Introducing Online High School Chemistry With A Design Perspective
Did Chess Ace Hans Niemann Cheat? A Design Detection Poser
On this ID the Future, mathematician William Dembski and host Eric Anderson explore whether design detection tools shed any light on the recent chess scandal involving world chess champion Magnus Carlsen and American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann. Did Niemann cheat in a match where he beat Carlson, as some have claimed? There is no smoking gun in the case, so how might one determine if cheating occurred? At first glance the problem might seem far removed from the design detecting rules and tools Dembski laid out in his Cambridge University Press monograph The Design Inference. But actually there is some intriguing overlap. Is there a way to dig into the chess data and determine whether Niemann secretly used a computer chess engine to help him win the match? Tune in as Dembski and host Eric Anderson wrestle with the problem.
Physicist Brian Miller Talks Nanotech, Origin of Life, and Area 51
On today’s ID the Future physicist Brian Miller and host Eric Anderson continue their exploration of a recent conversation between origin-of-life investigators Jeremy England and Paul Davies on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? radio show. Miller begins with a quick flyover of the many nanotechnologies essential to even to the simplest viable cell. A minimally complex cell is vastly more sophisticated than our best human nanotechnology. What about England’s insistence that real progress has been made in origin-of-life studies since the 1950s? True, Anderson says, but the progress has been principally in better understanding how the simplest cells function, and in figuring out what doesn’t work to blindly evolve life from non-life. That is, the direction of discovery has been to throw cold water on one idea after another for the naturalistic origin of life. Miller then makes an even bolder statement. All the physics for us to have known this were in place more than a hundred years ago. The origin-of-life community just chose to ignore it, perhaps because they were dogmatically wedded to finding a purely materialistic explanation for the origin of the first life. To show why that’s misguided, Miller offers an illustrative story: Imagine that what looks for all the world like an alien spaceship is discovered in the desert. Two groups of scientists decide on radically different approaches to understanding the workings of this mysterious object. Tune in to hear the rest of the story.
Covid-19, Random Mutations, and Aristotle’s Matrix of Design
On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid speaks with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor about Egnor’s recent Evolution News article, The Coronavirus Demonstrates How Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design. Egnor notes that the coronavirus and other viruses are not, strictly speaking, considered living things, even if they depend on living hosts for their continued existence. Egnor also discusses the role of random mutations in viruses and draws upon Aristotle to argue that these and other random events only occur, and have their meaning, against a backdrop of purpose and design — in this case, the designed systems — the bodies — that viruses invade.
The Taxonomy of Information, Pt. 2
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin continues his discussion on the taxonomy of information. He delves into the definitions of semantic information and complex & specified information, detailing their relationship and explaining how to use information to make a design inference.
The Taxonomy of Information, Pt. 1
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses the taxonomy of information, explaining various ways of defining information and whether or not they are helpful for making a design inference. He examines syntactic information, Shannon information and Kolmogorov information.
Read More ›Dr. Michael Egnor’s Brain Hypothesis
On this episode of ID the Future, Logan Gage interviews professor of neurosurgery at SUNY, Stony Brook Michael Egnor. Dr. Egnor discusses his current research into cerebral blood flow and the buffering of the brain from the force of blood pumped by the heart. Dr. Egnor’s approach to this problem is that of an engineer, using the design inference to understand how the brain protects itself from the pulsatility of the arterial blood flow of the heart.
Newsweek’s Trojan Horse
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses how Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley muffles the cosmic design inference and forces her philosophical blinders on her readers. Luskin shows how the evidence for fine-tuning is driving materialists like Begley to make extreme proposals — and to hide the alternative explanations — implicitly admitting that there is something about our universe needing explanation by an external cause.
Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence
On this episode of ID The Future, CSC’s Robert Crowther highlights one of the foundational books of the theory of intelligent design. No Free Lunch, the sequel to mathematician and CSC senior fellow William Dembski’s Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference, explores key questions about the origin of specified complexity. No Free Lunch demonstrates that design theory shows great promise of providing insight in the field of evolutionary computation