Intelligent Design

Early in the history of this blog, I had a running gag that I'd use every now and then. Basically, it involved humorously extravagant descriptions of how I wanted to hide my face behind a paper bag in sheer embarrassment at the antics of fellow physicians, particularly fellow surgeons. Over time, the gag evolved to my expressing a mock desire to hide my visage behind a metal Doctor Doom-style mask, again, over sheer embarrassment over the idiocy of my colleagues about a scientific issue, again, usually evolution. Sadly, creationist physicians are a very common source of such embarrassment,…

As an alternative to biblical creationism, Intelligent Design infers a less obtrusive God to explain life on Earth. This deity doesn't hurl bolts of lightning, unless it's with the express purpose of sparking abiogenesis in the primordial soup. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses probabilistic arguments against the likelihood of complex organisms, explaining that even the most improbable-seeming outcome of natural selection is more or less inevitable. As a flawed analogy, he imagines flipping a coin 500 times. This will always manifest a sequence of heads and tails that only had a…

Aristotle thought that there could be no lasting void in the natural order, that any emptiness would be instantaneously filled. Of course Aristotle was full of batty ideas. But this one came to be rephrased by philosophers and Vulcans alike as "nature abhors a vacuum," enduring as a powerful metaphor if not a precisely factual truth. In terms of critical thinking, scientists too abhor a vacuum, and are usually eager to fill in the blanks. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes a review of long-established brain anatomy, freshened with primary colors and a hypothesis that makes no sense.…

The following is an entry from the Esoteric Programming Language project (see link below): HERE is the site. If you go check it out, don't miss the programming langauge designed for Orang Utans, called Ook! Hat Tip: Ryan Jean

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA fired him for performance reasons. Ars Technica's John Timmer has the story: Coppedge had worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, starting as a contractor in 1996, and later becoming a full-time employee. But one of the projects he pursued on his own time was the promotion of intelligent design, the notion that the Universe and, most prominently, life itself, is too orderly to have come about without a designer. (Like many others in that movement, Coppedge is a self-identified evangelical Christian.)\ In 2009, he apparently got a bit aggressive about…

Have you ever wondered if creationism was intelligently designed? Most of my colleagues tend to dismiss creationism as generally nutty and not worth bothering about. But, every now and then, we did get the odd situation with a few students who disagree or state legislatures that get a little confused about the definition of science. This video lecture is a bit long, but definitely interesting.

tags: The Laryngeal Nerve of the Giraffe is Proof of Natural Selection, animals, giraffe, evolution, creationism, intelligent design, dissection, necropsy, autopsy, recurrent laryngeal nerve pathway, vagus nerve, cranial nerve X, evolutionary legacy, Richard Dawkins, streaming video This video, including comments by Richard Dawkins, documents a necropsy (an autopsy on an animal other than a human) carried out in a classroom on a giraffe. In this video, we follow the pathway of the recurrent (inferior) laryngeal nerve, an important nerve that is a branch of the Vagus nerve (tenth cranial nerve…

It has often been written on this blog and elsewhere that the mark of a true crank is hatred of the scientific consensus, be it consensus regarding the theory of evolution, the science that says homeopathy is impossible, anthropogenic global warming; various areas of science-based medicine; or the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Perhaps the most famous expression of distrust of a scientific consensus is the famous speech by Michael Crichton, in which he famously said: Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science…

Accoring to Aubrea Wagner, the 17 year old winner of the Christian World View essay contest in which students were asked to write an essay on the following theme: Write a letter to Charles Darwin explaining why you believe biblical creationism is more plausible and reasonable than Darwin's theory of evolution. Aubrea's essay is here in PDF form. The web site with other essays, the rules of the contest, and additional information is here. I invite you to review this essay and comment on its veracity and validity. Hat tip: Scott Lohman

For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for information theory stuff. I really don't deserve it: Jeff Shallit at Recursivity knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best. Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong. In Kitzmiller, the intelligent design folks didn't just lose; they utterly humiliated themselves. But Casey has taken it on himself to…

tags: religion, IDiots, satire, parody, comedy, humor, fucking hilarious, Hitler, DOWNFALL, streaming video The so-called Discovery Institute is a pretentious über-Christian disguise for creationism and an ultra-Conservative social agenda called The Wedge Strategy. So-called Intelligent Design theory is plagiarized from William Paley's long-refuted Blind Watchmaker argument, and is merely creationism in a not-so-cunning disguise. Having neither facts nor logic at their disposal, the polemicists of the so-called Discovery Institute have been forced to resort to lies and subterfuge. One of…

An alert reader pointed me at href="http://www.uncommondescent.com/philosophy/what-is-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">a recent post over at Uncommon Descent by a guy who calls himself "niwrad", which argues (among other things) that life is non-computable. In fact, it basically tries to use computability as the basis of Yet Another Sloppy ID Argument (TM). As you might expect, it's garbage. But it's garbage that's right up my alley! It's not an easy post to summarize, because frankly, it's pretty incoherent. As you'll see when we starting looking at the sections, niwrad contradicts…

For those who have slightly better memory of recent events than an average gerbil, you'll surely remember that not too long ago, the Intelligent Design folks, with the help of Ben Stein, put together a whole movie about how evilutionists are all a bunch of evil fascists, out to silence the poor, hard-working IDers. You'll also remember that Bill Dembski has been talking up the fact that he's got two peer reviewed papers allegedly about intelligent design. So, you'd think that after complaining about being locked out of the debate, now that he has some actual papers to talk about, he'd be…

An anonymous tipster sent me a note to let me know that on one of the Disco Institute's sites, my old pal David Berlinski has been arguing that all sorts of famous mathematicians were really anti-evolution. I've href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/08/bad_math_from_david_berlinksi.php">written about Berlinski before. In my opinion, he's one of the most pointlessly arrogant pompous jackasses I've ever been unfortunate enough to deal with. He practically redefines the phrase "full of himself". This latest spewing of him is quite typical. It is mostly content free - it consists of…

tags: intelligent design, scientific process, science classroom, rational thinking, AtheistBusCA, streaming video Kenneth Miller provides a brief explanation as to why "intelligent design" is not admissible in a science classroom.

As I wrote that title, I realized that it's probably insufficiently informative - there are, after all, multiple parallels between Intelligent Design proponents and the crackpots dedicated defenders of the Constitution who continue to insist that Barack Obama is not eligible to be the President. Both groups, for example, have a blind devotion to a concept that has no actual basis in reality. Both appear to be remarkably skeptical toward the enormous amounts of evidence challenging their views while simultaneously demonstrating a remarkable credulity toward any evidence that might possibly be…

tags: Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? , atheism, religion, water, streaming video The only people who are so stupid as to not understand the answer to that question are the creationists themselves.

A brief disclaimer before I start. I do not read Uncommon Descent. I didn't check it before writing my post yesterday. So I didn't know about the content of Dembski's post there that I'm about to write about, until I saw Bob O'H's comment on my post this morning. Yesterday, I explained how he used Dawkins' "weasel" experiment as an example of his and Marks' approach to quantifying the information in search. I said that it was a lousy example for what it was purportedly being used to demonstrate. And I theorized that he wanted to claim peer-review approval for his "critique" of Dawkins.…

It sometimes seems like every day, some "intelligent design" bozo comes out with another book rehashing the same-old crap. I usually ignore it. But this time, I felt like the promotional materials for one of the new books really stepped right into my part of the world, rhetorically speaking, and so I figured I should give it a quick smackdown. The book in question is Stephen C. Meyer's "Signature in the Cell". Meyer's argument basically comes down to one that is seems like we've heard and dealt with a thousand times already. There's stuff in the cell which looks kinda-sorta like a machine…

..that even when you try diligently to separate the politics of religion vs. creationism and to say again and again that religion can go along its merry way as long as it stays out of the science classroom, people like Casey Luskin will still find the words in your rhetoric to accuse you of attacking religion. Back in May, Genie Scott appeared with me and Lynn Fellman on Atheist Talk Radio, where we discussed science education. Genie is the director of the National Center for Science Education. In a recent posting on the Discovery Institute web site, Casey Luskin makes the contrast between…