Discovery Institute's Blog, page 113

Search for Cures Focuses on Biological Information

Seek information, and you will find. The largest independent research organization in Scandinavia is called SINTEF. They consider themselves "Next generation problem solvers." And here's a big problem to solve: cancer. SINTEF has unveiled their approach:

Norwegian scientists are opening the gates of nature's secret medicine factories, with the aim of giving us new weapons against cancers and resistant bacteria. [Emphasis added.]

This is significant, because it's all about design, with appare...

Denying the Signature: More on Substance Dualism

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately...

A Taxonomy of Information

Note: I've gotten a few requests for notes or a handout from my recent talk at the Christian Scientific Society meeting, "A Taxonomy of Information and the Design Inference." The talk should be available online eventually, but for the time being below is a condensed and reader-friendly reformatted version of my notes from the talk. The rough notes are also available here as a PDF.

The question I want to address is this: What are some common definitions of information, and which definition is...

Honoring the 41st Anniversary of the Discovery of "Lucy," Google Offers a Misleading Doodle

Yes, it's the 41st anniversary of the discovery of "Lucy." Google has a cute Doodle in her honor:

However, back in 2009, Casey Luskin made a pilgrimage to see the lady's bones, then on display at the Seattle Science Center. He wrote here at Evolution News:

The whole experience seeing Lucy was enlightening, though probably not in the way its creators intended. In short, I left the exhibit struck by the paucity of actual hard evidence for human evolution from ape-like species, and the amount...

Are Abstract Thoughts Just Patterns in Our Brains?

Atheist computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit and I have been having a discussion about the nature of our abstract thoughts. Are they material things in our brain, or are they immaterial?

Shallit thinks they are material:

[Abstract thoughts are] patterns in brains, of course. If you weren't so stuck in medieval philosophy, even you could have figured that one out... [p]attern is the differential arrangement of matter...

Shallit is right about some kinds thoughts, and wrong about others. We have...

Denying the Signature: Of Minds and Causes

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately...

An Open Letter to A.C. Grayling

Atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling has written a letter to the Aristotelian Society at Oxford demanding that the Society cancel a conference planned for March titled: "The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New Directions." The conference, which features leading philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and Rob Koons, is part of a Templeton Foundation project "The Metaphysics of Entanglement," which is the exploration of the philosophical implications of quantum entanglement. This is a question at the...

Rocket Science in a Microbe Saves the Planet

Anammox. It's a good term to learn. Wikipedia's first paragraph stresses its importance:

Anammox, an abbreviation for ANaerobic AMMonium OXidation, is a globally important microbial process of the nitrogen cycle. The bacteria mediating this process were identified in 1999, and at the time were a great surprise for the scientific community. It takes place in many natural environments... [Emphasis added.]

And now, the news. A team of European scientists found something very interesting about t...

For Euthanasia Fanatics, It's Never Enough

There is an insatiable logic to the euthanasia movement. Once becoming dead is transformed into a fundamental civil right, there is almost no limit to the killing/suicide license thereby created.

Case in point. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society in the Netherlands believes the wide-open killing license granted doctors -- its scope extending to the mentally ill, the elderly tired of life, the disabled, the grieving, the chronically ill, the terminally ill -- is just not enough.

Now, they want s...

Denying the Signature: Methodological Naturalism and Materialism-of-the Gaps

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately...