peer-reviewed

A new original research paper on mutagenesis comprising 240,000 plants in the journal Floriculture and Ornamental Biotechnology favorably cites to “intelligent design proponents,” including Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Stephen Meyer, as advocating one of various legitimate “scientific theories on the origin of species.” The paper was authored by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a recently retired biologist from the Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany who investigates the origin of certain features of flowering plants, or angiosperms. Citing to skeptics of neo-Darwinism such as Behe and “the almost 900 scientists of the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” the paper notes that: Many of these researchers also raise the question (among others), why — even after inducing literally billions of Read More ›

A peer-reviewed scientific paper published in 2010 by William Dembski and Robert Marks of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab supports no free lunch theorems. Published in Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics and titled “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” the paper’s abstract states that unless one has information about a target, search engines often fail: “Needle-in-the-haystack problems look for small targets in large spaces. In such cases, blind search stands no hope of success.” Their principle of Conservation of Information holds that “any search technique will work, on average, as well as blind search.” However, in such a case “[s]uccess requires an assisted search. But whence the assistance required for a Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] Ronald Numbers is a widely respected historian of science. He is an exceptional scholar who has garnered the respect of people on all sides of this debate. However, a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” co-authored by, among others, Ronald L. Numbers, Elliot Sober [anti-ID philosopher], and Terese Berceau [anti-ID legislator], gives one pause to wonder if Numbers is shifting his role from commentator, Read More ›

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, titled When Sentiment and Fear Trump Reason and Reality. In short, Krauss complains about the “marketing” efforts to reconcile science with religion. While he has a lot of contempt for anyone who expresses a religious belief in a public arena, for Kruass the absolute worst are those who express any doubts about Darwin. Those doubters he compares with the bloody Taliban regime of Afghanistan, though he does seem to think we have more entrepreneurial skills. “Foes of evolution and the Big Bang in this country do not operate with the direct and brutal actions of the Taliban. Read More ›