As most readers at TSZ are already aware according to the proponents of evolution it takes special intelligence to detect the apparent but striking designs in nature accomplished by random, natural processes of evolution.
According to this high-minded thought, whoever believes that life had to have been designed by an intelligent designer, and not by random, evolutionary processes, is ignorant and stupid…
Really? Continue reading
Just a note that I have put up a new post at Panda’s Thumb in response to a post by Eric Holloway at the Discovery Institute’s new blog Mind Matters. Holloway declares that critics have totally failed to refute William Dembski’s use of Complex Specified Information to diagnose Design. At PT, I argue in detail that this is an exactly backwards reading of the outcome of the argument.
Commenters can post there, or here — I will try to keep track of both.
There has been a discussion of Holloway’s argument by Holloway and others at Uncommon Descent as well (links in the PT post). gpuccio also comments there trying to get someone to call my attention to an argument about Complex Functional Information that gpuccio made in the discussion of that earlier. I will try to post a response on that here soon, separate from this thread.
Designer was riding Her submarine through the depths of the ocean one day, taking stock of Her work, and decided, “I’ve learned just about everything I’m ever going to learn from these prototypes. It’s high time to take the next big step toward the ultimate goal, a species of animal in which to ripen souls for harvest.” (Of course, souls that turn out goatlike go to Hell, to suffer eternal torment at the hands of Satan, and souls that turn out sheeplike go to Heaven, to kowtow forever at the feet of God. But Designer had to come up with something considerably more sophisticated than sheep and goats, to satisfy God’s requirement that the Fate of Souls be contingent instead of determined.)
Now, if Designer had done a complete redesign, when advancing from aquatic to terrestrial organisms, Hell might well have frozen over before there were any goatlike souls to fuel the flames. So Designer said, “I know that the optics are different in air than in water, but fish eyes are gonna have to do.”
Lacrimal system After observing that Her transitional prototype frequently took dips in the marsh to wash its eyes, She invented an organ to wet the eyes with saltwater. Compared to the eyes themselves, the lacrimal glands were a cinch to get right. As for eyelids, Designer had already tested them on some sharks. She did not anticipate that drainage would be a problem, but found that mammals with drops of water running down their faces looked very sad. In a flash of brilliance, Designer realized that eyewash could be reused to moisten the nostrils. And that was when She invented the lacrimal and naso-lacrimal ducts. What initially was supposed to be an aesthetic feature turned out to serve a useful function. God was highly impressed, and gave Designer, whom He called Asherah, a generous bonus at Christmas.
“Yahweh [front, flaunting large penis] and His Asherah [rear, working at computer]”
On Thursday 10/18/18 John Sanford presented at the prestigious Mazur Auditorioum of the National Institutes of Health:
https://calendar.nih.gov/app/MCalInfoView.aspx?EvtID=36417
Design is order imposed on parts of a system. The system is designed even if the order created is minimal (e.g. smearing paint on cave walls) and even if it contains random subsystems. ‘Design’ is inferred only for those parts of the system that reveal the order imposed by the designer. For cave art, we can analyze the paint, the shape of the paint smear, the shape of the wall, composition of the wall, etc. Each one of these separate analyses may result in separate ‘designed’ or ‘not designed’ conclusions. The ‘design’-detection algorithm shown in the attached diagram can be employed to analyze any system desired. Continue reading Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig-
is one of my favorite “creationists”, though similarly to my views, he doesn’t want to be identified with the main stream creationism…I would like to know why…
I don’t think I’m going to persuade this kind and caliber of the scientist to defend his 40+ year work of experimental mutagenesis on plants to defend anything on this crummy blog… So, what we can do, is to quote Dr. Lonnigs papers and public statements on his views on creationism, evolution, and especially the law of recurrent variation.
What is the Law of Recurrent Variation?
Dr. Winston Ewert put forward his module hypothesis, but I put forward an alternate module hypothesis at the domain and motif level of proteins. It is based actually on papers by evolutionists who have pointed out that the problem of “Promiscuous Domains” remains an unsolved problem in evolutionary biology.
