Jeff Shallit charges Jonathan Wells with incompetence for claiming that duplicating a gene does not increase the available genetic information. To justify this charge, Shallit notes that a symbol string X has strictly less Kolmogorov information than the symbol string XX. Shallit, as a computational number theorist, seems stuck on a single definition of information. Fine, Kolmogorov’s theory implies that duplication leads to a (slight) increase in information. But there are lots and lots of other definitions of information out there. There’s Fisher information. There’s Shannon information. There’s Jack Szostak’s functional information. Information, when quantified, typically takes the form of a complexity measure. Seth Lloyd has catalogued numerous different types of complexity measures used by mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Here Read More ›

For a free copy of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), help me understand the following: Accidental origin of life is the basic thesis of origin of life researchers. Life all just somehow sort of happened one day, billions of years ago, under the right conditions – which we may be able to recreate. But there is a constant, ongoing dispute about just what those conditions were. Here is the problem I have always had with accidental origin of life: It amounts to spontaneous generation. However, banishing the doctrine of spontaneous generation played a key role in modern medicine’s success. If we assume that life forms (for medical purposes, we focus on pathogens) cannot start spontaneously, then Read More ›

PZ Myers has, once again, railed against something that he doesn’t understand at his blog Pharyngula. Hi PZ! Notice that he doesn’t actually address the content of Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks’ paper, which you can read here: Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success, published at the IEEE. Given his argument, he doesn’t know how to measure the cost of success, yet claims that Dr. Dembski doesn’t understand selection. A bit of advice PZ, the argument presented by Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks is very sophisticated PZ, your mud slinging isn’t PZ, you need to step it up PZ. I know this new stuff isn’t ez, but you may want to consider a response that has Read More ›

H. L. Mencken once remarked that “the urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” I made much the same point in a recent op-ed about our new science czar John Holdren (go here). I first became aware of the quote from a July 24th article in INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY on climate change. Here are some highlights:

Ignoring Science
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, July 24, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: A new scientific paper says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations. Maybe the only place it’s really getting hotter is in Al Gore’s head.

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century. Read More ›

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of  Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperCollins

In August of 2004, philosopher Stephen Meyer published an article in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington.  The article raised media interest and outrage because it was the first to “advance the theory of intelligent design” in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.  The editor Richard Sternberg lost his position as a result of the ensuing debacle.

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The word ‘compaction’ is one that in my mind conjures up images of vacations long-passed when I would cram as many clothes as I could into the smallest suitcases I could find. Such a task has become even more irksome in recent years with the hefty restrictions in place that limit the amount of luggage we can now take onto airplanes. But in at least one context- that of DNA biology- compaction refers to something much more exquisite and desirable. Read More ›

Benjamin Wiker’s   The Darwin Myth  was first available on Amazon.com on June 2; my book on natural selection’s co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace, titled Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution, first appeared on Amazon on February 16. My aim in pointing this out is only to say that had Dr. Wiker been well ahead of me instead of a little behind, I might have saved perhaps one-third of the 114 references in my work. In other words, in order to give Wallace some historical context it was absolutely essential to at least give a general assessment of Charles Darwin, the man who utterly eclipsed the younger naturalist.  How did Darwin develop his theory? What did it contribute? How are we to assess the man (Darwin) in relation to his theory (evolution)? How was Darwin’s theory unique and different from all others?  How do answers to these questions impact the current evolutionary debate today?  I tackled these same questions in my own work but found that they had to be answered from multiple sources (from several contemporary biographies and from primary resources available in Darwin’s published notebooks, his Autobiography [used with extreme caution!], and others). Search after search yielded no one-volume source that handled Darwin with the frank perspicacity that biology’s paterfamilias deserved.  With Wiker’s new book it has finally arrived!

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Conservation of information as developed in several articles (see the publications page at www.evoinfo.org) by Robert Marks and me has come in for criticism not only conceptually but also terminologically. None of the conceptual criticisms has in our view succeeded. To be sure, more such criticisms are likely to be forthcoming. But as this work increasingly gets into the peer-reviewed literature, it will be harder and harder to dismiss. That leaves the terminological criticism. Some have objected that a conservation law requires that the quantity in question remain unchanged. Take conservation of energy, which states that in an isolated system energy may change forms but total energy remains constant. Some have argued that what we are calling conservation of information Read More ›

