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Materialist mathematician Jeffrey Shallit has a post on an article in the Globe and Mail about philosophy and the immateriality of the mind. Shallit’s post is titled “Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Philosophy”. Shallit doesn’t think much of philosophy: If philosophers think the view that “The brain is not an organ of consciousness. … The brain has no cognitive powers at all” deserves anything more than a good horselaugh, this simply shows how irrelevant philosophy has become … Our future understanding of cognition will come from neuroscience, not from Wittgenstein. Philosophy is plainly irrelevant to Shallit, which is the problem. Wittgenstein may not inform Dr. Shallit’s understanding of cognition, but Descartes, Kant, Hume, James, Skinner, Block, the Churchlands, Read More ›
In a previous post, I discussed Michael Behe’s recent paper in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” which reviews much recent work in the field of bacterial evolution. He devotes particular space, however, to the research of Richard Lenski, who has now grown over 50,000 generations of E coli in the lab to study its evolution. Lenski’s work was cited by Richard Dawkins most recent book (The Greatest Show on Earth) as the ultimate refutation of irreducible complexity. Dawkins’ book, however, made a straw man argument by discussing a misguided attack on Lenski’s work by Conservapedia editor Andrew Schalfly, completely ignoring critiques of Lenski’s research by Behe in The Edge of Read More ›
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Michael Behe has published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” arguing that “the most common adaptive changes seen … are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function.” The observation that a particular type of molecular change involves loss-of-function has been used by leading evolutionary biologists as argument against that particular mechanism as being an important force for adaptive evolutionary change. In a 2007 article in the journal Evolution, Hopi E. Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne co-authored a review article critiquing cis-regulatory mutations as a mechanism of evolution, stating, “Supporting the evo devo claim that cis-regulatory changes are responsible for morphological Read More ›
NASA’s discovery of an arsenic-ingesting microbe in California’s forbidding Mono Lake looks, on the surface, like bad news for Darwinists hopeful to show what a no-big-deal it is for a planet to bring forth life unguided. The bacterium evidently uses arsenic for purposes that all other known organisms would use phosphorus, including incorporating it in DNA. A reporter for Nature News cites UC Santa Barbara geomicrobiologist David Valentine as observing that the discovery may mean “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life.”
That’s interesting. Under Darwinian assumptions, the observation that such an alternative life chemistry is possible means that some planets previously assumed to be inhospitable to life, due to being poor in phosphorus, would now turn out after all to be potential theaters for life’s presumed spontaneous arising. That would seem to bump up the number of possible dice rolls available out there to jump-start an unguided chemical and biological evolutionary process on some other planet. Yet we still have no indication from SETI or anything else that intelligent or complex life exists anywhere but here. Which makes the existence of life on earth look just a bit more special than it did before, right?
Well, maybe yes or maybe no. Astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, urges caution before drawing conclusions from the find:
Read More ›Everyone seems to remember that Alfred Russel Wallace co-discovered the engine of modern evolutionary theory, natural selection, with his famous Ternate letter sent to Charles Darwin in early March of 1858. The receipt of that letter prompted an astonished Darwin into action to finally unveil his own theory and the rest is history. Or is it? Forgotten in the glare of Darwin’s preeminence is that Wallace went on to craft his own theory, a theory imbued with intelligent design. First announced in April of 1869, Wallace would go on to develop a theory of directed, detectably designed, and purposeful common descent best described as intelligent evolution.
Read More ›In my previous post, we saw that Eugenie Koonin argued that a formal test of universal common ancestry (UCA) “is unlikely to be feasible” but yet he claimed that the evidence in support of UCA “by comparative genomics is overwhelming.” Such thinking is common among evolutionists, who seek to to demonstrate UCA by finding a consilience of multiple lines of evidence in favor of it. In his Nature paper, Douglas Theobald similarly seeks to support UCA through a consilience of multiple lines of evidence: UCA is now supported by a wealth of evidence from many independent sources, including: (1) the agreement between phylogeny and biogeography; (2) the correspondence between phylogeny and the palaeontological record; (3) the existence of numerous predicted Read More ›
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It’s the time of year to take stock… and figure out what books and DVDs are missing from your library so you can ask for them for Christmas! This year our list is handily organized by category: Science, Faith & Worldview and History, Culture and Philosophy.