Science and Culture Today | Page 1235 | Discovering Design in Nature

Supervisors at NASA’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) illegally harassed and demoted a high-level computer system administrator for expressing support of intelligent design to co-workers, according to a discrimination lawsuit filed in California Superior Court. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys on behalf of David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a NASA laboratory managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where robotic planetary spacecraft, such as the Mars Rovers, are built and operated. Coppedge was a “Team Lead” Systems Administrator on the Cassini mission until JPL demoted him for allegedly “pushing religion” by loaning interested co-workers DVDs supportive Read More ›

An old Monty Python sketch about a mistranslated Hungarian-to-English phrasebook made infamous the line, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” Today, evolutionary biologists are puzzled about something equally bizarre: why are eels so full of speciation? One biologist recently said on ScienceDaily, “How can you have seven species of the same fish eating the same thing and, quite literally, living under the same rock?” Under evolutionary biology, one would expect to find some mechanism–perhaps a geographic barrier like a large expanse of open ocean–responsible for the reproductive isolation that generated the new “species.” Instead, they found this: To find out the biologists looked at selected mitochondrial and nuclear genes and asked whether there were unique alleles (variants) of these genes Read More ›

Finals might be over, but there’s still one deadline looming for college and graduate students. Applications for Discovery Insitute’s 2010 Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are due this Friday, April 16. These two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture run from July 9-17, 2010 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology). These seminars allow students not only to learn about ID, but to become equipped to make a difference as a part of the ID movement. Leading lights from the intelligent design community such as Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Stephen Read More ›

I have no reason to believe that the acclaimed physicist Roger Penrose supports intelligent design. But he’s definitely not afraid to take on critics of the argument for fine-tuning. In the video below, he explains that the fine-tuning of the initial entropy of the universe is this precise:

As I’ve discussed before, it’s often only when evolutionists think they have found some “missing link” that they feel safe enough to admit how little they actually knew about the alleged evolutionary transition in question. What happens when the link goes bust–as we’ve recently discussed is the case with Ida? We’re left with lots of admissions of ignorance about evolution and no links to fill the now-exposed gap. This is why Colin Tudge’s book about Ida, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little Brown & Co, 2009), is so intriguing. He thought he had a missing link to explain the early evolution of primates on the line that supposedly led to humans, so the book is filled with would-be retroactive Read More ›

Long ago a wise king solved an interfamily dispute with a simple solution: split the baby. Now paleoanthropologists are fighting–with little resolution in sight–about how to interpret newly discovered hominid fossils, which comprise about 130 bones from multiple individuals. Focused on a single juvenile specimen, the debate is over whether the fossils represent human evolutionary ancestors, just a new species that split off and went extinct, or another previously known species of little significance to human evolution. While many news articles are touting the fossil as a human ancestor or even a “missing link” (see, for example, AOL news or the London Telegraph), what’s encouraging is a couple sources in the mainstream media (though just a couple) are functioning like Read More ›

A new peer-reviewed paper continues the work published by William Dembski, Robert Marks, and others affiliated with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. (Check out their new revamped website at EvoInfo.org.) The authors argue that Richard Dawkins’ “METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL” evolutionary algorithm starts off with large amounts of active information–information intelligently inserted by the programmer to aid the search. This paper covers all of the known claims of operation of the WEASEL algorithm and shows that in all cases, active information is used. Dawkins’ algorithm can best be understood as using a “Hamming Oracle” as follows: “When a sequence of letters is presented to a Hamming oracle, the oracle responds with the Hamming distance equal to the number of letter mismatches in the sequence.” Read More ›

Okay. First admit the obvious.

Ontogenetic Depth (OD) 1.0 was — well, it would be beyond charitable to say utterly inadequate. I realized this not long after reading PZ Myers’ first wave of criticisms. As I’ll explain, however, my realization stemmed not from Myers’ specific points (most of which were either minor quibbles, or missed the mark completely), but rather from trying to apply OD 1.0 myself to the well-studied models systems of developmental biology. The OD 1.0 “metric” was no metric — measuring stick — at all. Thus, PZ’s general judgment in 2004, if not his specific criticisms, was dead accurate: “This is a poorly expressed and unusable idea.”

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 few years ago, P.Z. Myers — with his Mencken-like genius for the memorable putdown — devised “Paul Nelson Day,” aka April 7, to record my annual failure to follow up on a promise to elucidate “ontogenetic depth,” a notion I floated in 2003. Much as I enjoy having my own day and all, I figured it was time to explain ontogenetic depth (OD). OD is just not that hard an idea to grasp, in one sense. In fact, OD is downright pedestrian, not much more than a fancy way of saying…

Hey, wait a minute. Today is April 6. I still have a few hours to sort it all out. To warm up the audience, here’s an exercise. This bears on OD — really it does — so I’m not just tweaking your nose.