Republican Science

Writer David Klinghoffer's latest offering highlights the divide between Republicans and Democrats insofar as how the two groups think scientific theories should be viewed and and the role they should play in our daily lives...

"What's wrong with Republicans, anyway? Scientists and journalists offer a variety of diagnoses. Some say a backwoods element in the population has abandoned the Enlightenment, a result of poor education or religious fundamentalism or both.

Other experts find no convincing sociological explanation and opt for a more scientific (or scientific-seeming) approach, pointing to faulty brain chemistry. A forthcoming book title by journalist Chris Mooney says it all: The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality...

In coverage of the evolution debate, for example, Darwin defenders have convinced many journalists that only two sides exist: Darwinists themselves versus advocates of a naïve Scriptural view that insists the world is just thousands of years old.

But most Americans understand that a more credible view exists, one that accepts a history of life going back more than 3 billion years but that doubts blind Darwinian forces can account for life's development, seeing, instead, evidence of purpose and design.

There is a persistent sense that we are being manipulated by fellow citizens who use the prestige of the word "science," coupled with the technique of the excluded middle, to intimidate us in service to a political agenda. Not just any political agenda, but one that violates our own experience of who, as human beings, we really are.

At stake is an anthropological view that, on "scientific" grounds, equates humans with animals who climbed too high in their own estimation and need an attitude adjustment. In this picture, government plays the role of zookeeper. We need our modes of transportation and industrial production tightly constrained, our diets controlled, our claim of possessing marks of divine intention or favor firmly denied, our offspring available immediately from conception to be consumed for medical research...

..It's not "science" that we deny but this effort to redefine man in the name of science that we resist."

The entire article is a great read if you have the chance to peruse it in it's entirety.

Meanwhile, over at the DI, their staff has put together a list of 50 peer-reviewed and peer-edited publications supporting the theory of Intelligent Design. Feel free to bookmark that one for the next time you encounter the snarky, internet materialist who tries pushing the fallacy that 'there is no peer-reviewed science' when it comes to Intelligent Design.

Will Anomalocaris eyesight prove to be daunting for Darwinists?

If an important component of Darwinian theory is that "the highly complex species of today gradually evolved from earlier, simpler organisms" then Anomalocaris is an anomaly of the highest order (see video animation here). A recent article points out how highly complex the eyes of Anomalocaris and anything comparable is seldom seen in nature to this day...

"Bizarrely, the eyes of Anomalocaris were positioned on stalks on the side of the animal's head. The popular science media are abuzz about a recent discovery -- published in Nature and based on fossils found on Kangaroo Island, South Australia -- that Anomalocaris possessed compound eyes similar to those that modern insects and arthropods have today. The only difference is that Anomalocaris had even more lenses per eye (according to the Paterson et al. Nature article, as many as 16,000 hexagonal lenses per eye) than most of those modern groups do. These remarkable eyes (which presumably would have required a reasonably advanced brain) would have afforded the creature very sharp vision..."

The above article goes on to quote a New Scientist article which states...

"Very few modern animals, particularly arthropods, have eyes as sophisticated as this," says Paterson. Houseflies, for instance, have a mere 3000 lenses. The only comparable species are some predatory dragonflies that have up to 28,000 lenses in each eye."

I'm sure that the leadership within the Cult of the Dead Scientist is already scrambling to reassure their adherents concerning this latest problem this poses for their preferred fairy-tale beliefs. Perhaps something along the lines of finally junking Natural Selection in favor of Biased Mutation or Genetic Drift will keep the congregation happy and sufficiently obfuscate the matter for the time being. And if all else fails, they always have Genetic Flow that they can appeal to. How convenient.

10 Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher re: Design

William Dembski (Ph.D) has put together an interesting list of ten questions one could ask their biology teacher re: design. You can click on the link and peruse it at your leisure, but I thought I would cite a few of what I thought were some of the more interesting ones...

1. "In trying to understand biological systems, molecular biologists often need to “reverse engineer” them. Is this evidence that the systems were engineered to begin with?




2. What evidence would convince you that intelligent design is true and neo-Darwinism is
   false? If no such evidence exists or indeed can exist, how can neo-Darwinism be a
   testable scientific theory?




3. How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems?
   Where did they originate?"

And on and on they go. The official high priests of the psuedo-science known as evolutionary biology never asks itself these highly pertinent questions.

The Fairy Tale of the Walking Whale

The most amusing thing about this most recent discovery is that it is an absolute given that the science fetishists will either A. try and rationalize this complete change of the evolutionary timeline in whale development or B. Downplay the discovery as if they had their doubts about the entire timeline all along...

"In an article titled "Ancient whale jawbone found in Antarctica", the Associated Press reports that paleontologists have found "the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered," which is about 49 million years old. As we've discussed here on ENV in the past, whale evolution has faced problems because of the short timescale (~10 million years) allowed by the fossil record for whales to evolve from fully terrestrial mammals to fully aquatic whales. As Richard Sternberg has argued (see here, here or here), the many anatomical changes necessary to convert a land-mammal to a whale could not take place by Darwinian evolution even in 10 million years. There just isn't time. But this new fossil might imply that the amount of time available was actually less than 5 million years.

