Month: September 2009
Discover Magazine Fails With Miller’s Failure To Refute Behe
This latest installment of my ongoing responses to Ken Miller regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade will critically analyze Professor Miller’s citation of a 2008 paper co-authored by blood clotting expert Russell Doolittle. Citing to Doolittle, Miller claims that the lamprey lacks blood clotting components that Michael Behe, in Darwin’s Black Box, actually did describe as being part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade. The problem for Miller is that Doolittle’s conclusion was based on there allegedly being only one gene in the lamprey homologous to blood clotting factors V or VIII, but Doolittle’s reported data belies that conclusion: it shows there were multiple potential homologues for those factors — including at least Read More ›
Dawkins vs. Armstrong
Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that “we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s “Mangler of Theology” Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant.Armstrong:
Biologist Jonathan Wells: Fossil Evidence Deepens Darwin’s Dilemma
As Jonathan Wells reminds us in his new article, “Deepening Darwin’s Dilemma,” 2009 is a year of anniversaries for evolution — not just for Darwin and The Origin, but also the centennial of Charles Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale. With Darwin’s Dilemma coming out next week and premiering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Dr. Wells’ article couldn’t be more timely. As he explains in the film and will be on hand to explain in person on September 29, Darwin saw the Cambrian explosion as a serious argument against his theory, but he countered it by supposing “that fossils of the ancestors of Cambrian animals once existed but were destroyed…The discovery of microscopic and soft-bodied Precambrian fossils makes Read More ›
Screening Darwin’s Dilemma at Sam Noble Museum of Natural History Sept. 29
For those of you in Oklahoma, two events two weeks from now are bringing intelligent design to your doorstep. First, Stephen C. Meyer will give a free lecture at the University of Oklahoma on September 28. The next day is the Southwestern premiere of Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History September 29th. Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. The screening is sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Read More ›
Reducible Versus Irreducible Systems and Darwinian Versus Non-Darwinian Processes
Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine.” As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored. Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s Read More ›