Tag: Natural Selection | Page 4

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Author
Eric Cassell

Date
December 22, 2021

Tagged
adaptation, Animal Algorithms, animal behavior, bird navigation, Casey Luskin, chemotaxis, common ancestry, complex programmed behaviors, convergence, Convergent evolution, Darwinian Evolution, Darwinism, Eric Cassell, eusociality, Evolution, genetic engineering, geomagnetic reversal, gradualistic adaptation, ID 3.0, innate behavior, insect social behavior, instinct, Intelligent Design, intelligent design research, Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Natural Selection, neural networks, pheromone trails, pheromones, purpose, social colonies, social insect genomes, social insects, solitary behavior, spherical navigation, spiders, teleology, teleophobia}

Animal Algorithms Webinar Pt. 2: Author Q&A

_{Eric Cassell

December 22, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future is Part 2 of a recent live webinar with Eric Cassell fielding questions about his new book, Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. He and host Casey Luskin explore the engineering wonders of web-spinning spiders and their extraordinary silk, and the challenge of transforming solitary insects into social insects (with their complex and interdependent caste systems) via a blind step-by-step evolutionary process, and the many thousands of genetic changes required. What does Cassell consider the best explanation? He invokes design theorist William Dembski’s work with No Free Lunch theorems to argue that blind processes are a no-go for explaining their origin. From there Luskin opens the webinar up to questions from the Read More ›

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Author
Douglas Axe

Date
December 8, 2021

Tagged
> Douglas Axe, age of wonder, Alison Gopnik, Atheism, baking cookies, beta-lactamase, Casey Luskin, chance, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Darwinism, design detection, Design Intuition, dragonflies, enzymes, Evolution, functional enzyme, functional proteins, God, Intelligent Design, Joseph Holden, know-how, Lottery, Mind and Cosmos, Natural Selection, overwhelming improbabilities, Penicillin, protein evolution, protein experiment, protein folding, protein function, random mutations, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Thomas Nagel, Undeniable, William Dembski}

Axe’s Not-So-Secret Guide to Making Cookies and Dragonflies

_{Douglas Axe

December 8, 2021

Uncategorized}

This ID the Future brings in protein scientist Douglas Axe to discuss his contribution to a new book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Axe and host Casey Luskin discuss Axe’s thinking on the design intuition, the evidence that it’s triggered almost universally in small children when they observe things like dragonflies or fresh-baked cookies, and why he’s convinced that this intuition is a rational one rooted in our true sense of what sorts of things require know-how for their creation. For those who retort “Science!,” Axe has some of that to offer as well. As he tells Luskin, he led an experiment at a lab in Cambridge, England, on the abilities and limits of an enzyme to evolve. The research findings Read More ›

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Author
Denyse O'Leary

Date
December 1, 2021

Tagged
Alas for Darwin, altruism, Casey Luskin, Charles Darwin, compassion, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Daniel Dennett, David Stove, Denyse O’Leary, Eugenics, evolutionary psychology, force sterilization, Hank Campbell, heroism, Jerry Fodor, Michael Egnor, Natural Selection, Nazism, Neanderthal, origin of altruism, origin of the mind, panpsychism, racism, Richard Dawkins, Richard Weikart, selfish genes, Social Darwinism, sociobiology, survival of the fittest, The Descent of Man}

Evolutionary Psychology: Checkered Past, Checkered Present

_{Denyse O'Leary

December 1, 2021

Uncategorized}

On this ID the Future host Casey Luskin interviews science journalist Denyse O’Leary about her recent essay, “Is Evolutionary Psychology a Legitimate Way to Understand Our Humanity,” which appears in the new Harvest House anthology co-edited by Luskin, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. O’Leary, a science journalist and co-author of The Spiritual Brain, offers a withering critique of evolutionary psychology and traces its roots, beginning with The Descent of Man (1871), where Charles Darwin attributed various human behaviors to natural and sexual selection. That fed into what became known as social Darwinism, which fell out of favor after World War II thanks to Hitler and the Nazis’ application of social Darwinist ideas to defend Nordic superiority and genocide. Read More ›

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Author
Richard Weikart

Date
November 22, 2021

Tagged
Adolf Hitler, Bioethics, biological determinism, Casey Luskin, Charles Darwin, Charles Davenport, colonialism, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Darwinism, embryonic gene editing, Ernst Haeckel, Ernst Rüdin, Eugen Fischer, Eugenics, Euthanasia, evolutionary science, Francis Galton, From Darwin to Hitler, history of science, human-animal chimeras, imago dei, immoral experimentation, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, miscegenation, Natural Selection, Nazi Germany, nihilism, No-True-Scotsman fallacy, Nordic racism, pseudoscience, Richard Weikart, scientific racism, struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, The Death of Humanity, The Origin of Species, Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Universal Human Rights, Yuval Noah Harari}

Richard Weikart on Scientific Racism and the War on Humanity

_{Richard Weikart

November 22, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future again spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Historian Richard Weikart and host Casey Luskin discuss Weikart’s contribution to the new anthology, his essay “How Evil Has Been Done in the Name of Science.” As Weikart explains, over the past century and a half, science has been misused to fuel racist policies and undermine human rights. Darwinian ideas helped lay the groundwork for Nazi ideology in Germany. And we shouldn’t imagine the problem was restricted to Nazi Germany. Scientific racism also reared its head in the United States, including in the long-running and infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. More broadly, a marriage of scientism and evolutionary thinking continues to undermine the idea of inherent human worth Read More ›

Fossil dinosaur lizard. Fossil of prehistoric lizard skeleton on the rock

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Author
Jonathan Wells

Date
October 6, 2021

Tagged
Casey Luskin, Change Over Time, common descent, convergence, Darwinism, descent with modification, Evolution, fruit flies, Galapagos finches, Homology, human eye, Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells, macroevolution, Microevolution, molecular phylogenies, Natural Selection, octopus eye, peppered moths, random variation, Simon Conway Morris, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, unguided evolution}

Jonathan Wells and The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, Pt. 1

_{Jonathan Wells

October 6, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos, and specifically a chapter by biologist Jonathan Wells titled “What are the Top Scientific Problems with Evolution?” Wells is the guest, and the host is geologist and Center for Science and Culture associate director Casey Luskin, who co-edited the anthology from Harvest House Publishers. In this episode the first problem that Wells highlights concerns homology and convergence. A second problem involves fossils. Darwin anticipated “innumerable transitions” in the fossil record, but such a rainbow of transitional forms has never been found. Not even close. Another problem, molecular phylogenies. Another: the lack of observational evidence that natural Read More ›

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Author
Neil Thomas

Date
August 30, 2021

Tagged
agnosticism, animism, Antony Flew, artificial selection, Battle of Maldon, Bertrand Russell, British Rationalist Association, Cambrian Explosion, Charles Darwin, Church of England, Darwinism, devolution, domestic breeding, Evolution, gradualism, heroic fatalism, heroic poetry, Homeric epics, humanism, Icelandic sagas, John Updike, Michael Behe, Natural Selection, Neil Thomas, Niles Eldredge, paganism, Pigeon Feathers, Punctuated Equilibrium, Richard Dawkins, Richard Spilsbury, Stephen Jay Gould, Taking Leave of Darwin, the Enlightenment, Theism}

Author Neil Thomas Takes Leave of Darwin, Pt. 2

_{Neil Thomas

August 30, 2021

Uncategorized}

On this ID the Future, Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas and host Jonathan Witt continue their conversation about Thomas’s journey from Darwinian materialism to theistic humanism and a thorough skepticism of Darwinian theory. Here Thomas links the heroic posturing of modern atheists Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell, on the one hand, and on the other, the heroic fatalism of poetry stretching back to the early Middle Ages and, further still, to the ancient Greeks. Thomas also draws a link between the animistic thinking of much ancient pagan thought and the magical powers attributed to the Darwinian mechanism. Thomas explains why he now views the latter as essentially “crypto-animism.” In their wide-ranging conversation, Thomas and Witt also touch on Read More ›

