In the first, he takes us to sophisticated laboratories around the world where researchers are trying to isolate particles of dark matter. Their best guess is that dark matter is made of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which were created at the time of the big bang and are now fiendishly difficult to detect. In the second storyline, we join the hunt for dark energy, which began in the late Read More ›

In the short term, a smear campaign can be very successful, and will poison the atmosphere, perhaps even poisoning the general public’s perception of your opponents. Usually, it works by using what may be called for convenience the trifecta fallacy, unfortunately — and as we shall shortly see — a now habitual pattern of all too many evolutionary materialism advocates when they deal with Intelligent Design. Specifically:

The typical result of such an uncivil, disrespectful rhetorical tactic when used on a naive or trusting public is that it distracts attention, clouds, confuses, polarises and poisons the atmosphere for discussion. Especially when false accusations are used, it can seriously damage reputations and careers. So, the trifecta is at minimum a violation of duties of care and respect. At worst, it is a cynically calculated propagandistic deception that through clouding the atmosphere with a poisonous, polarising cloud, divides the public and points their attention to an imaginary threat elsewhere, so that an agenda that plainly cannot stand on its own merits can gain power in the community.

But what happens when the smear begins to unravel as more and more people begin to understand that you have failed to be fair or truthful, in the face of abundant evidence and opportunity to the contrary?

Let us see, by examining the NCSE-hosted (thus, again, endorsed) page for the ironically named New Mexico Coalition for Excellence in Science and Math Education. Excerpting:

This needs to be exposed and corrected in steps, and it is worth the while to immediately pause and look at the Dissent from Darwin list to see that: yes, Virginia, there is a real controversy on scientific matters tied to Darwinism.  Also, let us list links to the series so far: background, and “They said it . . . ” 1, 2, 3.

So now, correcting in steps: Read More ›