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Article in Philosophy Journal Critiques Self-Organization Models and Darwinian Evolution
University of British Columbia at Vancouver philosophy professor Richard Johns has published an article in the philosophy journal Synthese titled “titled “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result,” which argues that there are “limitations on the kinds of structure than can self-organise.” He defines a self-organized object as follows: 1. The appearance of the object does not require a special, “fine-tuned” initial state. 2. There is no need for interaction with an external system. 3. The object is likely to appear in a reasonably short time. (Richard Johns, “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result,” Synthese (Sept. 9, 2010).) Johns’ primary argument is to prove a “limitative theorem” that certain types of objects cannot self-organize through the laws of nature: Read More ›
NCSE’s Joshua Rosenau on Abortion and Murder
Joshua Rosenau — the National Center for Science Education’s Program and Policy Director– and I have had a spirited discussion abort human rights and abortion. On abortion Rosenau hews to the materialist/Darwinist code of ethics: human rights belong to the autonomous and to the strong. Not to children in the womb. But even Rosenau is skittish about the manifest venality of the pro-abortion argument: “First, nothing I’ve written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don’t have moral status as people.” Huh? Rosenau asserts that it is moral for the mother to kill her unborn child… if she doesn’t want him. Could there be a more explicit denial of moral status to a person — Read More ›
New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Darwinian Evolution
Over recent months, papers challenging key elements of Darwinian theory — the kind of papers which are supposed not to exist — have increasingly been slipping through the net and finding their way into the peer-reviewed literature. One such paper, “Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?,” authored by Joseph Esfandier Hannon Bozorgmeh and published online last week in the journal, Complexity, challenges the standard gene duplication/divergence model regarding the origin of evolutionary novelty. The abstract reports, All life depends on the biological information encoded in DNA with which to synthesize and regulate various peptide sequences required by an organism’s cells. Hence, an evolutionary model accounting for the diversity of life needs to Read More ›
Peer-Reviewed Research Paper on Plant Biology Favorably Cites Intelligent Design and Challenges Darwinian Evolution
A new original research paper on mutagenesis comprising 240,000 plants in the journal Floriculture and Ornamental Biotechnology favorably cites to “intelligent design proponents,” including Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Stephen Meyer, as advocating one of various legitimate “scientific theories on the origin of species.” The paper was authored by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, a recently retired biologist from the Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany who investigates the origin of certain features of flowering plants, or angiosperms. Citing to skeptics of neo-Darwinism such as Behe and “the almost 900 scientists of the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” the paper notes that: Many of these researchers also raise the question (among others), why — even after inducing literally billions of Read More ›
William Dembski and Robert Marks Publish (Another) Peer-Reviewed Scientific Paper Supporting No Free Lunch Theorems
A peer-reviewed scientific paper published in 2010 by William Dembski and Robert Marks of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab supports no free lunch theorems. Published in Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics and titled “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” the paper’s abstract states that unless one has information about a target, search engines often fail: “Needle-in-the-haystack problems look for small targets in large spaces. In such cases, blind search stands no hope of success.” Their principle of Conservation of Information holds that “any search technique will work, on average, as well as blind search.” However, in such a case “[s]uccess requires an assisted search. But whence the assistance required for a Read More ›