Another week, another silly article at the C4ID website! Antony Latham, a GP in the Outer Hebrides, has penned a peculiarly illogical article (The compound eye of arthropods is a model for designing specialised digital cameras) leading from a paper which outlines how the arthropod compound eye has been used as a model for designing digital
P Z Myers amuses me with his latest Pharyngula posting on Intelligent Design creationism: The Discovery Institute’s mask just slipped a bit more. The post includes a video from the Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer, who pontificates away about the existence of his god/creator. Meyer repeats once more the silly misrepresentations of Signature in the Cell,
Here’s a miscellany of stories from around the web. Apologies for the inaction at this blog of late. C4ID peddle paranoia in Shetland. The BCSE blog occasionally features items under the banner Creation Watch. A recent report (Creation-Watch report – C4ID in Shetland) details an event organised in Shetland by Glasgow’s very own Discotute wannabees, the
Those of us who are biologists with interests in genetics and genome biology were somewhat taken aback by ENCODE’s claim last year that around 80% of the human genome was functional, a claim that flew in the face of evidence that a very large proportion had no known function, and was regarded as ‘junk’. That
In this rather splendid blog article (The Discovery Institute feels sorry for my students – Mountain Beltway – AGU Blogosphere), Callan Bentley reveals a brief email correspondence between a Discotute ‘media relations specialist’, and writes an excellent takedown of Intelligent Design creationism.
It’s always struck me that Intelligent Design creationists always seem to fall into a hole of illogic. Essentially, they will argue that a particular biological feature, (examples such as bacterial flagella, the vertebrate immune system, and the origin of life spring to mind) are complex, have a cursory investigation of what is known about those case…then pronounce
It’s the seventh anniversary of the judgement in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the American court case that definitively rulled that Intelligent Design creationism was indeed religious and was therefore forbidden from publicly funded schools in the USA. I posted a more detailed overview this time last year (Happy Kitzmas!), making observations on the
A few years ago, a bizarrely deceitful film was released: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This pro-Intelligent Design creationism production made a variety of assertions, and did feature some interviews with the likes of Richard Dawkins – obtained by misrepresentation and edited to significantly alter the interviewees’ opinions. See for example what they did to Dawkins. The
No sooner had I noted that the jolly old Discotute wannabees C4ID had been rather quiet of late than I received an email update, representing something of a review of 2012. Apparently We’ve had a very productive year and it has been an exciting 12 months for the advance of Intelligent Design (ID) more generally.
The rather nice Bioimplement blog, which alas is updated somewhat infrequently has a particularly detailed overview of the history of the mousetrap. The mousetrap is often cited to illustrate the concept of irreducible complexity: a device which could not function with one of its parts missing. Irreducible complexity is one of those important concepts of Intelligent