PBS Offers Intelligent Design Documentary

CREATION - Evolution Headlines ^ | 04/28/2003 | Illustra Media/CREATION - Evolution Headlines

[Remedy]

According to Illustra Media, the Public Broadcasting System uploaded the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to its satellite this past Sunday. For the next three years, it will be available for member stations to download and broadcast. In addition, PBS is offering the film on their Shop PBS website under Science/Biology videos (page 4).

The film, released a little over a year ago, has been called a definitive presentation of the Intelligent Design movement. With interviews and evidences from eight PhD scientists, it presents strictly scientific (not religious) arguments that challenge Darwinian evolution, and show instead that intelligent design is a superior explanation for the complexity of life, particularly of DNA and molecular machines. The film has been well received not only across America but in Russia and other countries. Many public school teachers are using the material in science classrooms without fear of controversies over creationism or religion in the science classroom, because the material is scientific, not religious, in all its arguments and evidences, and presents reputable scientists who are well qualified in their fields: Dean Kenyon, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Jed Macosko, and Paul Nelson, with a couple of brief appearances by Phillip E. Johnson, the "founder" of the Intelligent Design movement.

Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it. If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film. Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think? We applaud PBS's move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.

This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis. People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers. Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats. The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action. The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.

This is a must-see video. Get it, and get it around.

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Intelligent Design Gets a Powerful New Media Boost 03/09/2002
Exclusive Over 600 guests gave a standing ovation Saturday March 9 at the premiere of a new film by Illustra Media, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. This 67-minute documentary is in many ways a definitive portrayal of the Intelligent Design movement that is sweeping the country. Intelligent Design is a non-religious, non-sectarian, strictly scientific view of origins with both negative and positive arguments: negative, that Darwinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of life, and positive, that intelligent design, or information, is a fundamental entity that must be taken into consideration in explanations of the origin of complex, specified structures like DNA. The film features interviews with a Who's Who of the Intelligent Design movement: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer, Dean Kenyon, William Dembski, and others, who explain the issues and arguments for intelligent design as the key to unlocking the mystery of life. The film also features nearly 20 minutes of award-quality computer animation of molecular machines, manufacturing plants, and storage libraries of elaborate information - DNA and proteins at work in the cell, climaxing with a dazzling view of DNA transcription and translation.
In his keynote address, Dr. Paul Nelson (who appears in the film), gave reasons for optimism. He said that Time Magazine, usually solidly Darwinian, admitted just last week that these Intelligent Design scientists may be onto something. U.S. News and World Report is also coming out with a piece on I.D. And Stephen Meyer, who also appears in the film, could not be at the premiere because he was on his way to Ohio (see next headline), armed with copies of the film to give to the school board members. Nelson said that scientists should not arbitrarily rule design off the table. "Keeping science from discovering something that might be true is like having a pair of spectacles that distorts your vision," he said. "It does profound harm to science." He described how Ronald Numbers, evolutionist, once told him that design might be true, but science is a game, with the rule that scientists cannot even consider the possibility of design; "that's just the way it is," he said. (See this quote by Richard Lewontin for comparison.) Yet design is already commonly considered in archaeology, cryptography, forensics, and SETI, so why not in biology? Apparently this arbitrary rule has become a national controversy. Intelligent Design, says Nelson, is finally removing a "rule of the game" that is hindering science. If the reaction of the crowd at the premiere luncheon was any indication, Unlocking the Mystery of Life has launched a well-aimed smart weapon at the citadels of Darwinism.

We highly recommend this film. Copies are just now becoming available for $20. Visit IllustraMedia.com and order it. View it, and pass it around. Share it with your teachers, your co-workers, your church. You will have no embarrassment showing this high-quality, beautiful, amazing film to anyone, even the most ardent evolutionist.

 

 

[plusone]

Actually, blind luck, random chance, and huge dollops of time are the only ingredients that pure non-Divine Evolution can offer as driving forces.

[Aric2000]

And those are the only things it needs, why do you have such a problem with this.

Blind luck, I suppose you could say that, because the creature that is lucky enough to have the right mutations will survive and reproduce, random chance, OK, same same, and huge dollops of time.

Do you know how long 3 1/2 BILLION years is?

