Robert Crowther

Q: Which Steve said design is an excellent and irrefutable explanation?Hint: He didn’t write Signature in the Cell. This incredible interaction came at last Friday night’s presentation of Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer at Biola University in front of 1,400 attendees and hundreds more watching the event streamed live on the internet. In a panel discussion after his lecture, Meyer met two of his critics head-on, one of whom essentially conceded that intelligent design is a better explanation than an unguided process like Darwinian evolution. The critics were Steve Matheson, a theistic evolutionist from Calvin College, and Arthur Hunt a Darwinist and biologist from the University of Kentucky. Both have written critically of SITC and intelligent design and Read More ›

Responding to Zimmerman’s latest blog is almost too easy. All a response to this really requires is to post a few photos of clearly designed items that have had amazing, spectacularly bad problems. (The Hindenberg for instance. Or any Toyota apparently.) How stupid, yes I said stupid, do you have to be to equate bad design with no design? How is it that if the body is poorly designed, humans have risen to the pinnacle of life? If we were blind as bats say, would we have been better off? Would we have stumbled over the secret of time-travel by now? Zimmerman’s argument is so weak as to be laughable. In fact, I had to stop my inelegant laughing so Read More ›

Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›

Stephen Meyer is in Brazil this week at the “Intelligent Design: Science and Religion” conference at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo, one of Brazil’s oldest and most prestigious universities. He speaks today at 3:00PM PST (7:00PM in Sao Paolo) about Signature in The Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.The Symposium lectures are being transmitted live on the university website and you can watch Dr. Meyer’s lecture this afternoon there. Once on that page click on the Symposium logo to stream the speeches in real time. Also in attendance at the conference is University of Idaho biologist Scott Minnich, who spoke this morning about “Irreducible Complexity and the Bacterial Flagellar Motor: Assessment of Recent Controversies”. On Wednesday at Read More ›

Last week we reported on a discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of JPL employee David Coppedge. Over the weekend the San Gabriel Valley Tribune ran a lengthy story reporting on the suit. After Coppedge discussed intelligent design with JPL scientists, his supervisors told him to stop discussing religion. Last April Coppedge’s bosses demoted him. Coppedge had been a leader on the system administrator team for the Cassini mission, according to the suit. The paper also reports that after being ordered by his superiors at JPL to stop talking about intelligent design, Coppedge did just that. Even more interesting is this: Earlier this month Coppedge claims he met with his supervisors, who told him that the written warning was inappropriate and Read More ›

Former Jet Propulsion Laboratory Team Lead, David Coppedge’s case is only the most recent of a series of similar free-speech controversies, including:

David Coppedge has worked on the Cassini mission since 1997. In 2000 he earned recognition for excellence, receiving the important role of “Team Lead SA” (system administrator), a role he held until his demotion in 2009.

SAs oversee 200 Unix workstations, several high-capacity data storage units, networking equipment, and other specialized computing equipment across America and Europe. He has a wide breadth of knowledge about technical aspects of Cassini’s computers and networks and was heavily involved in all the mission operations. Coppedge has been a faithful and highly regarded JPL employee for many years, has led tours of the lab and has served as an outreach speaker presenting the Cassini findings to civic and astronomy clubs and school groups.

Now, though, this exemplary employee has been demoted. Why? Did he do something to jeopardize the mission? No. Was he guilty of incompetence? No. Was he lazy or just lackadaisical in his work? No. David Coppedge’s sin was a thought crime, the mere willingness to challenge the ruling authority of Darwinian evolution. In conversation he asked colleagues if they’d be interested in watching a documentary that dealt with evolution and intelligent design. For this he was harassed and discriminated against.

This just in from Nature magazine, of all places. Not that long ago, biology was considered by many to be a simple science, a pursuit of expedition, observation and experimentation. Also not that long ago, junk DNA was being defended as an important element of the Darwinian evolution paradigm. Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was Read More ›

A new review of Signature in the Cell is just out in The Journal of the International Society of Philosophical Enquiry. It brings to the forefront of the overall debate the perspective of a software engineer and logician. Specifically, Harry Kanigel, former executive director, Information Technology at UBS Investment Bank, whose expertise is in computer algorithms. So he knows a thing or two about digital information. His reviews starts strong: Stephen C. Meyer changes the game in the intelligent design fight with Signature in the Cell, a big book that methodically, but agreeably, constructs an argument that intelligence in some unspecified form, is responsidble for the bio-molecular machinery in the cell and, therefore, for first life. Meyer’s argument is, at Read More ›