Posted on 08/21/2002 7:23:45 PM PDT by jennyp
Posted on 2002/08/21 Posted on 2002/08/21 Posted on 2002/08/20 Posted on 2002/08/19 Posted on 2002/08/18 Posted on 2002/08/15 Posted on 2002/08/15 Posted on 2002/08/15 Posted on 2002/08/14 Posted on 2002/08/14 Posted on 2002/08/14 Posted on 2002/08/13 Posted on 2002/08/13 Posted on 2002/08/13 Posted on 2002/08/12 Posted on 2002/08/12 Posted on 2002/08/12 Posted on 2002/08/10
Rutgers Researchers Seek Solutions To Mysteries Of Mutations
Rutgers U. (via ScienceDaily) - 2002/08/21
Scientists are closing in on understanding how the cell often knows to repair a DNA mutation before it gets to have an effect. Hint: Mutated bases are more acidic than normal.
Special Feature: Hugh Ross Exposé
AiG - 2002/08/21
AiG announces a detailed critique of Hugh Ross' progressive creationism, to be published this Friday, Aug. 23. "This special feature article will equip and challenge—but most of all, what Dr Mortenson has written shows clearly AiG’s position, that we must submit man’s fallible ideas to the authority of God’s infallible Word. [The article] deals with an issue of compromise that has contributed greatly to weakening the church in this increasingly anti-God culture."
New Evolution Debate Starting: Dave Thomas vs. Walter ReMine
NMSR - 2002/08/20
A new debate has started, sponsored by New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) and the Twin Cities Creation Science Assn (TCCSA). NMSR President Dave Thomas is debating Walter ReMine on whether molecular biology provides independent confirmation for macroevolution. The 1st installment, by Thomas, is now online. ReMine's opening statement should be online in a few days.
If Only Darwinists Scrutinized Their Own Work as Closely: A Response to "Erik"
designinference.com - 2002/08/16
This response to a highly technical mathematical critique of No Free Lunch is worth reading, if only for this gem: "Critics of evolution who say it is merely a theory don't go far enough -- it doesn't even deserve to be called a theory. ... Evolutionary biology isn't a theory -- it's a pile of promissory notes for future theories, none of which has been redeemed since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species almost 150 years ago."
Goose packed a prehistoric punch
Reuters via MSNBC - 2002/08/16
Monster kangaroos, car-sized wombats and flesh-eating marsupials were not the only outsized megafauna thundering across Australia before man’s arrival. Australian researchers say they have pieced together fossils of a giant goose that could have weighed up to half a ton and may have thrived as long as 55 million years ago.
Martin Gardner Pseudoscience and Fringe-Religion Collection Added to Center for Inquiry Library
CSICOP - 2002/08/14
We wish to announce the acquisition by the Center for Inquiry Library in Amherst, New York, of the Martin Gardner collection on the paranormal, pseudoscience, and fringe religions. Gardner, considered to be one of the leading skeptics in the world, has gifted his collection, which includes his papers in the areas of creationism, Catholic artifacts, psi, mediums, parascience, monsters, as well as in the mainstream sciences. There are over 400 books, reference works, and encyclopædias, plus numerous articles and news clippings in the collection.
Scientist Says Ostrich Study Confirms Bird "Hands" Unlike Those Of Dinosaurs
U. North Carolina - 2002/08/14
Drs. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki of the UNC - Chapel Hill opened a series of live ostrich eggs at various stages of development and found what they believe is proof that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs. They also discovered the first concrete evidence of a thumb in birds. "Whatever the ancestor of birds was, it must have had five fingers, not the three-fingered hand of theropod dinosaurs," Feduccia said.
Cobb mulls teaching evolution alternatives
Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 2002/08/15
Evolution may be on the way out as the only theory on the origin of life taught in Cobb County's schools. The school board is considering a policy that would allow science teachers to introduce alternative theories on the beginnings of life, including what one board member called "scientific creationism." All students in Cobb high schools already have biology texts that carry disclaimers saying evolution is theory, not fact. Now several board members say they are responding to parent and community pressure and want the district to start teaching alternative ideas in science class.
Gene explains dumb apes
Nature Science Update - 2002/08/14
Chimps lack key parts of a language gene that is critical for human speech, say researchers. The finding may begin to explain why only humans use spoken language. The human FOXP2 gene has two key differences with the various ape versions. These variants may have become widespread during the last 200,000 years, the researchers estimate, based on analyses of the human gene from individuals worldwide.
Skulls Found in Africa and in Europe Challenge Theories of Human Origins
NY Times - 2002/08/06
Two ancient skulls, one from central Africa and the other from the Black Sea republic of Georgia, have shaken the human family tree to its roots, sending scientists scrambling to see if their favorite theories are among the fallen fruit. Probably so, according to paleontologists, who may have to make major revisions in the human genealogy and rethink some of their ideas about the first migrations out of Africa by human relatives.
