Two rival groups of scientists have announced that the race to decode the human genome has ended-in a tie. J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, and Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, joined in a White House ceremony on June 26 to announce that they’ve deciphered the human hereditary script. The two organizations had Read More ›
Charles DeWolf holds a PhD in linguistics and is professor in the Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yoko Hama, Japan. “Creationists,” writes Robert T. Pennock, “are building a tower to heaven, and they are raising the banner of antievolution upon its ramparts.” To punish the upstarts, Pennock volunteers his services as a latter-day Jehovah. Unlike the Biblical deity, Read More ›
Many Darwinists gloat over having supposedly exposed the allegedly secretive “Wedge project.” What they never acknowledge (or realize) is that Phillip Johnson openly discussed the full meaning of the “Wedge” in this book years before the widespread internet circulation of the supposedly super secret “Wedge document,” which summarized many of the points in this book in order to clarify for Read More ›
Science is the supreme authority in our culture. If there is a dispute, science arbitrates it. If a law is to be passed, science must ratify it. If truth is to be taught, science must approve it. And when science is ignored, storms of protest are heard in the media, in the university — even in local coffee shops. Yet Read More ›
Robert Pennock’s misquote of me in Books & Culture (Sep/Oct 99, p. 31) is mischief in the making. He quotes me as writing that design theorists “are no friends of theistic evolutionists.” What I in fact wrote is: “Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.” (He got the quote right in his book Tower of Babel, but not in Read More ›
A review of The Design Inference by Massimo Pigliucci initially appeared on the Internet at www.infidels.org and elsewhere and later appeared in BioScience. Rather than rebut it myself, I leave it to one of Pigliucci’s fellow skeptics to rebut it. Mark Vuletic does a nice job of this. His rebuttal of Pigliucci can be found at https://infidels.org/library/modern/mark-vuletic-dembski/.
Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God is currently the best critique of intelligent design in book form, but still comes up short. I won’t respond to Miller’s critiques of Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, since they can speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that Miller’s critique of their work hardly constitutes a knock-out blow, and the debate will continue, with Read More ›
In Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998) I argue that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligent design. A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified. A short sequence of letters like “the,” “so,” or “a” is specified without being complex. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. Thus in general, given an event, object, or Read More ›
It’s official. Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity (IC) has found itself in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ironically, it was introduced by two critics of ID attempting to formulate non-teleological mechanisms for spawning IC. The article is: Thornhill, R.H., Ussery, D.W. 2000. “A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution.” J. Theor. Bio. 203: 111-116. First of all, this article shows Read More ›