Month: July 2009
New Scientist and Jerry Coyne’s Responses to ID Advocate Thomas Jefferson: Cases of Necromancy and Alzheimer’s
Responses from the Darwin faithful to anything touching upon intelligent design are often so thoughtless it takes your breath away. I guess this is how they manage to stay impervious to the evidentiary challenge to their religion — they just don’t think it through, or even read it. A single article in a newspaper or journal taxes their ability simply to read what a person says and respond to that, rather than to what they imagine he would say. Consider the cases of Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne. When Stephen C. Meyer wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Thomas Jefferson as a proto-ID supporter, outraged science journalist Callaway at the New Scientist couldn’t even mount an argument. He Read More ›
Ken Miller’s Only a Theory Attacks Straw Man Version of Intelligent Design on Common Descent
A friend recently wrote me an e-mail asking if I had any critiques of Ken Miller’s 2009 book Only a Theory. Writing back to him, I observed that the book has many problems, but that I would offer a few quick responses to two or three of its most egregious errors. This serious of three posts (or three topics, really) will look at three errors and mischaracterizations of intelligent design (ID) in Only a Theory, starting with Miller’s mischaracterization of ID and common descent. On page 51, Miller states: What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the Read More ›
Stephen Meyer in the Boston Globe: Thomas Jefferson’s support for intelligent design
Stephen Meyer has an interesting op-ed in today’s Boston Globe about founding father Thomas Jefferson’s view of intelligent design. A view which Meyer argues comes from the scientific evidence, not from religious authority, and which is foundational to our nation’s adherence to inalienable rights for all: Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.” The “ultimate cause” and “fabricator of all things” that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design” of life’s endlessly diverse Read More ›
The Frailty of the Darwinian Hypothesis, Part 2
In the previous post I described the debate among evolutionary biologists over the so-called adaptive hypothesis. Some biologists believe that natural selection has the power to drive evolution in adaptive directions, and that most changes that we observe in organisms are there because they confer some adaptive benefit. Other biologists believe that most of the changes we see in organisms over time are due to neutral, non-adaptive processes. You don’t need to take my word for the existence of this debate. Michael Lynch, an eminent evolutionary biologist, lays out the case against the power of natural selection in a paper called “The Frailty of the Adaptive Hypothesis,” 1 published a few years ago for an evolutionary symposium. In it he Read More ›
Signature In The Cell Continues to Garner Attention
Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell, continues to get lots of coverage. Dr. Meyer was recently interviewed for CNS and you can watch a video of the entire interview on the SITC website here. Also, over at Uncommon Descent Robert Deyes is reviewing the book chapter by chapter. When the 19th century chemist Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea in the lab using simple chemistry, he set in motion the ball that would ultimately knock down the then-pervasive ‘Vitalistic’ view of biology. Life’s chemistry, rather than being bound by immaterial ‘vital forces’ could indeed by artificially made. While Charles Darwin offered little insight on how life originated, several key scientists would later jump on Wohler’s ‘Eureka’-style discovery through public proclamations Read More ›