[donmeaker]

Darwin's theory predicted species (now extinct) between man and ape, the so called missing link. Over 10 different species of that nature have now been discovered.

Intelligent Design predicts how many of those? How many species are allowed to go extinct by intelligent design? If a species goes extinct, does that mean that the intelligent design was really not all that intelligent?

[balrog666]

Another loony set loose to drool on FR.

[tfecw]

Look – Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.


this is wrong. They have gotten fruit flies to live longer. It's all in definition manipulation. But Looks like another Creationism article that focuses of the "flaws" of evolution as proof for creationism.

[js1138]

This is a new twist on the old lie. Post a story that looks like a news article from a newspaper. The link goes to the Discovery Institute, which has a link to an online newspaper, which has -- surprise -- an opinion piece written by -- surprise -- someone from the Discovery institute.

[walden]

Good piece for the lay-person (as I am)-- this IS a religious war, you know! ;) Thank you for posting it.

[snarks_when_bored]

Another non-biologist, non-paleontologist pronounces on the moribundity of Darwinism. I own two of Belinski's books (Black Mischief and A Tour of the Calculus). He employs pseudo-literary flourishes in the service of the popularization of ideas that he himself didn't originate.

I guess a (paid?) sinecure at the Discovery Institute is the closest he could get to academic tenure at a real university.

[balch3]

Truth vs Darwinist lies Bump.

[js1138]

David Berlinsky is an astrologer:

David Berlinski explains the power of humanity's oldest predictive system in this stunning and original new book. Astrology began at the dawn of time and over the centuries became a complex system with gifted seers often achieving results of eerie accuracy. For most of recorded history, astrologers have been found at the elbows of the rich and the powerful. However, Newton's system of the world put an end to one aspect of the astrological tradition. As a result, a method once widely used has become widely discredited, especially by scientific critics with little knowledge of astrology itself.

With a genius for storytelling and penetrating analysis, Berlinski explains how astrology works and how astrological ideas, although disguised, have reappeared in modern scientific theories.

[Fester Chugabrew]

monkey worship bump

[RobRoy]

Heh, heh, bump.

[metacognative]

thank you...Berlinski is terrific

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Look – The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences – quantum electrodynamics, say – is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

More misinformation from the anti-science crowd. QED doesn't work at all in a strong gravitational field. They still can't solve multibody problems. Plus they certainly can't measure anything to 13 decimal places. They're still working on 3.

Early experimental work indicated that the magnetic moment of the electron has a slight deviation of approximately 0.1% from the value expected from QED. This deviation is known as the anomalous magnetic moment and the size of this deviation between theoretical and experimental values establishes a strong bound on the validity of QED.

But if someone wants to, they can do some homework here.

[MRMEAN]

The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists.

Perhaps the Discovery Institute would like to let us know who these three "prominent evolutionary biologists" are--associated with the Discovery Institute or other creationist organs?

Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceeding’s papers, but in the case of Steven Meyer’s "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.

STATEMENT FROM THE COUNCIL OF THE BIOLOGICAL
SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history. For the same reason, the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml), which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.

We have reviewed and revised editorial policies to ensure that the goals of the Society, as reflected in its journal, are clearly understood by all. Through a web presence (http://www.biolsocwash.org) and improvements in the journal, the Society hopes not only to continue but to increase its service to the world community of systematic biologists.

In other words, Discovery Institute creationist Meyer gives a paper to creationist editor Sternberg (who admits in his own blog that he, Sternberg, is associated with a YEC group, which fact was not generally known until the controversy), who short-cutted the editorial process in the in the last edition of the PBSW for which he would be editor, and did not choose an associate editor who might get in the way or choose unfriendly reviewers; of an article that was unsuitable for this specialized publication.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I thought you'd like this Feynman quote. It's almost 40 years old from one of his books but I haven't been able to find out which one.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

The accuracy that you mentioned resulted in only one case involving using the quantum Hall effect to measure the magnetic moment of an electron. The result was accurate to 11 places. But this is the only example of this kind of accuracy. Other attempts haven't fared as well.

And just to be persistent, here's a site that discusses problems with QED. Since QED is a graduate level course, the audience is pretty small.