Science and Culture Today | Page 1421 | Discovering Design in Nature

On Friday, March 23, 2007, the Royal Statistical Society, the British Society for the History of Mathematics, and the British Society for the History of Science will sponsor the Karl Pearson Sesquicentenary Conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of the founders of mathematical statistics.

The papers to be presented are a cornucopia of praise. The abstracts describe Pearson as a “Renaissance man” who created “the modern world view.” Yet several of Pearson’s most important contributions to the modern world view get no notice at the conference.

Last year I wrote about some memory lapses that Brown University biologist and textbook author Ken Miller apparently had while testifying during the Kitzmiller trial regarding his own textbooks. Ken Miller has authored many biology textbooks, and his first textbooks (from the early 1990’s) used Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings and blatantly promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. To his credit, Miller fixed later editions of his textbooks — he took out Haeckel’s drawings and replaced them with real embryo photographs, and he also stopped promoting recapitulation theory. Like many Darwinists, however, Miller then tried to rewrite history and pretend that these mistakes had not been promoted by biologists for many decades. First, read what Miller & Levine’s 1994 version Read More ›

A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title “A War on Science.” In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity in the bacterial flagellum by citing the type 3 secretory apparatus, giving his usual misrepresentation of irreducible complexity. But it gets incredibly worse. Miller egregiously twists the basic arguments of leading ID theorist, mathematician William Dembski. To paraphrase Miller’s argument (Miller’s exact words are given ***below), when cards are dealt out in a game of poker, the hand you get is unlikely. But obviously that hand wasn’t intelligently designed. Therefore, unlikely and non-designed things happen all the time, so evolution can happen even if it’s unlikely, and we should Read More ›

Is Darwinism essential to understanding bacterial resistance to antibiotics? Consider the following conversation, at the bedside of a patient with a serious antibiotic-resistant infection:

Nurse: Nothing’s working, Doctor!
Doctor: I know. All of our antibiotics have failed. Penicillin, Cipro, Tetracycline. Nothing is working.
Nurse: Let’s ask the Darwinists for help!
Doctor: (Slaps forehead) Of course! Darwinism is the foundation of our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Quick, Nurse, give the patient a tautology!

Darwinists claim that Darwin’s theory, which is the theory that all biological complexity arose by random variation and natural selection, is essential to our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. What exactly does Darwinism teach us about antibiotic resistance?

Darwinists often tell us that scientific views which challenge Darwin should be banned from classrooms or scientific discussion because they are outside the “consensus” of the scientific community. Darwinists love to make this appeal to authority because it is a very effective form of peer pressure which appeals to our respect for science and the conformist tendencies in society. Yet they rarely define the meaning of “consensus,” and they also ignore the fact that true respect for science implies that we should never accept something merely because it’s the “consensus.” Simply put, that’s because the consensus can be wrong, and we should accept something only because of the evidence. As Stephen Jay Gould and other scientists warned the U.S. Supreme Read More ›

University of Wisconsin philosopher Elliott Sober has published an article in Quarterly Review of Biology entitled, “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” It seems that mainstream biology journals are more than willing to publish articles attacking intelligent design (ID) while choosing not to include any companion piece supporting ID. Regardless, from Sober’s article it would appear that very little is wrong with ID because he ultimately fails to disclose the predictions of the theory. He starts by defining ID fairly well in a vague sense, stating “mini-ID is that … complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer.” He even acknowledges that those who state the designer is supernatural “go beyond mini-ID’s single Read More ›

Over at the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) archives, I’ve posted a review of Sean B. Carroll’s book entitled, “The Evolutionary Gospel According to Sean B. Carroll: A Review of Sean B. Carroll’s The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution” (W.W. Norton, 2006). Below are a few excerpts of the review: To ensure the reader adopts his own view of evolution, Carroll resorts to scare tactics. After a bleak discussion of the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming, Carroll explains that “acceptance of [evolutionary biology’s] facts” is not “a matter that should be open to political or philosophical debate.” Carroll, who interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature,” quotes Peter Medawar, saying Read More ›

The Darwin vs. Design conferences will kick off at the Knoxville Convention Center this coming Saturday, March 24th. Here is an updated agenda for the day’s events. If you haven’t registered yet, you can still do so online before Noon EST Wed., March 21. Otherwise, you’ll have to try and purchase tickets the day of the event, but if it’s sold out you’ll be out of luck. It’s better to get those tickets now while you still can. See below for the full schedule.

This is your assignment. You are to read the mind of someone named “Lucy.” Actually, you are to find out where Lucy’s mind came from. You can’t meet Lucy. She’s been dead for 3.2 million years. Your only data will be a fragment of Lucy’s fossilized skull and genetic analysis of some apes, men, and lice.

This isn’t a bad dream. This is an exciting new branch of evolutionary biology, and it’s on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And they’re serious.

Over at ID Plus, Peter Williams has an excellent analysis of Richard Fortey’s article against ID. Fortey’s article was subtitled “Why I hate this intelligent design story. It’s simply IDiotic” and it concludes, “Darwinists are readily labelled. There should be an equivalent term for the proponents of Intelligent Design. May I suggest IDiots.” In “Richard Fortey rants at straw man of ID,” Peter Williams writes in response, “While Darwinists provided their own name, this childishly rude title does not allow the proponents of the ID theory to choose their own name for their theory. Descending to name-calling is not going to help the Darwinist cause shift the appearance of ‘a threatened Establishment’! Rather, it confirms it.” Williams is correct: the Read More ›