Mark Frank wants to know what all of the fuss is about regarding the recent empirical verification of Michael Behe’s prediction in Edge of Evolution. In response to the News post Evolutionary biologist Larry Moran tries calculating with big numbers re evolution Mark asks: I must be missing something important. As far as I can see everyone seems to agree that the mutations required for chloroquine resistance are extremely improbable and this is born out by the rarity of such resistance in the wild. So what? Fair question, to which gpuccio aptly responds: Mark: The point is simple. The malaria parasite under the extremely strong selection of chloroquine is a model extremely favourable to the neo darwinian algorithm: huge populations, Read More ›

It is well known that the mammalian eye has an “inverted” structure, whereby light reaching the retinal surface must pass through a layer of cellular tissue before reaching the light-sensitive cells: the rods and cones. The cellular tissue can be expected to degrade the clarity of vision, and this has been interpreted by some as convincing evidence that the eye has not been designed intelligently, but has been cobbled together by processes characterized by chance and contingency. Responses have majored on the concept of optimization: the inverted structure provides benefits that compensate for any disadvantages. Most evolutionary biologists appear to be unconvinced, and the issue of eye design has become an icon of evolution: proof that intelligent agency was absent Read More ›

University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne twice emailed the academic who invited Dr. William Dembski to speak at a UC seminar on August 13, comparing Dr. Dembski to a Holocaust denier: “Would you invite a Holocaust denier to speak to a history department? For this is exactly what you are doing by inviting Dembski… And yes, seeing lies purveyed as truth, and creationists paraded out as if they were academically respectable researchers, is painful to me, and in similar ways that Holocaust denialists are painful to Jews like me.” The quotation above is a conflation of Jerry Coyne’s remarks in two separate emails, but as readers of Coyne’s latest post on the seminar can readily verify for themselves, it accurately Read More ›