Category: Science
Feser on Heisenberg on Act and Potency
In my view, the most important question in the ID-Darwinism debate is this: what do we mean by design? All participants in the debate agree that living things manifest design of some sort; Darwinists assert that the design is unintelligent, the product of ateleological genetic variation and natural selection. ID proponents assert that design implies an intelligent source. Philosophers of an Aristotelian and Thomist stripe assert that teleology pervades nature, but insist that a proper understanding of teleology entails a metaphysical understanding of nature (hylomorphism) that differs from the metaphysical presuppositions of most ID advocates, who generally accept (implicitly if not explicitly) the mechanical view of nature shared by materialists. In my view, we need to integrate our understanding of Read More ›
The Greatest Show on Earth — Another Circus Comes to Town
The New Scientist may sound like a scholarly science publication, but in covering news it often revels in uninformed and unprofessional attacks on critics of Darwinian evolution. So it is somewhat of a surprise to see the publication produce a not-so-veiled pan of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins’ new book. If the evident disappointment expressed by science filmmaker Randy Olson is at all valid, Dawkins’ resemblance to the creator of the original “Greatest Show on Earth,” 19th Century circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, is confirmed. Dawkins doesn’t address his real adversaries. He simply ignores Stephen Meyer, whose Signature in the Cell is now leading the science book parade in several Amazon categories. He just dubs opponents creationist reactionaries and Read More ›
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 ›
Examples of Biomimetics in Recent Issue of Leading Scientific Journal
A few weeks ago I discussed how the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A devoted its April, 2009 issue to the topic of biomimicry. The issue was introduced with a review by Bharat Bhushan, trying to deflect any possibility of intelligent design overtones from biomimicry by repeatedly referring to the power of “nature” to “evolve” these technologically useful structures. I concluded that “Dr. Bhushan’s chosen blindness to the intelligent design implications of his field does not negate the many dozens of instances of biomimicry discussed in his article and other articles in this recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A.” What follows is a list of some of the fascinating examples Read More ›
Behind the Scenes With Darwin’s Dilemma: An Interview With Producer Lad Allen
From ID the Future: Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future Anika Smith interviews Illustra Media producer Lad Allen on the new film out next week, Darwin’s Dilemma. As the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, Darwin’s Dilemma represents a capstone for Allen, who traversed the globe to present the story of Darwin’s journey to his theory of evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, the nagging problem for Darwin in the fossil record that has become a crisis for evolution today. Listen in as Lad Allen shares with us what it’s like to shoot on location in four continents and work with scientists like Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Meyer.