Until now, the whale series went something like this:
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya

So under the previous timeline, Darwinian biologists didn't have to worry about accounting for the origin of fully aquatic whales until about 40 mya. This new find pushes fully aquatic whales back to 49 mya. Now the timeline looks something like this:

Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
New Fossil Jawbone (fully aquatic whale): 49 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya"

Dr David Berlinsky mentions the monumental obstacles that evolution would have had to overcome in this particular example in this short, two minute video from a couple of years ago. I admit that I found such claims to be highly dubious from the start and it seems that my suspicions were proven correct. (Above: So-called whale predecessor Pakicetus)


"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 and 1984 editions), p. 184. Link

Berlinski on the Scientific Pretensions of Atheism

I just thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who might be interested in evolution. Human Events has posted a 5 part, videotaped interview with Dr. David Berlinski. The bulk of the interview is concerning questions about his book The Devil's Delusion, Atheism and it's Scientific Pretensions. To begin viewing the interview put out by the Hoover Institution, just click here.

EDIT: Youtube has a large part of the DVD The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski here.

Myers: 'Who the hell is JD Curtis?'

Two days ago, this blog was the recipient of a comment by perhaps the most widely known commenter it has seen has (so far) ever seen. While I know Vox Day has stopped by here a couple of times and given me the honor of creating a few threads on his blog Vox Popoli relating to subjects I have raised, (see here and here) he didn't actually leave a comment here.



PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers "is a liberal atheist and evolutionist activist in the creation-evolution controversy, contributing to The Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula blogs. Myers is also an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM)." Here is a brief video clip of him speaking from when he appeared in the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I first came to to hear about Myers through the first article I ever read by Day on World Net Daily which detailed the whole, sordid Communion Host Affair. Myers has apparently adopted the Run And Hide Method of Argumentation when called out on his positions and challenged by Day.


The thread that Myers commented on is viewable by clicking here. I'm quite sure this actually was Myers given that he cross-posted his comments on his own blog, Phyrangula.


Setting aside for a moment the dodginess of requiring someone to argue from the arguments raised by a particular person from a particular book (in this case, Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism) it is quite possible that I will take up Myers on his offer. I would first, of course, have to obtain a copy of Godless and peruse it for a relevant starting point, but I'm sure that it's not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.



What do you think of this offer by Myers?

Norway Killer - Darwinist, not Christian

It seemed like the template was already set to roll by the time the smoke cleared in Norway and Anders Behring Breivik (above) was taken into custody. A 'right-wing Christian fundamentalist' we were told by the left-wing media. However, new evidence is beginning to emerge and the explanation offered earlier might not be that simple...

"A review of Anders Behring Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto shows the media's quick characterization of the Norwegian terrorist as a "Christian" may be as incorrect as it was to call Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh one.

Breivik was arrested over the weekend, charged with a pair of brutal attacks in and near Oslo, Norway, including a bombing in the capital city that killed 7 and a shooting spree at a youth political retreat on the island of Utoya that killed more than 80 victims.

Piecing together Breivik's various posts on the Internet, many media reports have characterized the terrorist – who says he was upset over the multiculturalist policies stemming from Norway's Labour Party – as a "right-wing, Christian fundamentalist."

Yet, while McVeigh rejected God altogether, Breivik writes in his manifesto that he is not religious, has doubts about God's existence, does not pray, but does assert the primacy of Europe's "Christian culture" as well as his own pagan Nordic culture.

Breivik instead hails Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary theories stand in contrast to the claims of the Bible, and affirms: "As for the Church and science, it is essential that science takes an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings. Europe has always been the cradle of science, and it must always continue to be that way. Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I'm not an excessively religious man. I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe."

The terrorist also candidly admits he finds no support within either the Catholic or Protestant churches for his violent ideas."

Lets monitor this situation closely in order to see if ABCBS/NBCNN even bother to mention this at all.

Debunking the 'There's Been No Real ID Research' Myth

Casey Luskin schools journalist Lauri Lebo of who appears to be towing the Strictly Materialist party line of the aptly named "zero concession policy" when it comes to reporting on Intelligent Design...

"in March 2011, journalist Lauri Lebo, a science writer who covers the debate over evolution for anti-ID outlets like Scientific American, blithely declared that "as we all know, there is no such thing as ID research."1 In the last issue of Salvo, my article provided ample documentation to refute Ms. Lebo's claim. Let's add some more weight to this pile.

Natural Selection Breaks Down

In his Origin of Species, Darwin admitted that if "any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." My previous article discussed work by Douglas Axe and Michael Behe that confirms that many complex structures in biology are beyond the reach of natural selection. These theoretical studies found that Darwinian processes would be unlikely to produce "multi-mutation features" that require multiple mutations to function.

In 2010, research published by molecular biologist Ann Gauger of the Biologic Institute, Ralph Seelke at the University of Wisconsin–Superior, and two other biologists provided empirical backing to the claims of Axe and Behe.2 Their team started by breaking a gene in the bacterium Escherichia coli required for synthesizing the amino acid tryptophan. When broken in just one place, random mutations in the bacteria's genome were capable of "fixing" the gene. But when two mutations were required to restore function, Darwinian evolution could not do the job.

Such results show that it is extremely unlikely for blind and unguided Darwinian processes to find rare amino acid sequences that yield functional proteins...

[William] Dembski, [Robert] Marks, and their team have identified sources of active information in programs such as "Avida" and "Ev"—two programs that are widely touted by Darwin theorists as refuting ID. The work of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab shows that these evolutionary algorithms do not model truly blind and unguided Darwinian processes. Instead, the simulations "cheat" in the sense that they were pre-programmed by their designers to achieve their digital evolutionary goals.

Just as the lab's website predicted, research shows that even the best efforts of ID critics cannot escape the fact that intelligence is required to generate new information."

I've posted this before, but should anyone start spouting off that there have been no "peer reviewed ID research papers", then simply refer them to this link and watch as they slink out of the discussion.