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Last Chance to Apply to Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design
Finals might be over, but there’s still one deadline looming for college and graduate students. Applications for Discovery Insitute’s 2010 Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are due this Friday, April 16. These two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture run from July 9-17, 2010 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology). These seminars allow students not only to learn about ID, but to become equipped to make a difference as a part of the ID movement. Leading lights from the intelligent design community such as Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Stephen Read More ›
Roger Penrose on Cosmic Fine-Tuning: “Incredible Precision in the Organization of the Initial Universe”
I have no reason to believe that the acclaimed physicist Roger Penrose supports intelligent design. But he’s definitely not afraid to take on critics of the argument for fine-tuning. In the video below, he explains that the fine-tuning of the initial entropy of the universe is this precise:
Ida’s Bust Maroons Retroactive Confessions of Ignorance about Primate Evolution
As I’ve discussed before, it’s often only when evolutionists think they have found some “missing link” that they feel safe enough to admit how little they actually knew about the alleged evolutionary transition in question. What happens when the link goes bust–as we’ve recently discussed is the case with Ida? We’re left with lots of admissions of ignorance about evolution and no links to fill the now-exposed gap. This is why Colin Tudge’s book about Ida, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little Brown & Co, 2009), is so intriguing. He thought he had a missing link to explain the early evolution of primates on the line that supposedly led to humans, so the book is filled with would-be retroactive Read More ›
“Hype and Over-Interpretation” Causing Family Feud Over New Hominid Fossil (Updated)
Long ago a wise king solved an interfamily dispute with a simple solution: split the baby. Now paleoanthropologists are fighting–with little resolution in sight–about how to interpret newly discovered hominid fossils, which comprise about 130 bones from multiple individuals. Focused on a single juvenile specimen, the debate is over whether the fossils represent human evolutionary ancestors, just a new species that split off and went extinct, or another previously known species of little significance to human evolution. While many news articles are touting the fossil as a human ancestor or even a “missing link” (see, for example, AOL news or the London Telegraph), what’s encouraging is a couple sources in the mainstream media (though just a couple) are functioning like Read More ›
William Dembski, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab Take on Dawkins’ “WEASEL” Simulation in New Peer-Reviewed Paper
A new peer-reviewed paper continues the work published by William Dembski, Robert Marks, and others affiliated with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. (Check out their new revamped website at EvoInfo.org.) The authors argue that Richard Dawkins’ “METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL” evolutionary algorithm starts off with large amounts of active information–information intelligently inserted by the programmer to aid the search. This paper covers all of the known claims of operation of the WEASEL algorithm and shows that in all cases, active information is used. Dawkins’ algorithm can best be understood as using a “Hamming Oracle” as follows: “When a sequence of letters is presented to a Hamming oracle, the oracle responds with the Hamming distance equal to the number of letter mismatches in the sequence.” Read More ›