Category: Life Sciences
Leading Origin of Life Researcher: “Genetic Information More or Less Came out of Nowhere”
Earlier this summer we highlighted Susan Mazur’s reporting about the Altenberg 16 conference, in which Mazur wrote that there are “hundreds of other evolutionary scientists (non-Creationists) who contend that natural selection is politics, not science, and that we are in a quagmire because of staggering commercial investment in a Darwinian industry built on an inadequate theory.” Many Darwinists, needless to say, did not like Mazur’s reporting, and they attacked her harshly. They probably are also not going to like Mazur’s latest article, where she interviews University of California, Santa Cruz origin of life researcher David Deamer. When asking Deamer about the “origin of the gene,” he replied, “I think genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance Read More ›
“Large Scale” Function for Endogenous Retroviruses: Intelligent Design Prediction Fulfilled While Another Darwinist Argument Bites the Dust
ID predicts function because the basis for ID’s predictions is observations of how intelligent agents design things, and intelligent agents tend to design objects that perform some kind of function.
The Human Eye Is so Poorly Designed That Engineers Mimic It
How many times have we heard the old Darwinist canard that the human eye is “poorly designed”? As the argument goes, the vertebrate eye is poorly designed because our photoreceptor cells face away from the incoming light and the optic nerve extends over them, allegedly blocking some light. William Dembski and Sean McDowell’s new book Understanding Intelligent Design has an easily accessible and forceful rebuttal to this poorly designed Darwinist objection to ID, explaining that the design of the human eye is actually quite optimal: The photoreceptors in the human eye are oriented away from incoming light and placed behind nerves through which light must pass before reaching the photoreceptors. Why? A visual system needs three things: speed, sensitivity, and Read More ›
The Implications of the Hypothetical Discovery of Martian Life for Intelligent Design
I recently received an e-mail asking about the most recent Mars lander (Phoenix) and the implications for intelligent design (ID) if amino acids, proteins, or life were found on Mars. The person asked, “would this not mean that Neo darwinism is correct and that life occurs if you ‘just add water’?” I’ve posted a modified version of my reply to this person’s question below: These are complex questions you ask, but a scientific “conclusion” is only as good as the starting assumptions that underlie the scientific reasoning involved in making that conclusion. Now I am all for searching out the universe to determine whether life exists outside of Earth. But at present, the research that searches for extra-terrestrial life — Read More ›
Alfred Russel Wallace: Celebrating the Early Days of Natural Selection or Intelligent Design?
There’s a longstanding debate among scholars about whether it was Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, or someone else who first conceived of the idea of natural selection. Many credit Alfred Russel Wallace, who with Darwin co-presented their theory of natural selection to the Linnean Society of London, exactly 150 years ago today. (For a nice news piece on this topic, see here.) Some people celebrated this event by proclaiming, as Johnjoe McFadden did yesterday in the London Guardian, that “Darwin and Wallace destroyed the strongest evidence left in the 19th century for the existence of a deity.” Darwin might have agreed, since he once wrote that “[t]here seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and Read More ›