When I put Promiscuous Domains on the table in the Common Design vs. Common Descent thread, the TSZ Darwinists ignored the problem and then declared victory. I viewed their non-response as evidence they didn’t understand the problem and/or preferred to ignore it.
Perhaps pictures are worth ten thousand words. From the NIH, that great source inspiration for the Intelligent Design community, we have the CDART database viewer.
From the CDART viewer, I provide a few of the thousands of diagrams that show the promiscuity of protein domains. The diagrams below show the classical zinc finger ZF-C2H2 “ZF” domain and the Plextrin Homology “PH” domains. Note how the location of domains is “shuffled” to different locations in different proteins. It’s as if proteins are made by different lego-like parts in different order and position. My preliminary look into small 4-amino acid motifs that are the target of phosphorylating kinases suggests the the problem of promiscuity goes all the way down to small motif levels.
Such promiscuity is more consistent with common design than common descent.
Continue reading
I have always been puzzled by the theistic evolution belief system. It makes absolutely no sense to me at all as it clearly seems to contradict both theism and evolution – the two fundamental beliefs it is supposedly be based on…
Why? Continue reading
For those interested in discussions of evolutionism, creationism, Intelligent Design as they impact science, philosophy and theology/worldview in society and education today, please find below a small piece of news.
In short, IDism isn’t really all that hard to counter. Most of you have done it here already countless times against IDists. As for me, I’m batting 100% against IDists in person and 99.5% against IDists online. Only Cameron Wybrow in Canada is the lone holdout. I have questions for every IDist that CSC’s John West would (not) ‘expel’ me for!
The DI is afraid of me because I saw it on the inside. But who could ever see the inside of quality, rigorous, ‘good science’ that is done ‘peacefully’, when there is no institutional centre currently available to hold such an abstract utopia, even better than IDism?
No, what is really difficult is to counter IDists who are actually TEists & ECists also at the same time. This combination is much more difficult than just arguing here with lowbrow IDists or mainly heterodox theists. And this, folks, is where you will find them: https://discourse.peacefulscience.org
Vincent J. Torley is already there and he has an offer to co-author his first scientific publication since his PhD with the site host. So it can’t be too hard to handle for TSZers since Vincent is now officially (yet?) a moderator at TSZ. So that’s a perfect introduction for you to show Peaceful Science what you think about their “Science of Adam.”
When the California-born & accented Dr. Swamidass gets the money, as he is already asking for at Peaceful Science, then let me assure the vast majority atheists here they had better be ready to buckle their belts in the North American “creation war” as Swamidass repeatedly calls it. Why? A recycled neologism known as “Genealogical Adam” is coming to a theatre near you & guess what: if your worldview doesn’t like it, then Swamidass cares. http://peacefulscience.org
Swamidass openly welcomes atheists at Peaceful Science. He even prefers them over thoughtful religious critics that don’t play ball his way, displaying why he was not long ago banned by Deborah Haarsma at BioLogos for refusing to bow to former BioLogos biology-lead and Haarsma’s current darling, Dennis Venema, who has blindly followed his Canadian counterpart Denis Lamoureux into becoming what Swamidass calls “no Adam Christians.” Let’s just say the evangelicals at BioLogos and Peaceful Science aren’t getting along right now and with the ASA meeting about to come up with “The Science of Adam” on the agenda, fireworks could result.
It’s almost as if ‘ideologically self-contradictory’ is something evangelical Protestants of the Swamidass, Venema, Lamoureux, BioLogos-variety deny they ever could be accused of themselves.
BioLogos banned Swamidass for claiming what IDist Ann Gauger did: “We could have come from two … A bottleneck of two [A&E] that is older than 500,000 years ago is possible … based on analysis of the genetic data”. What do the biological scientists here say about that?