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
July 30, 2021

Tagged
aesthetic judgment, bad design, common descent, Darwinian Mechanism, Darwinism, devolution, Evolution, Immanuel Kant, Intelligent Design, Jim Madden, Michael Behe, Natural Selection, optimal design, Pat Flynn, purpose, purposeful arrangement of parts, random mutations, random variation, science stopper, the problem of evil, Thomism, Thomists, unguided evolution, vertebrate eye}

Darwin Devolves Author Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 3

_{Michael Behe

July 30, 2021

Uncategorized}

On this ID the Future, ID biologist Michael Behe continues fielding tough questions from philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 3 of 3, Behe responds to the claim that some designs in biology are bad designs and to criticisms leveled at ID from some Thomists. Also in the mix, the issue of academic pressure to distance oneself from ID, even before those involved understand what the theory of intelligent design actually is. Madden also asks Behe what reforms he’d pursue if he suddenly found himself in charge of the National Academy of Sciences. Tune in to hear Behe’s response, and much more. This three-part series is borrowed, with permission, from Flynn’s podcast, which can be found on his Read More ›

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Author
Michael Behe

Date
July 26, 2021

Tagged
Aquinas’s fifth way, argument from ignorance, Big Bang theory, Charles Darwin, Darwin Devolves, Darwinism, devolution, evolutionary theory, guided evolution, Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity, methodological materialism, Molecular Machines, Natural Selection, Pat Flynn, purposeful arrangement of parts, random mutation, teleology, theistic evolution, Thomas Aquinas, unguided evolution}

Biologist Michael Behe Tangles with Two Philosophers, Pt. 1

_{Michael Behe

July 26, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future features Darwin Devolves author and Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe speaking about the logic and evidence of intelligent design with two philosophers, Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. In a friendly, stimulating exchange, Flynn and Madden press Behe with objections — some philosophic, others scientific — to see how well his position stands up to scrutiny from experts who have engaged the subject. Here in Part 1 of a three-part series, Behe counters the charge that ID is an argument from ignorance, and then the three men compare the contemporary design argument to philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s fifth way. For Behe’s newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This discussion is presented here with permission of philosopher Read More ›

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Author
Günter Bechly

Date
July 14, 2021

Tagged
abrupt appearance in the fossil record, Cambrian Explosion, Christianity, Darwinian gradualism, Darwinism, Evolution, fine tuning, Fossil Record, Günter Bechly, Inference to the Best Explanation, Intelligent Design, Joshua Swamidass, Justin Brierley, methodological materialism, Natural Selection, Neo-Darwinism, neutral evolution, origin of the universe, random mutation, Rube Goldberg, Theism, Unbelievable, William Lane Craig}

An ID Debate, Pt. 2: Joshua Swamidass and Günter Bechly

_{Günter Bechly

July 14, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future concludes a debate over the merits of intelligent design and modern evolutionary theory. Günter Bechly is a distinguished German paleoentomologist who was an atheist and Darwinist but became convinced of theism after he finally decided to read some of the books written by leading ID proponents and found their arguments far stronger than he had been led to believe from second-hand accounts. S. Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist at Washington University in Saint Louis who says ID may or may not be true in some part of what it affirms, but while he believes in a Creator, he doesn’t find the central arguments of intelligent design proponents logical and cogent. He also is more sanguine Read More ›

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Author
Günter Bechly

Date
July 12, 2021

Tagged
abrupt appearance in the fossil record, Biological Information, Cambrian Explosion, Christianity, Darwinian gradualism, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, Joshua Swamidass, Justin Brierley, Natural Selection, Neo-Darwinism, neutral evolution, random mutation, saltation, specified information, Theism, Unbelievable, whale evolution}

An ID Debate: Joshua Swamidass and Günter Bechly, Pt. 1

_{Günter Bechly

July 12, 2021

Uncategorized}

Today’s ID the Future features a debate over the merits of intelligent design. Günter Bechly is a German paleoentomologist heard many times on ID the Future, who says the science convinced him that intelligent design is true. S. Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist at Washington University in Saint Louis who says ID may or may not be true in some part of what it affirms, but for him, the science doesn’t lead you to it. They met in a dialogue hosted by Justin Brierley on his Unbelievable? podcast, reposted here with Brierley’s permission. This is the first half of the conversation. The second half is coming to IDTF soon.