Month: July 2010
Granville Sewell on his book In The Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design
Univeristy of Texas, El Paso mathematician Granville Sewell has written a book of essays spanning a wide variety of issues related to the debate over evolution. Besides biological evolution, it also deals with the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and even design in mathematics. Here he talks a bit about some of his views from In The Beginning And Other Essays on Intelligent Design
Can Neo-Darwinian Processes Account for Complexity in Nature?
In their critique of William Dembski, Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit write, “there is abundant circumstantial evidence that Darwinian processes can account for complexity in nature, but Dembski excludes this evidence because it does not pass his video-camera certainty test.” This badly misrepresents Dembski’s argument. Looking at all the theoretical work Dembski is doing to test the ability of Darwinian processes to generate specified complexity (see his papers at www.evoinfo.org) it should be clear that Dembski is NOT demanding “video-camera certainty” but rather is willing to test the ability of present-day causes to generate high CSI empirically, and theoretically, and then apply his findings to make inferences from the historical record. That’s exactly how historical scientists ought to study these Read More ›
We Hold Some Truths To Be Self Evident
When we celebrate our country’s independence on July 4th, the day may resonate with many Americans more powerfully than in other recent years. The nation’s political mood is increasingly, well, independent. Voters are fed up with incumbent politicians and reigning political parties. This accounts for the unlikely bestselling books that keep shooting up out of what might seem like nowhere — previously obscure biographies of the Founders that pose fundamental questions about the role of our government and what direction the nation is headed. In a welcome development, Americans want to refresh their acquaintance with the sources of our rights as citizens. Yet there is one source, more basic than any other, that so far has not received the attention Read More ›
Is Messenger RNA Regulation Controlled by an Irreducibly Complex Pathway?
What we know about the complexity of the cellular information storage, processing and retrieval mechanisms continues to increase exponentially, and at an unprecedented rate. Almost on a daily basis, new papers are published revealing the ingenuity of the elaborate mechanisms by which the cell processes information — processes and mechanisms that bespeak design and continue to elude explanation by Darwinian means. For how exactly could such a system – apparently, an irreducibly complex one – be accounted for in terms of traditional Darwinian selective pressure? A new paper has just been published in Molecular Cell, in which the researchers, Karginov et al. reported their discovery that messenger RNA (mRNA) can be targeted for destruction by several different molecules. According to Read More ›