So, Swamidass is busy preparing either a noble or an ignoble (depending on who you are) place in history by intentionally relativising Adam and Eve with Genealogical Adam. Will anyone ask him what his qualifications for becoming, finally in these previous @18 months, a ‘scientific genealogist’ as he is now claiming to be?
Go to this site, but ask him nicely. Atheists can be nice, good people about Adam and Eve most times too.
Evolution “…is as much a fact as the heat of the sun…”– Richard Dawkins
Unfortunately, what evolution no doubt is missing to be such a fact is the actual proof that evolution can do what its supporters claim it has done and can do…
Simply pointing to a fully developed organism and saying – “evolution did” – is just as good a claim as saying – “God did it, or ID must have done it”- unless there is some kind of falsifiability for the claims…Otherwise, such claims remain in the realm of optimism bias, blind faith, or simply science-fiction…and give science bad name at the same time…
Death has been on everyone’s mind at one time or another… It’s unavoidable…
Some are fascinated by death; mainly the possibility of better afterlife. Some, or the great majority of people, are frightened by it. It seems the unknown of after-death is one of the main factors causing many to tremble…
However, it turns out that Craig Venter, the pioneer of the human genome project and the supposed creator of artificial life, turned his attention and efforts toward decoding death… here
It seems obvious Venter believes that death is be caused by genetics; some genetic mutations that could be fixed and we could live forever, otherwise he wouldn’t be digging in the genome looking to fix the death code…
Ever since the implications of quantum entanglement between particles became unavoidable for physicists and cosmologists, the doubt of the accuracy or completeness of Einstein’s general and special theory of relativity became real… Einstein himself called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance” because the possibility of faster than speed of light transfer of information between two entangled particles (no matter what distance between them) would violate relativity and the fundamentals of one of the most successful theories in science…
Recently, however, several experiments have confirmed that entanglement is not only real but it seems to violate relativity.
The results of the first experiment have provided the speed of entanglement, which was measured to be at least 10.000 times faster than the speed of light. here
This is a follow up to Earth is the Center of the Universe? OP with the link to the full documentary entitled The Principle. It is really worth to watch it in its entirety just to get the sense of how cosmologist, like Lawrence Krauss, and many other scientists deliberately resist the data (verified by 3 different probes) that Axis of Evil are pointing to the special location of the Earth in the Universe…
On Uncommon Descent, poster gpuccio has been discussing “functional information”. Most of gpuccio’s argument is a conventional “islands of function” argument. Not being very knowledgeable about biochemistry, I’ll happily leave that argument to others.
But I have been intrigued by gpuccio’s use of Functional Information, in particular gpuccio’s assertion that if we observe 500 bits of it, that this is a reliable indicator of Design, as here, about at the 11th sentence of point (a):
… the idea is that if we observe any object that exhibits complex functional information (for example, more than 500 bits of functional information ) for an explicitly defined function (whatever it is) we can safely infer design.
I wonder how this general method works. As far as I can see, it doesn’t work. There would be seem to be three possible ways of arguing for it, and in the end; two don’t work and one is just plain silly. Which of these is the basis for gpuccio’s statement? Let’s investigate …
While researching the evidence for Cosmic Consciousness, the implications of the collapse of wave function, QM and so on, I came across some interesting evidence pointing to the fact that the Earth not only resides in the special place of the universe, it is the center of the universe…The evidence comes from the so-called “Axis of Evil – the earth’s ecliptic and equinoxes, and this represents a very unusual and unexpected special direction in space, a direct challenge to the Copernican Principle, which “appears to give the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than might be expected by chance.”- Wikipedia
This is a follow up to my previous OP Is Cosmic Consciousness responsible for reality?
