19Jun 2020 by Post

Save the Washington Monument. But How?

BioEssays, censorship, Center for Science & Culture, cosmos, creator, Declaration of Independence, demoralization, Discovery Institute, Evolution, Founders, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, human dignity, Human Zoos, Intelligent Design, Internet, Jefferson Memorial, John West, monuments, police, Science Uprising, scientists, statues, Stephen Meyer, Thomas Jefferson, universe, vandalism, Washington DC, Washington Monument, YouTube videos
At dinner recently I said to my kids that I’m glad they’ve seen the Washington Monument in person because I’m not sure it will still be there in a year. This was following nights of rioting when news helicopters showed fires in the capital obscuring the structure. My oldest son scoffed. “They’re not talking about taking down the Washington Monument!” “Not yet,” I said.  Nobody would have predicted all the changes we’ve witnessed in 2020, what seems to be evidence of national demoralization. Freedom of assembly and of worship canceled overnight across swaths of the country, with hardly a protest? Revolutionary unrest in the cities? Statues and other monuments defaced or torn down? Serious discussion of abolishing the police? What will come next? Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture understands…
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18Jun 2020 by Post

Chance, Necessity, and Design

automobiles, chance, chassis, critics, design, design detection, differential, doors, explanatory filter, Intelligent Design, Jonathan Waldman, Joshua Swamidass, kinetic theory of heat, necessity, probability, repudiation, retirement, rust, Rust: The Longest War, Sean McDowell, shocks, Uncommon Descent
ID supporters continue to send me emails about Josh Swamidass. The latest hammers on a comment I made in 2008 at Uncommon Descent, namely: “I’ve pretty much dispensed with the EF [Explanatory Filter]. It suggests that chance, necessity, and design are mutually exclusive. They are not. Straight CSI is clearer as a criterion for design detection.” I would not write that now. In my view the filter is just fine and it neither conflates nor falsely differentiates the three modes of explanation (chance, necessity, and design). My comment back then should be seen as an unnecessary concession to critics, not as undercutting the filter per se. To properly use the Explanatory Filter, it is vital to identify what exactly one is trying to explain. Take a rusted automobile. In Jonathan Waldman’s wonderful…
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17Jun 2020 by Post

Trapped in the Naturalistic Parabola

abiogenesis, American Federation of Teachers, cell phone, Chemistry, Evolution, evolutionists, Faraday cage, federal courts, geometry, hydrolysis, Intelligent Design, Ludwick Fleck, Luke, methodological naturalism, National Academy of Sciences, Naturalistic Parabola, Oparin-Haldane model, origin of life, Origin of Species, parabola, paradigm, Prado Museum, proteins, reducing atmosphere, San Francisco, Sisyphus, smoked herring, strange loop, Thomas Kuhn, Titian
The principles of an alien [thought] collective are, if noticed at all, felt to be arbitrary and their possible legitimacy as begging the question. The alien way of thought seems like mysticism. The questions it rejects will often be regarded as the most important ones, its explanations as proving nothing or as missing the point, its problems as often unimportant or meaningless trivialities.Ludwik Fleck, 1935  When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.T.S. Kuhn, 1970 …a wide chasm has been fixed between us, so that those who want to cross from this side to you cannot do so, nor can they cross from your side to us.Luke 16:26 Don’t…
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16Jun 2020 by Post

Intelligent Design YouTube Festival — June 16-30, 2020

appeal, Center for Science & Culture, Intelligent Design, movie producers, video production, Videos, YouTube videos
Starting later today, we will be celebrating 15 YouTube videos produced by the Center for Science & Culture that have received more than 100,000 views each. For 15 days, we will be highlighting one video per day and sharing something about the story behind each video. We are highlighting these videos in the hope that you might become one of our “movie producers” and provide funds to help us create even more videos in the months ahead. Keep watch for the first video that will be posted later today. Please donate now to our video production fund! The post Intelligent Design YouTube Festival — June 16-30, 2020 appeared first on Evolution News.
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14Jun 2020 by Post

Weekend Reading: Heretics and Inquisitors

BioEssays, censorship, creationism, crime, Culture, Darwinists, Douglas Axe, establishment, Evolution News, free speech, Günter Bechly, Heresy, history, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, Italy, Middle Ages, mystery, novels, Politics, Richard Sternberg, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, William of Baskerville
Years ago, reading Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, I got bogged down early on and stopped. Rereading it now, I can’t imagine what I found boring. It’s great! A learned crime-mystery about murders in a 14th-century Italian abbey, it deals in part with the relationship between heretics and inquisitors. What Eco relates (via his protagonist William of Baskerville) has a lot of contemporary relevance. Intelligent design is a heresy against the backdrop of conformist evolutionary thinking, and ID proponents must ever beware of Darwinist inquisitors. (See the recent threat of censorship from the biology journal BioEssays.) Eco observes that inquisitions generate heretics, rather than stamping them out. That is true. Many of the leading ID scientists (Axe, Sternberg, Bechly, and others) came to us because they were…
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13Jun 2020 by Post

Billions of Missing Links: Electricity and Bioluminescence

Aequorea victoria, Billions of Missing Links, bioluminescence, eels, electrical impulses, Evolution, Geoffrey Simmons, ID The Future, Intelligent Design, jellyfish, knee jerk reaction, knife fish
On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear about electricity and bioluminescence, as highlighted in Dr. Geoffrey Simmons in his book Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can’t Explain. Listen in to learn about how a knee jerk reaction, eels, and the knife fish all use electrical impulses.  Download the podcast or listen to it here. Photo attribution: Aequorea victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish, by Sierra Blakely. The post Billions of Missing Links: Electricity and Bioluminescence appeared first on Evolution News.
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12Jun 2020 by Post

Origin Stories — RNA, DNA, and a Dose of Imagination

abiogenesis, breakdown, building blocks, Cambridge University, components, cross-reactions, cytidine, deoxyadenosine, deoxyinosine, DNA, early Earth, Engineering, Evolution, Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell, genes, genetic alphabet, intelligence, Intelligent Design, naturalism, origin of life, polynucleotides, prebiotic environment, primordial soup, RNA, RNA world, self-driving cars, self-replication, silicon, unguided natural processes, uridine
Editor’s note: Eric Anderson is an attorney, software company executive, and co-author of the recently released book, Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell.  A new paper in Nature seeks to shed light on life’s origins from non-life on the early Earth, that is, on abiogenesis. Several outlets have picked up the story, including New Scientist. Phys.org explains that the research, led by Cambridge scientists, “shows for the first time how some of the building blocks of both DNA and RNA could have spontaneously formed and co-existed in the ‘primordial soup’ on Earth.” My purpose is not to question the research protocol or the results. No doubt the work is impeccable and the results as described. I am willing to assume that the researchers recreated early Earth conditions and demonstrated…
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11Jun 2020 by Post

New Video: Why Evolution Is Different

cinematographer, Darwinism, Evolution, Fundacja En Arche, Intelligent Design, Istanbul, Joseph Le Conte, Polish, species, video, Why Evolution Is Different
After presenting a talk entitled “Why Evolution Is Different” at a meeting in Istanbul in May 2017, I turned my presentation into a homemade video. The talk, and the video, looked at the two main reasons why such an extremely implausible theory as Darwinism remains so popular in the scientific world — “Le Conte’s axiom” and the similarities between species. It shows why neither proves the absence of design. (You are all very familiar with Le Conte’s axiom, though not by that name!)  In the three years since, I have continued to develop this video, and recently I enlisted the help of a skilled cinematographer who has done a magnificent job of turning it into a “real film,” which you can see below. The video is currently being translated into Polish by Fundacja…
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10Jun 2020 by Post

Information, Specified Complexity, and the Explanatory Filter

chance, Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Daniel Reeves, Discovery Institute, functional information, ID The Future, Intelligent Design, molecular biology, necessity, specified complexity
On a new episode of ID the Future, listen to the third and final portion of a talk given at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. Daniel Reeves, Educational Outreach Coordinator at Discovery Institute, rounds out his explanation of intelligent design theory. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Far from being “Gee whiz, that’s complicated; it must be designed!” the theory relies on well-defined concepts such as specified complexity and an explanatory filter that allows one to distinguish designed events from chance, necessity, or a combination of the two. The key lies in the molecular biological realm: detecting functional information.  Photo: Daniel Reeves, by Nathan Jacobson. The post Information, Specified Complexity, and the Explanatory Filter appeared first on Evolution News.
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08Jun 2020 by Post

Make Like a Scorpion, and Other Arachnid Designs

amebocytes, American Chemical Society, arachnids, Australia, cancer, cephalothorax, City of Hope Cancer Center, daddy-longlegs, death stalker, Delaware, dragline silk, horseshoe crabs, Huwentoxin-IV, immunotherapy, Intelligent Design, Journal of Natural Products, Jurgen Otto, Limulus Amebocyte Lysate, mating season, mites, Nature Communications, peacock spiders, pedipalps, scorpions, spider web, spider-silk, spiders, Tachypleus gigas, tarantulas, ticks, toxins, University of Melbourne, University of Queensland, venom, β-sheet
Arachnids (a class of invertebrate arthropods, most with six pairs of appendages, of which four are usually for locomotion) make up some of the scariest creepy-crawlies to most people. The class includes spiders, daddy-longlegs, mites, ticks, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs. They have simple eyes, unlike the compound eyes of most insects. Also different from insects, arachnids have a fused head and thorax (the cephalothorax) and abdomen; the cephalothorax is often covered by a hard carapace.  The first pair of appendages in spiders, the pedipalps, help hold prey; in scorpions, they act as pincers. Lacking jaws, spiders suck the juice out of their prey and discard the exoskeleton. Some hunting spiders have exceptional vision, with eight eyes looking in all directions. Horseshoe crabs, only recently added to the class of arachnids…
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