That's a VERY long time, if I say that the average human lives to be 100 years old, how many generations would that be. Hint, take 2 zeros off 3,500,000,000, or 35 million generations. Now, bring that life down to 20 years, that's still long, and you are talking a huge amount of generations, plenty to mutate and change.

Lots of time, lots of chances.

[longshadow]

spasmodic placemarker

[Theophilus]

that evolution is not a purely random process

Anything this is random must also be purely random because there is no such thing as less or more random. For instance: Take a non-random number "A" (your age) multiply it by a random number "B" (try to choose a purely random number, it's hard to do and just as hard to prove) the result, "C", can only be as random, unplanned, haphazard, unpredictable, improbable and meaningless as "B" is.

Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare

Fri May 9,12:39 PM ET

Add AP - Feature Stories to My Yahoo!

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

In a project intended more as performance art than scientific experiment, faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques.

Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

The Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.

Phillips said the results showed that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that.

"They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."

___

On the Net:

The monkeys' output: www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/

They should have told those anti-evolutionist monkeys to take a shot at: "The Origin of Species"

[general_re]

Anything this is random must also be purely random because there is no such thing as less or more random. For instance: Take a non-random number "A" (your age) multiply it by a random number "B" (try to choose a purely random number, it's hard to do and just as hard to prove) the result, "C", can only be as random, unplanned, haphazard, unpredictable, improbable and meaningless as "B" is.

Oh? Let's play a game. Here's how it works - you roll a set of three ordinary six-sided dice to determine if you win or lose, but the only winning roll is to roll eighteen. How "random" is the set of winning rolls going to be?

Evolution is like that - there's a random element to it, but the final product is not completely random, because the losers get thrown out, just like our dice game. Unlike our dice game, evolution is much more powerful, because it's not a random attempt every time - it's an additive process, whereby the best parts of prior attempts are preserved in the future attempts and used as a foundation to build on. If our dice game was more like evolution, you'd be able to roll three dice, keep any sixes that turned up, and roll the remaining dice until they also showed sixes - you'll get eighteen pretty quickly that way, much faster than if you roll all three every time. That's why evolution is not a purely random process - it doesn't start from scratch for every new organism. There's always an extant organism that's the starting point for the new one.

[general_re]

Do you agree that evolutionary and genetic programming which use Darwinian principles create things which lend theirselve to somehow proving evolution?

They prove that iterative, additive processes - a set of processes which includes evolution via natural selection - can produce complex constructs in a relatively short amount of time. As for proving evolution, we're past all that now.

[Theophilus]

you roll a set of three ordinary six-sided dice

There is nothing "random" about rolling dice. The outcome is determined by factors such as the position of the dice in my hand, the force I apply to dice as I accelerate them into the air, the symmetry of the dice as they tumble in the air and the elasticity of the surface on which they bounce and come to rest. While these factors may be beyond my control or even my awareness, I am intuitively confident that they are a finite and therefore a nonrandom set.

[general_re]

"Intuitively confident", are you? Isn't that nice? My four year old is "intuitively confident" that Santa brings her presents every Christmas. In both cases, I have a feeling that the two of you are operating on approximately the same amount of provable or demonstrable factual information. Why don't you take a set of ordinary dice and test this theory by generating output and measuring its entropy? That way, you'll be able to bring something more to the table than "intuitive confidence" in the notion that the output is somehow non-random...

[Theophilus]

Every man uses intuition all the time. Since you took your first step, your intuition has told you that the force gravity will remain constant and that you won't be slammed into the ground and you won't fly off into space. Sure, our intuition can be fooled and sometimes it's not enough. That's why a pilot uses an artificial horizon. But your daughter is not a fool for believing her father loves her and tells her the truth. Most of the time, I'm sure you do! Evolution sprang from Darwin's creative intuition, but he was deceived. Do you disbelieve that there are a finite number of factors determining the outcome of a die roll? I think it's obvious that there is a relatively small number of significant proximate factors in a die roll. Someone has probably already build a robot that can gently and precisely roll a die with fairly good accuracy at predicting the outcome. Do you think that there is an infinite amount of matter in the universe? Or are you willfully agnostic about these concepts?