There seems to be some confusion regarding the causes of collapse of wave function(which seems to creates reality) whether a conscious observer can collapse the wave function ONLY or can a designed robot/computer perform the same role. Instead of pointing out the facts, I’d like “the seekers of truth” to do it for themselves. Since apparently ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’, I attach 2 videos that cover 2 breakthrough experiments in the understanding of well known double-slit experiment and the implications of collapse of wave function by an observer on the nature of reality…
Joe Felsenstein, who posts and comments in The Skeptical Zone, presented the 37th Fisher Memorial Lecture on January 4, 2018. The video recording of his lecture is now available. I’d say that the cover frame, at the very least, was well worth the wait.
Excuse me for attaching to this post a brief rejoinder to a pathetic response to the lecture. Andrew Jones’s “The Law of Zero Magic” appeared in the flagship publication of the intelligent design (ID) movement, Evolution News & Science Today. The title is hugely ironic, inasmuch as the movement conceives of intelligent design as violation of a law of nature, and struggles to devise the law that is violated. Continue reading
IDists often act as though there is something surprising about the DNA code. A recent post at UD highlights a letter from Crick containing the line “Now we believe that the D.N.A. is a code.” The typical implication is that somehow it came as a surprise that DNA would involve a code.
But there was nothing new about such an idea. Indeed, what is difficult is to imagine how genetic information could be held without being coded. In 1943, a decade before DNA’s structure was revealed, Erwin Schrodinger explained how a code would work in life, writing:
THE VARIETY OF CONTENTS COMPRESSED IN THE MINIATURE CODE
It has often been asked how this tiny speck of material, nucleus of the fertilized egg, could contain an elaborate code-script involving all the future development of the organism. A well ordered association of atoms, endowed with sufficient resistivity to keep its order permanently, appears to be the only conceivable material structure that offers a variety of possible (‘isomeric’) arrangements, sufficiently large to embody a complicated system of ‘determinations’ within a small spatial boundary
Page 21 of the pdf What is Life?
Indeed, and DNA fits quite well with that description. In addition, the linear nature of the DNA code allows for a straightforward geometry for producing transcripts and eventual translation of DNA information. The fact that Crick underscores “is” before “a code” appears to be nothing but recognition that what had been predicted is what was actually discovered, a genetic code.
Of course Schrodinger, like Crick and Watson, had no doubt that life had evolved. To be sure, this does nothing to demonstrate that DNA did evolve or any such thing, just that while the IDists simply assume that a code must be designed, people who lacked their biases merely considered how a genetic code was functional within life. The DNA code is just something that well fits the requirement for compact information storage and provides for a straightforward output of that information into proteins, RNA, and other needed molecules.
The evolution of the genetic code may well involve certain affinities between RNA and amino acids, and thus may not be entirely arbitrary in its origins, but that is a subject beyond the scope of this short post. The point at present is merely that one should not be hung up on the word “code” as if that means anything about its origins, for the fact is simply that it stores and puts out information in a manner that functions well for life. The term “code” denotes something important about DNA’s function, but not about its origin.
As Tom English and others have discussed previously, there was a book published last year called Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, the authors of which are Marks, Dembski, and Ewert.
The main point of the book is stated as:
Indeed, all current models of evolution require information from an external designer to work.
(The “external designer” they are talking about is the modeler who created the model.)
Another way they state their position:
We show repeatedly that the proposed models all require inclusion of significant knowledge about the problem being solved.
Somehow, they think it needs to be shown that modelers put information and knowledge into their models. This displays a fundamental misunderstanding of models and modeling.
It is a simple fact that a model of any kind, in its entirety, comes from a modeler. Any information in the model, however one defines information, is put in the model by the modeler. All structures and behaviors of any model are results of modeling decisions made by the modeler. Models are the modelers’ conceptions of reality. It is expected that modelers will add the best information they think they have in order to make their models realistic. Why wouldn’t they? For people who actually build and use models, like engineers and scientists, the main issue is realism.
To see a good presentation on the fundamentals of modeling, I recommend the videos and handbooks available free online from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM.) “[Link]”.
For a good discussion on what it really means for a model to “work,” I recommend a paper called “Concepts of Model Verification and Validation”, which was put out by the Los Alamos Laboratories.