A short article in the popular press reports that certain sauropods with long necks could not have held those necks upright. I read the article, leaned back in my chair and did a lot of serious thinking. . .
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3] Intelligent Design does not carry out or publish scientific research Judge Jones of Dover and those who follow him are simply wrong: despite opposition and harassment, there is a significant and growing body of ID-supportive research and peer-reviewed scientific publications. (For instance, the Discovery Institute maintains a list of such research-based publications here. [In an earlier form, this list was actually submitted to Judge Jones, but he unfortunately ignored the brute facts it documents when he wrote his ruling based on misleading and inaccurate submissions by the NCSE and ACLU.]) A few plain words are also in order. For, there has been significant harassment and career-busting that have been targeted at ID proponents. For example, Dembski and Marks were Read More ›

Some of you may find interesting a couple of articles in the latest issue of Spontaneous Generations, a peer-reviewed journal founded and run by graduate students at the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto.   One article documents the activities of a philosopher of science in the American South who teaches the next generation of teachers who will have to deal with evolution/creation/ID in the classroom. It’s quite a thoughtful piece and well worth a read.   The other article is a piece I was asked to write in response but which turned out to be a stand-alone piece that attempts to justify my participation in these matters (since this is a question that arises Read More ›

I defended myself, pointing out that “Among journalists I know, it is not necessarily a term of abuse. It means “one who lives by writing.” That’s why I called my neuroscience, spirituality, and popular culture blog, The Mindful Hack.

Enough of this. Forrest went on to say something I want to share, namely that he is proud of being an “amateur” scientist, meaning that he has many science publications but no science degree. Indeed, he notes,

Discover Magazine has named 10 amateur scientists to its list of “50 Best Brains in Science,” including my colleagues Ely Silk, Bill Hilton Jr. and me from the Society for Amateur Scientists.

As of tomorrow (Friday, November 14th), Barry Arrington assumes the leadership of UD. After more than three years at the helm, I’m finally stepping down. I expect I’ll still be posting here occasionally, but my energies will go more and more into technical ID research. Robert Marks and I continue to crank away at papers and have finally cracked the peer-review barrier in the information sciences with a paper on conservation of information (stay tuned at www.EvoInfo.org for a formal announcement). Barry has organized UD as a non-profit corporation and plans to take UD in some new directions that will increase its readership, sense of community, and impact. Take it away Barry!

My friend Forrest Mims, survivor of Darwinist thug attacks, has recently been named one of the “50 best brains in science” by Discover Magazine (December 2008, page 43). The cover story informs us, “there may be no amateur scientists more prolific than Forrest Mims.” It is not on line yet.

The Discover article classes Mims as an Outsider and reads, in part, “There may be no amateur scientist more prolific than Forrest M. Mims III, 64, of south central Texas. He has published in major scientific journals such as Nature as well as countless general-interest publications. Mims began teaching himself science and electronics at age 11 and says he never received any formal training apart from a few introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.” I am told the list includes some other relative unknowns, as well as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking (on the cover), Michael Griffin (head of NASA), James Hansen (global warming guru), E. O. Wilson (sociobiologist and evolutionist), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders), Neil deGrasse Tyson (PBS Nova), Harold Varmus (NIH), and J. Craig Ventner (human genome).

The selection panel has good reason for its view of Forrest. For a man with little formal science training, Mims has done an astonishing amount of research that has been published in a variety of journals. He has written many popular articles, as well as books. He is probably best known for the books and lab kits on electronics projects that he had developed for Radio Shack over the years. He even has a claim to minor historical fame as a co-founder of MITS, Inc., which introduced the Altair 8800, the first microcomputer, in 1975.

Encouraged by her family, his daughter Sarah Mims had a journal publication while still a high school student.

However, Forrest told me yesterday that when he was first told by a Discover editor to expect his name to come up, he worried that it was a vulgar hit piece, retailing the “Scientific American” affair or the “Eric Pianka” episode. Read More ›

It appears that the Waco Tribune abridged Don McLeroy’s op-ed on Texas science standards (that piece was cited a few posts back). Here is the full op-ed (reprinted with Don McLeroy’s permission):

Don McLeroy, guest column:
Biology standards and reasonable doubts

Sunday, October 19, 2008

COLLEGE STATION — Science education has become a culture-war issue. The battle is over the controversial evolutionary hypothesis that all life is descended from a common ancestor by unguided natural processes.

Texas is adopting new science standards. Scientists representing evolutionists and calling themselves the 21st Century Science Coalition say that creationists on the State Board of Education will inject religion into the science classroom. Should they be concerned? No. This will not happen.

They also say that the board will require supernatural explanations to be placed in the curriculum. This will not happen.

The National Academy of Sciences in its recent booklet Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, defines science as “the use of evidence to construct testable explanations and predictions of natural phenomena, as well as the knowledge generated through this process.” This definition should be acceptable to both sides. Read More ›