Discovery Institute's Blog, page 81

A Fish That Walks

In the journal Scientific Reports, a new paper reports the discovery of a blind cavefish that walks up the walls of waterfalls. The fish is reported to show changes to its spine and pelvic girdle that would support a walking movement like that of salamanders. Its fins also project laterally, presumably to help it walk. The discovery, if true, is a big deal, because it adds to the story of how fish may have evolved in tetrapods (animals walking on four feet).

Karl Zimmer has picked up the tal...

In Response to Meyer-Dawkins Dispute, Misconceptions About My Research Resurface

Editor's note: As Paul Nelson pointed out yesterday, Richard Dawkins has responded to Stephen Meyer's use of Doug Axe's work on the rarity of functional proteins in sequence space. Dawkins's comments appear in a thread at Jerry Coyne's blog Why Evolution Is True. A reader there commented that, "Over on Panda's Thumb, Arthur Hunt has evaluated the Axe paper that Meyer cited, and shows where Axe went wrong." He was referring to a post by Hunt to which, however, Axe already responded back in 20...

About a Bike Lock: Responding to Richard Dawkins

I was flattered to learn that Richard Dawkins felt it necessary to come to the aid of his friend Lawrence Krauss in Krauss's dispute with me about whether the evolutionary process depends upon an ineliminable element of randomness. How odd, however, that Professor Dawkins would weigh in for the purpose of defending an obviously incomplete and therefore, indefensible caricature of the standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism. In review of my talk at last Saturday's debate at Wycliffe Col...

As Richard Dawkins Takes on Stephen Meyer, Other Scientists Join the Melee over "Random" Evolution

Following up on Richard Dawkins's attempted takedown of Stephen Meyer's bike-lock analogy ("It's irrelevant...because natural selection is a NONRANDOM process"), our Biologic Institute colleague Douglas Axe joined the conversation over at Why Evolution Is True. (That is Jerry Coyne's blog.)

Dawkins posted his original comments there, following a post by Coyne on the Toronto debate. He concluded by asking, "[A]re they cynically playing to the gallery, dazzling the naive audience with big numb...

An Engineered "Minimal" Microbe Is Irreducibly Complex, Thus Evidence of Intelligent Design

Science Magazine published a paper last week, "Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome," describing the creation of a bacterium with a stripped-down genome. The paper represents twenty years of work by many scientists, including celebrated biochemist J. Craig Venter. They managed to reduce the genome by almost half, from over 900 genes to 473, a little bit at a time. The paper has made a splash across the Internet (see, for example, articles from Associated Press and Bloomberg).

W...

The Epicurean Escape Hatch -- Richard Dawkins Responds to Stephen Meyer

In a comment at Why Evolution Is True, Richard Dawkins has deigned to descend from the atheist Mt. Olympus to comment on the Meyer et al. debate, and immediately stepped in a steaming pile of...organic matter. He was unimpressed by Steve Meyer's case:

Meyer was terrible, not because of his migraine but because of the content of his speech, which was written down BEFORE his migraine. When will these people understand that calculating how many gazillions of ways you can permute things at rando...

"Science Signaling"

I keep circling back in my mind to the dramatic juxtaposition of atheist, theistic evolutionist (TE), and ID advocate in Saturday night's debate at the University of Toronto. I won't use names, since it was almost a clash of archetypes where the personal identities and personal circumstances hardly matter. That the TE persistently joined with the atheist in going after the ID'er speaks volumes.

An email correspondent, thinking along the same lines, offers the phrase "science signaling," a p...

By a Whisker: Scientists Discover Predictive Coding in a Surprising Place

The closer you look at a biological phenomenon, the more complex and fascinating it gets. Most people probably figure that their pet dogs and cats use their facial whiskers to enhance their sense of touch. But would you have ever guessed that the twitching whiskers on mammals perform complex algorithms and do predictive coding?

That's what a recent paper in Nature Neuroscience says, based on experiments with rats. Three scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, begin our jo...

Ev Ever Again -- Eying an Evolutionary Simulation

A writer at The Skeptical Zone, Patrick, recently contributed a post on the computer simulation ev. He takes aim at William Dembski, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab's analysis of that simulation. However, the events he discusses actually show a history of Darwinists repeatedly misunderstanding or misrepresenting arguments for intelligent design.

Patrick fundamentally mistakes the claim we are making about ev (and evolutionary simulations in general). Regarding a response...

Temperature Control: Heat and Temperature -- What's the Difference?

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

We live in a world...