Cosmologists Can’t Agree and Are Still In Doubt!
AiG - 2002/08/14
On July 23rd, the NY Times hosted an article entitled ‘In the Beginning...’ by Dennis Overbye. This was an attempt to put down any belief that science doesn’t have the answers, i.e. it was a defence of scientism. The article claims that even though cosmologists may have been divided in the past on explanations of the origin, age and evolution of the universe, now this is not so. But the fact is that cosmology is rife with controversies and ad-hoc theories because they refuse to accept Bible-based cosmological Truths.
Is physics watching over us?
Nature Science Update - 2002/08/13
In an argument that would have gratified the ancient Greeks, physicists have claimed that the prevailing theoretical view of the Universe is logically flawed. Arranging the cosmos as we think it is arranged, say the team, would have required a miracle. The incomprehensibility of our situation even drives Susskind's team to ponder whether an "unknown agent intervened in the evolution [of the Universe] for reasons of its own". But creationists should not rejoice: even a god such as this can't explain how things got so strange.
Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Conference
IDEA Center - 2002/08/13
The U. of SF and the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center are hosting a conference on the creation-evolution issue entitled the "Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Conference." The conference is open to the public and will last from 6 pm - 9 pm on Friday September 27th, and from 9 am - 7 pm on Saturday September 28th, on the USF campus at the USF McLaren Center in San Francisco, CA.
Joshua's Long Day: Did it really happen — and how?
AiG - 2002/08/13
(from 1997:) Russell Grigg argues that, even though the story of NASA computers calculating Joshua's Long Day is an urban legend, the event still must have happened. He discusses several ways in which God might have pulled this one off.
Crows prove they are no birdbrains
BBC News - 2002/08/08
Experiments show the humble crow is better than the chimp at toolmaking. British zoologists were astonished when a captive crow called Betty fashioned a hook out of wire to reach food. It is the first time any animal has been found to make a new tool for a specific task, say Oxford University researchers. They believe the bird shows some understanding of cause and effect.
Brains sniff out scam artists
Nature Science Update - 2002/08/12
The human brain contains dedicated circuits to detect cheaters, say researchers. The same team has found that people from different cultures are equally good at spotting unfair behaviour. Humans evolved cheat detection as a separate mental component, says evolutionary psychologist John Tooby of UC Santa Barbara. "Our brains have specialized programs like computer programs, specific for various applications," he says.
New release in award-winning video series (Lawsuit averted!)
AiG - 2002/08/12
To much fanfare last summer, AiG released the first in a series of young people's videos featuring 'The Discovery Team.' These high-quality productions—with lots of special effects—are designed to counter evolution and reach children with the Gospel. But just after the release, the Discovery Channel threatened AiG with a lawsuit over the word 'discovery.' So we decided to avoid further delays by changing the name to the Creation Adventure Team. The change was expensive, but we believe that distributing these life-changing episodes now is more important than fighting over a word.
Einstein's relativity theory hits a speed bump
The Age (Australia) - 2002/08/08
On its long journey, the light from quasars has passed through gas clouds full of metals. When they measured the fine structure constant of this 12 billion-year-old light, Webb and Murphy found it was slightly smaller than it would be today. Mathematically, there were two possible reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had increased, or the speed of light had fallen. Davies, Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility, because that would break the second law of thermodynamics, which says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots. "That's illegal..."
< / sarcasm >
After all these years, and they still can't answer the first question.
How did life start? Prove it.
If any of the crevo crowd prefers a no-holds barred discussion of this subject, there's a thread for this purpose in FreeRepublic's new Smokey Backroom forum, where posts are generally not deleted unless they explicitly violate Jim Robinson's long-standing rules (no racism, etc.). The thread is here: WHO ARE THE CREATION "SCIENTISTS"? .
So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 19].
Sigh...
