Evolution News & Views: A Mathematician Looks at Darwin's Theory and Discovers It Doesn't Add Up. SEATTLE -- "Darwin's attempt to explain the origins of all the magnificent species in the living world in terms of the struggle for survival is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science," writes Dr. Granville Sewell in his new book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design published by Discovery Institute Press.
What do you get when you add together the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and the evolution of life? Definitely not a materialistic theory of origins, answers Sewell, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso. Evolution News & Views: Does Darrel Falk's Junk DNA Argument for Common Descent Commit "One of the Biggest Mistakes in the History of Molecular Biology"? Some who aren't aware of recent developments in this field find "junk" DNA arguments for common ancestry persuasive, especially when they are made by highly credible individuals with Ph.D.s in biology -- individuals like Dr.
Falk, who unfortunately are known to dismiss criticisms by asserting that if you don't have a Ph.D. in biology, then you've got no business commenting on biological origins. (These types of dismissals are utterly unpersuasive to laypersons who like think of themselves as reasonably intelligent people.) The fact that "junk" DNA arguments for common ancestry are made by some highly-credible scientists doesn't mean the arguments are good ones -- it just shows how deeply these views have penetrated into the evolutionary scientific community.
So after buying Dr. Falk's book, did my suspicions turn out to be right or wrong? What surprised me after reading Coming to Peace with Science wasn't that Dr. Dr. All Those Darwinian Doubts. All Those Darwinian DoubtsBy: David BerlinskiWichita EagleMarch 9, 2005 For more information about David Berlinski - his new books, video clips from interviews, and upcoming events - please visit his website at www.davidberlinski.org.
Original Article NOTE: The article below is the full version by Dr. Berlinski. The Wichita Eagle opted to shorten the piece to only 400 words. Best Free Podcasts. About - Deniable Darwin. In a Controversial New Book, David Berlinski Tears Apart the Facade of Scientific Overconfidence When it comes to some of life’s most profound questions—the origins of life, of matter, of the universe itself—does modern science already have everything all figured out? Many scientists would like us to think they are mere steps away from solving all the deep enigmas of physical existence. Consummate skeptic David Berlinski shows that all such confidence is at best a bluff.
In essays about evolution using humor and wit, Berlinski shows how lost today’s scientists really are. His new book The Deniable Darwin frees us from the superstition of preening scientism and illuminates the path to a renewal of real science. In The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays (DI Press 2009) Berlinski wields his famous skepticism excluding neither Darwinism nor intelligent design from his critical eye. Evolution News & Views: "No Real Conflict When One Side Gives Up": Richard Weaver and the Darwin Debate.
Richard M.
Weaver, who died at age 53 in 1963, effectively launched modern philosophical and political conservatism in the United States. Everyone cites one of his titles, Ideas Have Consequences, but too few bother to read his actual works. In reading him now I'm struck by what a brilliant ally he would have made in the current debate over Darwinism. Though a philosopher and a professor of English stationed at the University of Chicago, he anticipated not only the major outlines of contemporary thinking about why the evolution debate matters. Evolution News & Views: Against Surrender: Richard M. Weaver's "Metaphysical Dream" While today it would be more common to speak of a person's "worldview," philosopher Richard Weaver (1910-1963) spoke equivalently of a "world picture," a "metaphysical dream," or an integrative "vision.
" I like vision or dream best, since they conjure something more than a dry-bones philosophical perspective that can be adopted or discarded easily if you change your mind about things. Just as you can be woken involuntarily from a good dream, or you may be unable to wake from a bad one, so too with a vision that explains to you how the world works -- what's above, what's below, what came before you and what will come after. Once shattered, it is not easily reconstructed. In this series we are discussing Weaver's philosophy, a pillar of modern conservatism that stresses, in a way that may surprise many conservatives, the corrosive effects of Darwinism on Western culture. (See Parts I, II, and III, here, here, and here.) Evolution News & Views: Tracing the "Abomination of Desolation": Richard M. Weaver's Forgotten Conservative Vision.
The vision that first inspired the contemporary conservative movement back in the 1940s and '50s would be unrecognizable to many conservatives today.
In Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948), the book that sociologist Robert Nisbet credited with "launch[ing] the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country," you will not find a single reference to the then sitting President of the United States (Truman). It's not really a political book at all. It is not about setting or opposing a legislative agenda. It is about correcting a faulty and widespread materialist "world picture" of which Darwinism forms a crucial ingredient. We are reconsidering and appreciating Weaver in this series.
With "Darwinism...lurking in the background," writes Weaver, "Politics, arts, everything, came under the rule; man was primarily a food- and shelter-finding animal. " Evolution News & Views: Rediscovering Conservatism: The Evolutionary Heresy of Richard M. Weaver. Somewhat unlike its current form, conservatism in its modern-day inception was about ideas and their consequences.
It was primarily a philosophical dissection of what ails our culture. So Richard M. Weaver put it in the famous title of his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. A professor of English at the University of Chicago, a Southerner who looked back on the lost culture of the South as the Western world's last surviving "non-materialist" civilization, Weaver was a Darwin critic. That fact comes out again and again in his books. Anyone who wants to know what conservatism really means needs to understand Weaver. Evolution News & Views: Richard M. Weaver, Conservative Intellectual Icon and Darwin-Doubter.
