The Hump of the Camel

I’ve stumbled across this astonishing series of articles by Stephen L Talbott at the Nature Institute. Astonishing because it’s an overview of some of the new (and astonishing!) processes being discovered within the cell, including some very good stuff on epigenetics, yet put in the context of a whole scientific and philosophical critique of not only Neodarwinism, but of the whole reductionist approach to biology and of ateleological science overall. An ambitious set of targets indeed!

There’s a lot of it, and some is somewhat technical, but don’t let that put you off wading through the lot. It’s some of the most conceptually fruitful stuff I’ve read in a long while.

Continue reading →

A refutation of William Paley’s design argument

(Garvey, J.C. Kipling, J.R. et al 2011)

William Paley, the 19th century Intelligent Design Creationist, tried to put the scientific clock back 500 years to the time when Francis Bacon was burned at the stake for denying that the world was flat, by using the example of a self-replicating watch found during a walk on the heath.

His “argument” (which was never peer-reviewed in the proper way) has been rightly dismissed many times on the basis that a watch is quite different from the biological systems known to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection. But in these days when Fundamentalist attempts to impose the God of the Bible under the guise of science are threatening to undermine the fabric of the Universe, and have already produced global warming, there is now a clear need to refute his sophistry from a purely scientific and evolutionary viewpoint.

Continue reading →

One argument often heard against Intelligent Design is that allowing it into science would put pressure on people to believe in God, to the detriment of faith. In its most extreme expression, one blogger said that a scientific proof of God would put our generation at an unfair advantage over all the previous generations, who did not have that proof.

Continue reading →

One of the things one often finds in discussion with theistic evolutionists, in particular, is an extension of the practical use of methodological naturalism to a, usually vaguely expressed, principle that God’s presence ought not to be detectable in nature.

I exclude here those heterodox ideas of a God who doesn’t actually create, but leaves a quasi-sentient universe “free” to experiment with evolution, and so on. No, the people I’m talking about are orthodox (especially Bible-respecting) Christians who believe God is “behind” creation, but who hold that on principle one is unlikely to detect that fact through science.

Continue reading →

Since Penman keeps asking me, and since he’s the only person who reads this blog apart from a few hundred spambots, here’s an attempt to summarise what James Shapiro is presenting in Evolution – a View from the 21st Century for a complete non scientist. Those with scientific training will realise it is grossly inadequate, but I’ve done a more critical review here!

Continue reading →