The exchange of articles between Erik from TalkReason.org and Wm. Dembski is mostly way over my head. But the polemics before and after all the daunting math reveals a thin skin covering a big ego. Dembski practically declares Darwinism a fraud. This adds to his growing collection of amazing pronouncements regarding evolution and "naturalism".In July, Dembski wrote a response to Eugenie Scott & Glenn Branch's critique of ID, 'Intelligent design' Not Accepted by Most Scientists. In it, he tries hard to refute the charge that ID is a subtle form of creationism that tries to slip by the courts' ruling that Scientific Creationism is a religious doctrine:
ID is not an interventionist theory. It's only commitment is that the design in the world be empirically detectable. All the design could therefore have emerged through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang. What's more, the designer need not be a deity. It could be an extraterrestrial or a telic process inherent in the universe. ID has no doctrine of creation. ... The most prominent design theorist, Michael Behe, is on record to holding to common descent (the evolutionary interrelatedness of all organisms back to a common ancestor). No design theorist I know wants to teach that evolution didn't happen. There is a question about the extent of evolution, but that is a question being raised by non-ID scientists.Now, it seems to me that if the design that Dembski and his comrades perceive is front-loaded into the laws of nature and "emerg[es] through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang", then natural biological processes - being a product of design - should be capable of creating all the known irreducibly complex systems themselves, in which case the act of design would be indistinguishable from natural biological processes. But ID's whole reason for being is supposed to be because a Designer had to step in to construct the first working flagella, for example, because biological processes alone are incapable of producing it.
This seems like an attempt at a face-saving retreat from ID's stronger claims which have fired the imagination of so many creationists who look to ID to save society from godless "materialism". But elsewhere Dembski charges ahead like the most doctrinaire creationist:
What, pray tell, are these "currently available alternatives" that purport to account for the origin and evolution of biological complexity apart from design? In fact, all evolutionists have done is describe supposedly possible mechanisms, in highly abstract and schematic terms, to which, in the case of Darwinism, no significant details have been added since the time of Darwin (and, I would urge, none has been added even since the time of Empedocles and Epicurus), and for which other naturalistic evolutionary scenarios remain even more speculative.Not surprisingly, Dembski buys Phillip Johnson's argument that ID is manning the frontlines in the battle to save society from moral destruction caused by Darwinism and godless science:Critics of evolution who say it is merely a theory don't go far enough -- it doesn't even deserve to be called a theory. No Darwinist, for instance, has offered a hypothetical Darwinian production of any tightly integrated multi-part "adaptation" with enough specificity to make the hypothesis testable (even in principle). Evolutionary biology isn't a theory -- it's a pile of promissory notes for future theories, none of which has been redeemed since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species almost 150 years ago.
Wm. Dembski, If Only Darwinists Scrutinized Their Own Work as Closely: A Response to "Erik", designinference.com
The fundamental divide between Intelligent Design and Darwinism is this: Is reality fundamentally mindful and purposive or mindless and material? Wiker shows that how we answer this question undergirds all our moral decisions. Moreover, insofar as the moral decline around us is systemic, it is because we have answered this question incorrectly. Thou shalt have no other gods before me reads the First Commandment. Naturalism substitutes Nature (writ large) for the true God and in so doing distorts all our moral judgments.Perhaps that's why Dembski is so willing to believe that Darwinism is all a house of cards, propped up by the secret machinations of the Vast Atheist Scientistic Conspiracy.This book is above all a call to clarity, clarifying the moral structure that God has placed in the world as well as the distorting power of naturalism to undermine that moral structure. If you really want to understand why our culture is in its current state, you must read this book.
Wm. Dembski, Foreword to Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists
Dembski also seems to be getting frustrated by the lack of headway he's made in academia. It seems the experience of being removed from his position at the Polanyi Center at Baylor in 2000 has embittered him. At the time, former creationist Glenn Morton castigated Dembski for bad judgement in his behavior during the Polanyi affair, concluding that Dembski had no-one but himself to blame for getting fired. But to Dembski, the episode seems to have convinced him that mainstream academia is out to get him. Recently at the ARN discussion site, Dembski wrote a tense post criticizing ID enthusiast "Mike Gene". Gene had said he didn't think ID deserved a spot in high school science classes yet. Dembski replied:
This is truly astonishing. An insurgent scientific theory and its related research program often runs into opposition from older, entrenched scientists who grew up professionally under the dominant paradigm. This is the standard Kuhnian "paradigm shift". The insurgent theory often gets much of its early support from graduate students or young professors - people whose youthful curiosity hasn't been completely molded in such a way that they can only understand the dominant paradigm. But Dembski thinks ID is doomed as a research program unless he can have a crack at indoctrinating high school students! Is that what it comes down to? ID's only chance at surviving in academia is to convince adolescents who've only dissected their first frog a month ago???Mike, along with S&B, takes the "high road" that ID must first be developed further as a scientific and scholarly program before it may be legitimately taught in public school science curricula. Before the dissolution of my ID think tank at Baylor, my sentiments were largely the same. But I've come to reject this view entirely. Here are the relevant considerations from my end:
(1) Evolutionary biology has been so hugely unsuccessful as a scientific theory in accounting for the origin of life and the emergence of biological complexity that it does not deserve a monopoly regardless what state of formation ID has reached.
(2) ID is logically speaking the only alternative to evolutionary biology. Either material mechanisms can do all the work in biological origins or some telic process is additionally required.
