BioLogos, we are informed, is holding a meet right near an American Scientific Affiliation conference. Funded by Templeton millions, it claims: In contrast to EC, YEC, and OEC, Intelligent Design(ID) does not explicitly align itself with Christianity. It claims that the existence of an intelligent cause of the universe and of the development of life is a testable scientific hypothesis. ID arguments often point to parts of scientific theories where there is no consensus and claim that the best solution is to appeal to the direct action of an intelligent designer. At BioLogos, we believe that our intelligent God designed the universe, but we do not see scientific or biblical reasons to give up on pursuing natural explanations for how Read More ›

From New Scientist, reviewing two books: Plants, say the authors, are highly responsive, attuned to gravity, grains of sand, sunlight, starlight, the footfalls of tiny insects and to slow rhythms outside our range. They are subtle, aware, strategic beings whose lives involve an environmental sensitivity very distant from the simple flower and seed factories of popular imagination. More. Here’s a possibility: Our notion of intelligence was actually standardized on human intelligence. Which is of an entirely different type. Intelligence is everywhere in nature, and manifests itself in different ways. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Here. But in 2009, everything started to fall apart. When Rimm ordered a fresh set of antibodies, his team could not reproduce the original results. The antibodies were sold by the same companies as the original batches, and were supposed to be identical — but they did not yield the same staining patterns, even on the same tumours. Rimm was forced to give up his work on the melanoma antibody set. “We learned our lesson: we shouldn’t have been dependent on them,” he says. “That was a very sad lab meeting.” Antibodies are among the most commonly used tools in the biological sciences — put to work in many experiments to identify and isolate other molecules. But it is now Read More ›

We recently reported that the common squid, Doryteuthis pealeiirecodes, uses massive, tissue-specific, RNA editing to modify many of its proteins. One evolutionary explanation for this apparent intelligent design would be that the editing machinery is merely an uncontrolled, random process. This would be in keeping with evolution’s view of life as a train off the tracks and many past findings were initially described as vestigial or junk, until the design could no longer be denied. One current example is the finding that most of the human genome is transcribed. Apparently it is functional, and so isn’t mostly junk, but one evolutionary explanation that continues to have currency is that the transcription machinery is uncontrolled and has gone wild.  Read more

From Kirk Durston, here: The definition of macroevolution is surprisingly non-precise for a scientific discipline. Macroevolution can be defined as evolution above the species level, or evolution on a ‘grand scale’, or microevolution + 3.8 billion years. It has never been observed, but a theoretical example is the evolution from a chordate eel-like creature to a human being. Many people who embrace Darwinian evolution confidently state that evolution is a proven fact, not a theory. They say this in the basis of thousands of papers discussing microevolution. Herein lays the second mistake … the assumption that because variation/microevolution is such an overwhelmingly proven fact that, therefore, macroevolution must be as well. Macroevolution is very different from microevolution. The reason there Read More ›

This rubbish was written by a person who still has a human body: 3. A too-narrow pelvis Problem: Childbirth hurts. And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman’s pelvis hasn’t changed for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger. Okay, so Big Brains (like a whale?) would be some kind of advantage? No insult intended, but what have whales ever contributed to the stock of science knowledge? Fix: Sure, you could stretch out the pelvis, Latimer says, but technologists may already be onto a better solution. “I would bet that in 10,000 years, or even in 1,000 years, no woman in the developed world will deliver naturally. A clinic will combine the sperm and egg, Read More ›

Sometimes, one of the most telling issues in a debate is the point the other side utterly refuses to take up. The one it tries to pretend is just not there. Even, as it hastens off to a red herring dragged away to strawman caricatures laced with loaded accusations or insinuations and set alight to cloud, poison, confuse and utterly polarise the atmosphere; frustrating the process of seeking truth through reasoned civil discussion. That is why I think it is a strong indication that we are on to something serious when my clipping and citing Paley’s watch example in full form — not the common strawman tactic caricature —  led to an insistent attempt to deflect discussion into accusations of Read More ›

