2009

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum has an article well worth reading in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Santorum compares the tactics of suppression used in the global warming debate to similar tactics used in the debate over Darwinism: Questioning the scientific consensus in pursuit of the truth is an important part of how science has advanced through the centuries. But what happens when the scientific consensus becomes an ideology that trumps the pursuit of truth? Answer: Those making legitimate inquiries are ostracized, the careers of dissenters are destroyed, and debate is stifled. Unfortunately, I am referring not only to the current proponents of the theory of man-made global warming. In 2001, I offered a legislative amendment about teaching the subject of evolution. Read More ›

Some very prominent members of the American Physical Society are circulating an email asking the Society to withdraw a position statement adopted on 2007 that supported the theory of global warming. It’s a powerful statement by leading physicists who are obviously furious about the ClimateGate fraud and about the impact it will have on science. Compare this statement to the cowardly and arrogant editorial in Nature and to the spinning of this transparent fraud by faux pro-science journalists and blogs.

Note that the authors of the email have tried to get the APS management to withdraw the 2007 statement supporting global warming theory because it was based on the fraudulent science. They were unsuccessful, and the APS management has also refused to bring the issue to the membership. Establishment science is circling the wagons to protect this fraud.

Ethical scientists are mortified by the scientific misconduct and fraud in climate science; the question is: are there enough ethical scientists to bring integrity back to science? These courageous folks are trying very hard. I hope they succeed.

The email:

It’s somehow cheering to know that while the pompous know-nothingism of Darwinian atheists in the U.S. is matched by those in England, so too not only in our country but in theirs the screechy ignorance receives its appropriate reply from people with good sense and an open mind. Some of the latter include atheists who, however, arrived at their unbelief through honest reflection rather than through the mind-numbing route of fealty to Darwinist orthodoxy. Such a person is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher. He praised Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Times Literary Supplement as a “book of the year,” concluding with this enviable endorsement:

[A] detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter — something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin….Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

Nagel’s review elicited howls from Darwinists who made no effort to pretend they had even weighed the 611-page volume in their hand, much less read a page of it. On his blog, Why Evolution Is True, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne complained that they hadn’t ought to let such an opinion even appear in the august columns of the TLS:

“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?
Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me. I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.

No doubt the editors appreciated his letting them know they had erred by printing a view not in line with the official catechism. Coyne then appealed for help. Not having read the book himself, while nevertheless feeling comfortable dismissing it as “religious speculation,” he pleaded:

Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.

Coyne was later relieved when a British chemist, Stephen Fletcher, published a critical letter to the editor in the TLS associating Meyer’s argument with a belief in “gods, devils, pixies, fairies” and recommending that readers learn about chemical evolution by, instead, reading up on it elsewhere from an unimpeachable source of scientific knowledge:

Hey Don — I want you should do me a favor. I noticed that you put up this real negative review of Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell on Amazon. I want to tell you, I loved the stuff about the slow fuse and all. It brought back memories of the time Boom Boom Salacio was a Senior Fellow at the DI. The Putznagel Salami Fire? That was Boom Boom. We all miss the Big Guy at the DI. But here’s the thing. The moment your review hit the stands, bang! sales of Meyer’s book go through the roof. I mean you’re taking Boom Boom to a whole new level. So I was thinking that maybe you could give my Read More ›

Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4 (This Article): The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Dr. Ken Miller not only conflates evidence for common descent with evidence for Darwinian Read More ›

A quick heads-up for our readers with cable: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed will be playing on Showtime tomorrow through the 21st: On Showtime 212/16/09 at 11:15 AM On Showtime Showcase12/17/09 at 6:15 PM On Showtime12/19/09 at 5:15 PM On Showtime12/19/09 at 4:30 AM On Showtime Showcase12/21/09 at 10:00 PM On DemandAvailable from 12/11/09 to 01/07/10 If you find similarities between Ben Stein’s account of the ID movement and the ClimateGate news of scientists blackballed from science journals and treated like traitors, well, welcome to reality.

Want to know more about the Amazon.com bestselling book that made the Times Literary Supplement’s Top Books of 2009? Robert Deyes has a review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell below:

New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Scientific Naturalism

In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compelling facets of the Intelligent Design case — that of biological information in DNA. Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative.

Meyer’s historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.

Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of ‘turning point’ historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Read More ›

Which of the items below is an exercise in science from a peer-reviewed journal, and which is an example of religion in a popular magazine? According to conservation of information theorems, performance of an arbitrarily chosen search, on average, does no better than blind search. Domain expertise and prior knowledge about search space structure or target location is therefore essential in crafting the search algorithm. The effectiveness of a given algorithm can be measured by the active information introduced to the search. We illustrate this by identifying sources of active information in Avida, a software program designed to search for logic functions using nand gates. Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of Read More ›

“Before going on,” said Frost, “I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to each other are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1946)

The relevance of this passage from Lewis will be clear below. But first…

In nine highly readable chapters The Darwin Myth takes its reader from Darwin’s boyhood of wealth and privilege, to his brief stint in theology school, his quest for adventure, and the development of his “one long argument” that would form the remainder of his life’s work. This bold and uncompromising biography exposes Darwin “warts and all,” the flaws of Darwinian evolution, and the dark and disturbing consequences of a theory that easily lent itself to social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and even Hitler’s völkisch racism.