Science and Culture Today Discovering Design in Nature
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Applied Sciences

Darwin on Trial: The Implications for Neuroscience and Ethics

Neuroscientist Patricia Churchland cites Prairie Voles to illustrate how chemical processes inform morality. Prairie Voles with a greater number of oxytocin receptors were monogamous while those with fewer such receptors were not. Read More ›

A Mathematician Explains the Irreducible Complexity of Metamorphosis

In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article "A Mathematician's View of Evolution," I compared the development of the genetic code of life with the development of a computer program, such as my finite element code PDE2D. Read More ›

We Get Poor-Mouthed by the National Center for Science Education

To "poor-mouth" means using claims of poverty to try to manipulate other people. Read More ›

“More Philosophical than Scientific”: Parsing a Rationalization

If you want to show that evolution does not violate the second law, you cannot simply say, sure, evolution is astronomically improbable, but the Earth is an open system, so there is no problem. Read More ›

Digging Into Granville Sewell’s Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenging Darwinian Evolution

Dr. Sewell is fully aware of the standard objections to the classical version of the second law argument, but his thesis is not the classic unsophisticated version of the argument. Read More ›

The Universe Is Haunted: Reflections on the “Nature of Nature”

In hanging the fraudulent creationist label on intelligent design, Darwinists enjoy such success partly because those on the ID side seldom stop to paint a broad, encompassing, and accessible portrait of what exactly is going on in nature. The Nature of Nature stands out for its monumental comprehensiveness. Read More ›

Massimo Pigliucci Ignores ID Research, Claims “Random Alteration” of DNA Creates New Information

Discovery Institute senior fellow William Dembski is apparently living inside the heads of intelligent design critics. A recent opinion article by Massimo Pigliucci in EMBO Reports, published by the European Molecular Biology Organization, states, “In some quarters, ‘information’ seems to be a magical word: Intelligent Design proponent Bill Dembski, for example, keeps repeating that evolutionary theory cannot explain the production of new information…” Aside from the “magical” slur, Pigliucci’s description of Dembski’s view is reasonably accurate. Pigliucci, who apparently knows Dembski well-enough to call him “Bill” in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, attempts an explanation of the talk about the origin of information: As for the claims that Dembski and others make about information and evolutionary theory, Read More ›

Scientific Paper Reviews Dembski and Behe’s Methods of Detecting Intelligent Design

In a prior post I noted that a recent paper in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, co-authored by Dissent from Darwinism list signer Dominic Halsmer, cited to the work of Guillermo Gonzalez as evidence for cosmic design. However, the paper also looks at design in the biological realm, citing the work of a variety of noteworthy proponents of intelligent design, including Walter Bradley, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and William Dembski. The paper examines to the engineering of life, noting that “[b]iological systems are constantly undergoing processes that exhibit modularity, specificity, adaptability, durability, and many other aspects of engineered systems.” It quotes from William Dembski and Jonathan Wells’ book The Design of Life, stating: “Many of the systems Read More ›

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