More on Intelligent Design

http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2007/02/the_steps_toward_evolutionary.php

http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm

Dave Scott on AIDS:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/532

http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm

"...I deleted two comments that appeared to be headed towards a dispute about the historical accuracy of the bible...
Comment by DaveScot — January 23, 2006 @ 3:18 pm"

If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e. the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos 
toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.

--William Dembski

Dave Scott = David Springer

Springer: 

"I believe in a chain of command and unquestioning loyalty to it. One follows the orders of those higher in the chain and gives orders to those lower in it. Mission objectives are given, rules of engagement are defined, then mission leaders take the initiative to get the job done. Bill offered me the job of blog czar and I accepted. I then received my marching orders and got on with it. Czar is hardly suggestive of democracy or gentle persuasion. If he wanted a czar that’s what he got. If not then I’m the wrong person for this position."

You'll also find comments of his in groups like alt.impeach.clinton and alt.fan.rush-limbaugh.

Professor Says Seminary Dismissed Her Over Gender

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 27, 2007

FORT WORTH, Jan. 26 (AP) — A former theology professor at a prominent Southern Baptist seminary here said officials had told her to leave because women are biblically forbidden to teach men.

Dembski's university?

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1141

KM: Okay, here's another. In the November 7th or November 14th issue of Science magazine, a number of investigators wanted to test the Darwinian hypothesis that you folks say is never tested. And the way in which they did this was to take the receptor protein for the human-growth hormone, it's a receptor to which the human-growth hormone fits in precisely. And they did it a terrible genetic disservice. They mutated -- they cut out an essential amino acid, right in the middle of the receptor called Tryptophan. With that gone, just like that mousetrap, it wouldn't have been expected to work. They then allowed a natural selection process to take place to see whether the cells under their own observation could mutate the receptor gene sufficiently to bind the receptor. And after seven generations, lo and behold, there it was. And it illustrates beautifully the ability of natural selection to respond to mutations and proteins to co-evolve.

On Kent Hovind

http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1053

Anika Smith blog:

http://anikapanika.blogspot.com/

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/review.html

Is this the case with either the complement system or the clotting cascade? I'll confess I do not know for sure. Many of the proteins of both these systems fulfill the similar sequence criterion, though this is a weak test. The much stronger test, and major violation of the "irreducible complexity" postulate, would be to find varying cascade systems in the living world. If, for example, I found a system with one less level than human, that would already show that the human system is not "irreducibly complex", violating Behe's claim that "not only is the entire blood-clotting system irreducibly complex, but so is each step in the pathway." Again, it's not my speciality, and I am unaware. Indeed, it is quite possible that it remains an unexplored area. Does the clotting system function in the same manner in fishes? In Agnatha (jawless fishes such as hagfish and lampreys)? In lancets (invertebrates thought to be representative of the ancestors of vertebrates)? Behe's silence on these points, the fact he did not even consider such an opposing model, or worse, that he never considered the predictions of his own model, does not bode well. Indeed, it is the critical examination of one's own model which separates cargo cults from science.

Behe wrong on textbooks

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/textbooks.html

That such a worry was realistic was demonstrated in October 2004, when a review article by ID theorist Dr. Stephen Meyer passed peer review by scientists employed in mainstream secular institutions and was published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Darwinists were so alarmed by the publication of Meyer’s article that they mounted an angry campaign of protest against it. The governing Council of the Society was so overwhelmed that it repudiated the article as inappropriate for publication in its Proceedings, citing the AAAS policy, and reassuring critics that “the topic of design will not be addressed in future issues.” Following this disavowal, Darwinists mounted a furious campaign to discredit the editor who had approved Meyer’s article for publication, accusing him of being a closet “young earth” creationist.

"Now this is very, very interesting. First of all, the claim that Sternberg is not an ID advocate is a flat out lie. We know that because he presented a pro-ID paper at the RAPID conference, a conference that was open only to ID advocates. In fact, that conference also featured Meyer presenting a paper on the very subject of the PBSW article and it was at that conference that Meyer and Sternberg began conspiring to get it published in that forum."