All that follows is from UD commenter Timaeus: Larry Moran wrote: “I’ve been trying to teach Denyse about evolution for almost twenty years. It’s not working.” Perhaps teaching is not your strong point, Larry. There is some empirical evidence of that, I believe. Or perhaps it is expertise that is the problem. Last time I checked your website for your publications on evolutionary theory, I found many popular articles on ID and creationism, and some apparently self-published biochemical data on your university website. I couldn’t find a single article on evolutionary theory in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject for over 10 years into the past. For someone who has so many opinions on evolution, and voices them so loudly Read More ›

All that follows is from Dr. JDD: Hopefully from the first of these two posts the simplified concept of AltORFs that overlap existing genes has been sufficiently introduced. It appears to me that this is an area of research vastly underrepresented in not only the literature, but the minds and understandings of many PhD-level scientists today. I think the very fact that it is barely mentioned in papers such as those referenced previously (Nature publications on the human proteome, for example) illustrates this point to a degree. The paper I wish to discuss is this one from 2013: An out-of-frame overlapping reading frame in the ataxin-1 coding sequence encodes a novel ataxin-1 interacting protein. Bergeron D, et al. J Biol Read More ›

At TSZ, Elizabeth Liddle asks IDists what the “energy source” is for a designer to move matter in some specific manner?  One wonders what EL is talking about – what is the energy source for any human designer to generate intentional outcomes, like picking up tools and building a house?  The energy used is the same energy kind that is used as any physical process that occurs.  The difference between intentional outcomes and unintentional outcomes is not that a different kind of energy is used, but rather that the energy was used intentionally. Instead of the process being guided by what would be predicted by natural law or a stochastic process (unintentional), intentional activity is not plausibly derivable from those Read More ›

Underway: Sheldrake For committed materialists, psychic (psi) phenomena such as telepathy and the sense of being stared at must be illusory because they are impossible. Minds are inside brains. Mental activity is nothing but electro-chemical brain activity. Hence thoughts and intentions cannot have direct effects at a distance, nor can minds be open to influences from the future. Although psi phenomena seem to occur, they must have normal explanations in terms of coincidence, or subtle sensory cues, or wishful thinking, or fraud. Dogmatic skeptics often repeat the slogan that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” But the sense of being stared at and telepathy are not extraordinary, they are ordinary. Most people have experienced them. From this point of view, the Read More ›

It has become apparent that a major objection by EL et al, is that ” . . . What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer” — clearly implying God as Designer/ Creator. This objection is closely backed by the now far too common atheistical/ secularist notion that belief in God (especially the God of the Bible) is utterly irrational and therefore a menace to the community. As we continue this for record* response series — 1st, 2nd, so far . . .  —  we need to address this objection. Not, because design theory is “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo” [a canard that should long since have been apologised for by those Read More ›

Remember when evolutionists stated that information flow proceeds from DNA to RNA to proteins? They called it the “Central Dogma” and they envisioned DNA mutations providing the fuel for natural selection to create the species. Then there was reverse transcriptase, a protein machine that inserted RNA into DNA. And then there was alternative splicing where protein machines rearranged RNA. And there was RNA editing, where proteins … Read more

Just ran across this interesting article. I don’t put too much stock into computer simulations of things that are still poorly understood. Indeed, there are plenty of open questions about whether even the basic mechanics of planet formation are understood. But this caught my eye: For planets to be habitable, they must orbit stars within the ‘habitable zone’ where it is not too hot or too cold Yes, we know that, but this next part is less often discussed: In addition, recent studies on habitability of planets suggest that the water-land ratio must be similar to the Earth. That is, the water mass fraction should not be far from that of the Earth’s (~0.01wt%): planets with too much water (> Read More ›

Christians for Darwin? We are looking at you. We are looking at you now. Do you renounce the nonsense? Or just hope to get more funds from it until you quietly retire? Suggested by poli sci prof J. Budziszewski. Here: Christians need not be afraid to confront the inconsistencies of Darwinism Can you name something that natural selection doesn’t explain? The most distinctive things about us—what Christians call our spiritual qualities—can’t be explained by natural selection. Tell me the adaptive value of a sense of beauty. Or say you are moved to awe by Bach’s Air on the G String: How does awe help you to pass on your genes to the next generation? One sociobiologist, an atheist, speculated that Read More ›