Month: June 2010
Intelligent Design Proponents Toil More than the Critics: A Response to Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit
A few years back Dr. Wesley Elsberry and Dr. Jeffrey Shallit co-wrote an article, “Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s ‘Complex Specified Information’,” in response to William Dembski’s 2001 book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. No Free Lunch was something of a sequel to Dembski’s first major book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), but Dembski’s work has come a long way since that time. In this regard–and it’s not Elsberry or Shallit’s fault per se, this is just how things go–their critique is now somewhat out-dated. The computational research of Dembski and Robert Marks at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (as well as the Biologic Institute) has preempted Read More ›
Stephen Meyer Describes His Definition of Intelligent Design From Signature In The Cell
Definitions of intelligent design used in the mainstream media are either so superficial as to be meaningless, or completely wrong in stating that ID is creationism and anti-evolutionary. One of the best basic definitions is from www.intelligentdesign.org: The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. In his groundbreaking book, Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer expands on this definition and builds a strong, scientific case for the theory of intelligent design. Here is a short video of Meyer explaining his definition of ID as he used it in his book.
The Comment that Chris Mooney’s Discover Magazine Blog Won’t Publish
In May, I wrote an article on Evolution News & Views commenting on Darwinian Atheists Lecturing Religious People on Proper Belief in God. Chris Mooney then wrote a response, and I then tried to submit a comment in reply. For some reason, perhaps innocent, perhaps not–I don’t really know–Chris Mooney’s Discover Magazine Blog refused to publish the following comment from me: Chris, you make hay that my blog post is apparently posted on some “BibleProphecyUpdate” website. You then say “Wow.” For the record, I’ve no idea what “BibleProphecyUpdate” is, nor do I know anything about them. I originally posted my blog at Evolution News & Views (ENV) — just follow the link from my name. From your post here today, Read More ›
The Recapitulation Myth
Casey Luskin recently posted two blogs showing that textbooks still misuse Haeckel’s long-discredited embryo drawings when attempting to provide evidence for Darwinian evolution (see here and here). Luskin provided ample documentation to demonstrate that these drawings are still printed in some recent textbooks. Over at The Panda’s Thumb blog, apologists for Darwinian theory have defended (see here and here) Ernst Haeckel from the charge of fraud and have argued, albeit unconvincingly, that, in principle, the concept of recapitulation is a valid one.According to Nick Matzke: Haeckel didn’t ignore the differences in embryos in the earliest period just after fertilization (differences which are visually significant but mostly fairly trivial, due to the different amounts of yolk in different vertebrate eggs).
Promoting Intelligent Design to the Spanish-Speaking World
In the latest ID the Future Podcast, I interview Mario Lopez, founder of the Organización Internacional para el Avance Científico del Diseño Inteligente (OIACDI), a group dedicated to promoting awareness about intelligent design (ID) to the Spanish speaking community. The group’s website, OIACDI.org, contains a variety of online resources in Spanish, including articles, news updates, and an ID FAQ in Spanish. OIACDI also recently published a book, Diseño Inteligente: Hacia Un Nuevo Paradigma Científico, which contains articles by leading ID thinkers like William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, and Stephen Meyer translated into Spanish. As discussed in the podcast interview with Mr. Lopez, a large part of OIACDI’s goal is to network with Spanish-speaking scientists, assisting them in making contributions Read More ›