Dice - A simulated movie

[general_re]

This is easily testable. Take a set of ordinary (fair and unmodified) dice, roll them in the usual manner a million times or so, and record the output - if the output is not random in a statistically significant manner, there are many statistical tests that can reveal that.

Anyway, it's really neither here nor there - if the most substantive critique of evolution that can be mustered is to essentially deny the concept of randomness and entropy, then I think the theory is on pretty solid ground.

[general_re]

Perhaps you would like to render your opinion on the nature of randomness and entropy? ;)

[PatrickHenry]

Perhaps you would like to render your opinion on the nature of randomness and entropy?

You didn't ask me, but whenever I think of those two things I get very lazy and my thoughts become scattered and incoherent.

[general_re]

I believe that my desk here is some sort of entropy "sink" for the entire house - over time, it gradually becomes more and more random, while the rest of the house stays relatively ordered, or even gets more ordered. So I fight the gradient and organize things on my desk, but then it starts slowly getting more and more random. It's very odd, but I'm trying to figure out if there are any practical uses for it. Maybe I can rent out my desk to people with messy houses, and they can use it to "soak up" the randomness in their houses.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I rarely use the term "random" except in terms such as "random variable." I prefer to use terms such as "independent identically distributed" for selections. This concept is easily defined (one may consult any text on probability.)

What's important is that there are laws that do tell us about the behavior of iid variables. For example, for iid variables with finite variance, the sums of sets of these vairables tends to a normal distribution. Other things are know, for example, the empirical distribution function of an iid sample will converge (with probability one) to the actual distribution from whence the sample is taken.

Theo's statement: Anything this is random must also be purely random because there is no such thing as less or more random. exhibits a large lacuna in understanding the entire concept. Trivially one could generate normally distributed random samples and only keep those with values bigger than zero. The resulting sample would be the result of both a "random" choice and a deterministic outcome. A random walk with an absorbing barrier is another example. (Think: an ensemble of drunks walking near a cliff.)

In probability theory, entropy is just the average of the logarithm of the distribution. It's a useful quantity but seemingly misused by Creationists. In thermodynamics, entropy is a state function of a system. This is but loosely connected with the probability version. Again, the concept of entropy is seemingly misused by Creationists.

[general_re]

Trivially one could generate normally distributed random samples and only keep those with values bigger than zero. The resulting sample would be the result of both a "random" choice and a deterministic outcome. A random walk with an absorbing barrier is another example. (Think: an ensemble of drunks walking near a cliff.)

This is more or less what I wanted to get at here - although the nature of mutations in an environment may be purely random in their effect, the selective pressures serve to drive the organisms in a particular direction or set of directions. You don't see jellyfish flitting about in deserts because the environment is such that it rewards organisms that can survive hot, dry conditions, and punishes those organisms that cannot. And given time, what are essentially random mutations will conspire to produce an entire set of organisms that can survive hot, dry conditions - this is not an accident, even if the mutations that produce such organisms are, because of the selective pressures operant in that environment. It's not a matter of pure blind chance that all the organisms in the desert are adapted for desert environments.

[Theophilus]

Why use "random" when the eminently more verbose: "independent identically distributed" will do?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Do you agree that "random" is equivalent to "independent identically distributed"? If not, please explain what the difference is.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Much of evolutionary theory (and lots of other things) act a bit like stochastic differential equations. One could visualize these as a deterministic system with small random perturbations at each step. Sort of like following a particle moving according to Newton's laws but getting a kick at each small time step (this can be described in a continuous setting.) It's like Brownian motion and F=ma at the same time. (Keywords for GOOGLErs: Îto, Stratanovich, stochastic© differential equations.)

[TaxRelief]

You didn't ask me, but whenever I think of those two things [randomness and entropy] I get very lazy and my thoughts become scattered and incoherent.

ROFLOL! Thank you, I needed a good guffaw!

[nmh]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU again. I ordered this video because of your thread. I was not aware of it. I'll have to wait 4-8 weeks for delivery because it is in high demand but it is worth it.

I find evolution to be humoerous beyond words. This will be VERY refreshing to see something that is objetive science giving God the credit due to Him.

Also if you have a ping list, please add my name to it.