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/02/worldnutdaily_flogs_dead_stern.php

Lastly, I find it very curious that Cashill claims to know who the peer reviewers were. Sternberg has flatly refused to reveal who the reviewers were. Cashill has no way of knowing anything about those reviewers without knowing their identities, yet he claims to know a good bit about them. Did Sternberg tell Cashill who they were? Or did he just tell them that they're not ID advocates but were just "open minded" and Cashill swallowed it whole without any evidence? Either is possible. But given that Sternberg dishonestly claims not to be an ID advocate himself when he clearly is, his word in this regard just isn't worth much at this point.

Documentation of mutations producing new features includes the following:

    * the ability of a bacterium to digest nylon (Negoro et al. 1994; Thomas n.d.; Thwaites 1985);
    * adaptation in yeast to a low-phosphate environment (Francis and Hansche 1972; 1973; Hansche 1975);
    * the ability of E. coli to hydrolyze galactosylarabinose (Hall 1981; Hall and Zuzel 1980);
    * evolution of multicellularity in a unicellular green alga (Boraas 1983; Boraas et al. 1998);
    * modification of E. coli's fucose pathway to metabolize propanediol (Lin and Wu 1984);
    * evolution in Klebsiella bacteria of a new metabolic pathway for metabolizing 5-carbon sugars (Hartley 1984); 

Or, even better, your own DC spokesman for the Discovery Institute (Mark Ryland) claiming that the DI had “never” advocated the teaching of ID in schools, followed by Richard Thompson, in his own voice, waving a copy of Steve Meyer’s book which advocated exactly that? I’ve got that last one on a DVD if you like.


What is intelligent design?

Intelligent design is 

There are several answers

According to William Dembski, intelligent design is simply a rephrasing 

Intelligent design is a haphazard public relations campaign disguised as a scientific theory. 


"Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text."

Wedge document calls for churches to defend traditional creationism.

"Actually, we’re already there. Many Darwinists critical of ID no longer reside in the culture of rational discourse. They know they are right as much as any religious dogmatist. But the alarmism takes this one step further. Because denial poses a danger to the body politic, deniers must to rooted out. Moreover, those who root them out, as the defenders of virtue against evil, thus require additional powers to root them out. After that, persecution Soviet-style is not far away." Dembski

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/sep06.html

"Herman Muller, in 1918, indicated that an expected result of evolutionary processes was the development of what he called "interlocking complexity". Muller was one of the great geneticists of the twentieth century. He went on to win a Nobel in 1946 for work in mutations.
<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/1946.html>

Muller's definition of "interlocking complexity" is exactly the same as the definition of "irreducible complexity" -- a system of mutually independent parts that requires all those parts to be present for the system to work. However, Muller's claim is that this is an EXPECTED result of evolution. Behe took the same definition, and claimed it was IMPOSSIBLE as a result of evolution.

The reason for the difference is basically that Muller was using evolution; and Behe was using a weird strawman of his own devising. Behe describes evolution as working by the gradual addition of parts, one by one. Muller, however, describes evolution as working by gradual modifications of parts. Muller's description is the more accurate. New proteins don't get added to systems particularly often; the vast majority of evolution is small modifications to proteins, to alter their amino acid sequence and hence their chemistry. Behe neglects this entirely; and hence omits the vast majority of evolutionary change.

Here is a relevant extract, from pages 463-464 of the article:

    ... Most present day animals are the result of a long process of evolution, in which at least thousands of mutations must have taken place. Each new mutant in turn must have derived its survival value from the effect which it produced upon the "reaction system" that had been brought into being by the many previously formed factors in cooperation; thus a complicated machine was gradually built up whose effective working was dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous elementary parts or factors, and many of the characters are factors which, when new, where originally merely an asset finally become necessary because other necessary characters and factors had subsequently become changed so as to be dependent on the former. It must result, in consequence, that a dropping out of, or even a slight change in any one of these parts is very likely to disturb fatally the whole machinery; ..." 

*

Michael Egnor is just ignorantly repeating some of the dumbest lines from the ID propaganda manual. This paper explains the origin of new genetic information, reviewing 20+ examples where the origin of new genes with new functions has been reconstructed in detail:

Long M, Betran E, Thornton K, Wang W. (2003). The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old. Nature Reviews Genetics. 4(11):865-75. 