Smithsonian Controversy. Intelligent Design.org Book and DVD Store - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Why Darwinismlike Marxism and Freudianism before itis headed for extinctionIn the 1925 Scopes trial, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to allow the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools.
Seventy-five years later, in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the ACLU sued to prevent the teaching of an alternative to Darwin’s theory known as "Intelligent Design"and won. Why did the ACLU turn from defending the free-speech rights of Darwinists to silencing their opponents? Jonathan Wells reveals that, for today’s Darwinists, there may be no other choice: unable to fend off growing challenges from scientists, or to compete with rival theories better adapted to the latest evidence, Darwinismlike Marxism and Freudianism before itis simply unfit to survive.
Wells begins by explaining the basic tenets of Darwinism, and the evidence both for and against it. Intelligent Design.org Book and DVD Store - Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong. Evolution News & Views: Douglas Theobald Tests Universal Common Ancestry by Refuting a Preposterous Null Hypothesis.
In March 2010, Douglas Theobald published a paper in Nature purporting to demonstrate "A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry.
" According to his cheering squad at National Geographic, the paper "supports the widely held 'universal common ancestor' theory first proposed by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago. " National Geographic is mistaken on one obvious point: Darwin wasn't the first to propose universal common ancestry. But never mind that. The paper makes no official claim to be a response to scientific skeptics of universal common ancestry, but given Theobald's notoriety as the author of the widely criticized "Talk Origins Common Ancestry FAQ," his motivation is clear.
If there were no doubts about universal common ancestry ("UCA"), his paper would be unnecessary. Before going any further, I must make it clear that intelligent design (ID) is certainly not incompatible with common ancestry. Evolution News & Views: But Isn't There a Consilience of Data That Corroborates Common Descent? Evolution News & Views: Peer-Reviewed Scientific Paper by Michael Behe Challenges "Gain of Function" Mutations in Molecular Evolution. Michael Behe has published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in the journal Quarterly Review of Biology titled "Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and 'The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution'," arguing that "the most common adaptive changes seen ... are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function.
" The observation that a particular type of molecular change involves loss-of-function has been used by leading evolutionary biologists as argument against that particular mechanism as being an important force for adaptive evolutionary change. In a 2007 article in the journal Evolution, Hopi E. Evolution News & Views: Michael Behe's Quarterly Review of Biology Paper Critiques Richard Lenski's E. Coli Evolution Experiments. In a previous post, I discussed Michael Behe's recent paper in Quarterly Review of Biology, "Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and 'The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution'," which reviews much recent work in the field of bacterial evolution.
He devotes particular space, however, to the research of Richard Lenski, who has now grown over 50,000 generations of E coli in the lab to study its evolution. Lenski's work was cited by Richard Dawkins most recent book (The Greatest Show on Earth) as the ultimate refutation of irreducible complexity. Charles Darwin: The Theory of Evolution. Quotes from Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) on Evolution, Natural Selection, Science, Humanity, God & Religion I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. (Charles Darwin) Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. (Charles Darwin, Introduction to The Descent of Man, 1871) Issues and Problems with Evolution Theory.
Scientific Issues and Problems with Traditional Evolution Theory Darwin's idea that current species are descended from different earlier species is now overwhelmingly confirmed by steadily increasing observational evidence and no longer has scientific opposition. Darwin's evolutionary mechanics theory, essentially survival of the fittest or natural selection, also fits the vast majority of observations. His idea was that mutational changes occasionally occurred in individual organisms. Sometimes the changes were inheritable. Sometimes inheritable changes improved the ability of individual organisms possessing them to survive longer (and thereby reproduce more) or to otherwise reproduce more, thus propagating their altered design in a population. According to traditional mechanics theory, any evolved organism characteristic must therefore improve the ability of individual organisms to live longer or reproduce more.
The Philosophy of Evolution - Valuable Resources. The Problem With The Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection. Problems With The Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection by Gene Zimmer Inherent in Darwin’s theory of evolution is the notion that natural selection must inevitably bring about the "improvement" of organisms. It must be fully understood what is meant by "improvement". To Darwin, and most modern thinkers, any and all species adapt (i.e. mutate) to environmental forces in various ways, some useful and some not useful.
Only the species which are better equipped to handle or win the battle for survival in their unique environments will remain, while other species less well-fitted to succeed in the same environment, will disappear (i.e. die out). The index used to determine "improvement" is linked directly to raw biological survival of the species. Modern biologists, humanists, psychologists and social engineers possess an almost religious reverence for the concept of "evolution", "nature" and the "unified organic process of the organism and environment". Where are all the missing links? Darwin's Theory Of Evolution. Recent Problems in Evolution. Primer: Evolutionary Theory. A. Debunking Evolution - problems, errors, and lies of evolution exposed as false and wrong. Debunking Evolution:problems between the theory and reality;the false science of evolution These top creationist arguments present the truth about evolution. Top creationist arguments - every one.
"Evolution" mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. Variation (microevolution) is the real part. The types of bird beaks, the colors of moths, leg sizes, etc. are variation. Do these big changes (macroevolution) really happen? Evolutionary Theory: the Big Problems!