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What is Intelligent Design?
Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.The new war is not about evolution and creation, but about Darwinism and something called ‘intelligent design.’ Intelligent design maintains that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than unguided natural processes. Since ID relies on evidence rather than on scripture or religious doctrines, it is not creationism or a form of religion. ID restricts itself to a simple question: does the evidence point to design in nature? ID does not deny the reality of variation and natural selection; it just denies that 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 ›
Myers’ Old Ideas
P.Z. Myers takes me to task for this irony that I recently pointed out : the data he cited to argue that Christian faith and prayer were irrelevant to advances in cancer care actually came from a children’s hospital– St. Jude’s Hospital– that was founded explicitly on Christian faith. In fact, St. Jude’s Hospital was founded explicitly on a prayer. Myers sneers at my observation, and he extols science and mocks the culture of faith from which modern science and medicine arose:
Science’s Blind Spot Is Still There
When scientists decide they know what the right answer is, despite what the scientific evidence may indicate, then bad things can happen. This was the theme of my recent book Science’s Blind Spot, where I explored the history and consequences of the mandate for naturalism in science. For about two hundred years before Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution, theologians, philosophers and scientific investigators promoted a series of religious and philosophical arguments that mandated purely naturalistic explanations for the history of the world. Darwin’s book, where he used a plethora of these metaphysical arguments for his otherwise scientifically weak theory of evolution, was something of a capstone for the movement. The foundation was in place, and as one historian Read More ›
More Similarities between Flagellum and Human-Designed Machines
In 1998, Darwinian biologist David J. DeRosier stated in the journal Cell, “More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human.” Firstly, it functions like a human-designed rotary engine that propels a bacterium through a liquid medium in the same way a propeller powers submarine through the ocean. A website devoted to rotary engine enthusiasts has observed that when it comes to the Rotary engine, “Nature always does it first.” The flagellum is basically a rotary engine, with a motor, a rotor, a stator, a bearing, a u-joint, and a propeller. Now it turns out that the flagellum has a clutch. According to recent Research Highlights from Nature: “A protein that allows the soil bacterium Read More ›