Imagine that scientists discovered the best documentary evidence for God’s existence that anyone could possibly hope for: messages in the DNA of each and every human cell, saying “Made by Yahweh.” Imagine that a notorious New Atheist and a well-known Catholic philosopher are both asked by journalists what they make of this evidence. The New Atheist shocks everyone by announcing that he now (provisionally) accepts that there is a God. “Sure, aliens might have made those messages,” he concedes. “But it’s not likely, is it? For the time being, I’m going with the hypothesis that God did it. This looks like pretty good evidence to me.” The Catholic philosopher is asked what he makes of the new discovery. To everyone’s Read More ›

In eukaryotic organisms and especially humans, large amounts of the DNA are transcribed into RNAs that never end up getting translated into proteins. This has led some to argue human DNA is mostly junk. I speculate otherwise. The supposed junk DNA that transcribes to supposed junk RNA is not junk at all. I recently discovered that RNA is an excellent chemical basis for molecular level sensing, logic, computation and communication. Because of these facts I speculate RNAs are important in navigation, organization, computation and processing of information in the eukaryotic cell. I contrast my view with that Darwinist Steve Matheson who debated Stephen Meyer regarding claims in Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell. Matheson had a dismissive view of DNAs Read More ›

In the course of two short posts littered with no less than ten erroneous, misleading or doubtful claims, Professor PZ Myers argues his case that science and religion are incompatible: (i) science can only flourish in an atmosphere where dangerous or eccentric ideas can be freely discussed; (ii) religion, by its very nature, tends to suppress those ideas that run counter to orthodox doctrines; hence (iii) religion is fundamentally inimical to the progress of science. What Professor Myers’ thesis overlooks, however, is that: (a) it was sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives, who did more than anyone to advance the cause of religious toleration and free speech, which enabled science to flourish, as Perez Zagorin’s Read More ›

I’d like to begin my post by inviting readers to watch a short video of a 2010 TED talk titled, The roots of plant intelligence, by Professor Stefano Mancuso, who works in the Department of Plant, Soil & Environmental Science at the University of Florence. Professor Mancuso, who describes himself as a plant neurobiologist, is a leading advocate of the radical idea that plants are intelligent, and that their intelligence is embodied not in a brain but in a highly resilient distributed network whose information processing is, in its own way, just as sophisticated as that found in animals. Reporter Michael Pollan interviewed Mancuso and his colleagues for a thought-provoking article, titled, Are Plants Intelligent?, which was published in the Read More ›

Why is it that humans can recognize the designs of other humans even for token objects like a system of 500 fair coins? Why does life resemble designs? Answer: designs frequently conform to simple organizing principles rather than explicit patterns. Simple organizing principles are a way to understand large amounts of data with our finite human minds and limited information. Ironically, the fact that humans have finite memory and limited information is one reason humans tend to think and design in terms of organizing principles, and thus design creation and recognition is possible in part because of finite human memory and limited human information. First, it would be helpful to compare and contrast design detection using organizing principles versus design Read More ›

Here’s a question for neo-Darwinists: “If someone could prove to you that the Earth was ten or even one hundred times younger than the currently accepted figure of 4.54 billion years, would you give up your belief in evolution by natural selection? Or putting it another way, what’s the youngest age that you, as a Darwinian evolutionist, would accept for the age of the Earth? How low would you go?” In my previous post, A hypothetical question for neo-Darwinists, on the age of the earth, I challenged neo-Darwinian evolutionists to provide an estimate (to the nearest order of magnitude) of how much time it should take for evolution by natural selection to generate complex life-forms like ourselves from the earliest Read More ›

Denyse O’Leary has put up a fascinating post about a cockatoo (a Tanimbar corella, Cacatua goffiniana, like the one pictured above) that can crack locks unassisted, without having to be offered a reward at each step along the way. This raises the interesting question of whether the bird’s behavior can properly be described as intelligent. Here’s a brief excerpt from the report by Sandrine Ceurstemont (3 July 2013) in New Scientist magazine: Alex Kacelnik and colleagues at the University of Oxford set a number of cockatoos a challenge: pick a lock to access a nut visible behind a transparent door. The birds had to remove a pin, followed by a screw and a bolt, before turning a wheel to release 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 ›

In answering yet another round of G’s talking points on design theory and those of us who advocate it, I have outlined a summary of design thinking and its links onward to debates on theology,  that I think is worth being  somewhat adapted, expanded and headlined. With your indulgence: _______________ >> The epistemological warrant for origins science is no mystery, as Meyer and others have summarised. {Let me clip from an earlier post  in the same thread: Let me give you an example of a genuine test (reported in Wiki’s article on the Infinite Monkeys theorem), on very easy terms, random document generation, as I have cited many times: One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according Read More ›

Professor James M. Tour, who is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world, has been publicly criticized for forthrightly declaring in an online essay that while microevolution (or small changes within a species) is well-understood by scientists, there is no scientist alive today who understands how macroevolution is supposed to work, at a chemical level: “I do have scientific problems understanding macroevolution as it is usually presented. I simply can not accept it as unreservedly as many of my scientist colleagues do, although I sincerely respect them as scientists. Some of them seem to have little trouble embracing many of evolution’s proposals based upon (or in spite of) archeological, mathematical, biochemical and astrophysical suggestions and evidence, and Read More ›

In my last post, A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution, I wrote about Professor James Tour, who is one of the ten most cited chemists in the world – and a Darwin skeptic. Professor Tour is not an Intelligent Design proponent, but he is openly skeptical of macroevolution, which is generally defined as “evolution happening on a large scale, e.g. at or above the level of species, over geologic time, resulting in the formation of new taxonomic groups.” In 2001, Tour, along with over 700 other scientists, signed the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”, which read: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection Read More ›

Who is Libby Anne? That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it? I’ll let her introduce herself: As a brief introduction, I was raised in a large homeschooling family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. I grew up an evangelical Christian, though with some fundamentalist aspects. I found my beliefs challenged in college and am today an atheist and a feminist. I am in my mid-twenties, married to a wonderful man… and busily raising young children… I am also in graduate school getting my Ph.D. in a humanities field. (I’ve omitted the names of family members, out of respect for their privacy.) Libby Anne has a Web site called Love, Joy, Feminism. I would recommend that readers take the time Read More ›

Two new papers (here and here) have just been released in Science entitled “Making the Moon from a Fast-Spinning Earth: A Giant Impact Followed by Resonant Despinning” and “Forming a Moon with an Earth-Like Composition via a Giant Impact.” For popular science press releases on the story, see New Scientist and Space.com. As the Space.com report explains, The moon did indeed coalesce out of tiny bits of pulverized planet blasted into space by a catastrophic collision 4.5 billion years ago, two new studies suggest. The new research potentially plugs a big hole in the giant impact theory, long the leading explanation for the moon’s formation. Previous versions of the theory held that the moon formed primarily from pieces of a mysterious Mars-size body that slammed Read More ›

In order for a biological system to have more biological complexity, it often requires a substantial increase in thermodynamic entropy, not a reduction of it, contrary to many intuitions among creationists and IDists. This essay is part II of a series that began with Part 1 The physicist Fred Hoyle famously said: The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. I agree with that assertion, but that conclusion can’t be formally derived from the 2nd law of thermodynamics (at least those forms of the 2nd law that are stated in many physics and engineering text Read More ›