(3) Why should ID supporters allow the Darwinian establishment to indoctrinate students at the high school level, only to divert some of the brightest to becoming supporters of a mechanistic account of evolution, when by presenting ID at the high school level some of these same students would go on to careers trying to develop ID as a positive research program? If ID is going to succeed as a research program, it will need workers, and these are best recruited at a young age. The Darwinists undestand this. So do the ID proponents. There is a sociological dimension to science and to the prospering of scientific theories, and this cannot be ignored if ID is going to become a thriving research program.
Wm. Dembski, Then and Only Then -- A Reply to Mike Gene, ARN Discussion Forum
Apparently so, and to Dembski it's downright cowardly not to work towards making that happen. He concludes:
It's all very convenient for Mike Gene to adopt a pseudonymous persona and discuss the appropriate time for ID to be introduced into the high school biology curriculum. In the neat and sanitized world of Internet discussions, this works just fine, and Mike and[sic] keep his coterie of hangers-on happy by taking the "high road." But come out of the shadows long enough to feel the brunt of the Darwinian establishment, and things look very different.Dembski seems like an intelligent guy, as he keeps reminding us. But he's hitched his wagon to a failed, agenda-driven movement. His career trajectory is flirting dangerously close to settling into a long rut of increasingly bitter irrelevance, like Velikovsky. If it does play out that way, at least Dembski can console himself with the certainty that the future history of science will at last recognize him as a visionary who was ahead of his time. Or as he says at the end of his "Erik" piece:
Here's a prediction. Erik is a close reader of my work and, despite all his protestations against it, is actually researching its ramifications. I expect he'll be publishing something in the peer-reviewed literature inspired by the ideas of No Free Lunch, though no doubt with the requisite sneers in my direction -- if only to help it through the peer-review process. Face it you professional critics of intelligent design: Intelligent design is the best thing you've got going for you. You become the champions of science and gain academic advancement to boot. Did Rob Pennock really get tenure at Michigan State University for writing Tower of Babel?
Face it you professional critics of intelligent design: Intelligent design is the best thing you've got going for you. You become the champions of science and gain academic advancement to boot. Did Rob Pennock really get tenure at Michigan State University for writing Tower of Babel?MeeeYOWWWW!!!
It looks like some interesting articles at The Scientist, InScight, and New Scientist were not included.
LOL, you're in good company.
The incomprehensibility of our situation even drives Susskind's team to ponder whether an "unknown agent intervened in the evolution [of the Universe] for reasons of its own". But creationists should not rejoice: even a god such as this can't explain how things got so strange.
Is physics watching over us?
Nothing in the article supports this contention about "god."
He seems to be holding up pretty well.
But what, pray tell, are these "currently available alternatives" that purport to account for the origin and evolution of biological complexity apart from design? In fact, all evolutionists have done is describe supposedly possible mechanisms, in highly abstract and schematic terms . . .
He's right about this.
No Darwinist, for instance, has offered a hypothetical Darwinian production of any tightly integrated multi-part "adaptation" with enough specificity to make the hypothesis testable (even in principle).
He's right here.
Evolutionary biology isn't a theory -- it's a pile of promissory notes for future theories, none of which has been redeemed since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species almost 150 years ago.
Right again.
If biologists really understood the emergence of biological complexity in purely material terms, intelligent design couldn't even get off the ground.
And again.
Show us detailed, testable, mechanistic models for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous biomacromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick death.
And again. This is very true.
The mechanisms of evolutionary biology fail to specify detailed testable mechanistic pathways capable of bringing about tightly integrated multi-part complex functional biological systems. In other words, evolutionary biology trades in unspecified mechanistic causes -- indeed, that's the only currency evolutionary biology seems to know.
Still right.
Two comments are in order here: First, scientific explanations need to be causally adequate; in other words, they need causes with sufficient power to account for the things we are trying to explain. We know that designing intelligences have the causal power to produce tightly integrated multi-part functional systems (like machines). We have no experience of undirected material processes doing the same. Thus, in introducing an "unspecified designer," intelligent design is at least identifying a cause sufficient to produce the effect in question. To be sure, intelligent design must not stop here. But it certainly must not be prevented from getting here.
How can anyone object to this?
Second, we can legitimately infer design even if we know no details about the designer. As Del Ratzsch points out in Nature, Design, and Science (SUNY Philosophy of Biology Series, 2001), if we found a bulldozer on one of Jupiter's moons, a design inference would be warranted (indeed mandated) even if we had no idea who the designer was or how the designer put the bulldozer there. Are the designers of Stonehenge specified? We know (or presume) that they were human, but we don't know much beyond that.
Or this.
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