Last week, my wife and I spent an afternoon at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, in Cambridge, MA, near where we live. We both were generally impressed by the exhibitions, particularly the dinosaur section, and would recommend the museum to anyone visiting Boston. I was, however, quite disappointed to see this notice at the entrance to the display on evolution.
The Bayesian formulation of biological design arguments is, in my opinion, deserving of greater attention. Bayesian inference is widely used when dealing with design in the physical sciences. Perhaps the time has come for this structure of argument also to be used in design arguments in the life sciences.
One way to frame the argument for the existence of God is to consider the evidence that we self-evidently live in what I call a moral choice arena. What is a moral choice arena? A moral choice arena is simply a community of persons, not necessarily humans, but persons in circumstances where they can engage in what we at least call moral decision-making, where they interact and mold themselves in what gets called morally significant ways.
Our responses to the Muller two-step have been around for a long time; it would be nice if ID critics would recognize them and perhaps even answer them rather than inaccurately proclaiming that their arguments go “unchallenged.”
Since 2007, Hunt has been claiming to have refuted Michael Behe’s thesis that irreducible complexity cannot arise by mindless evolutionary processes.
Discoveries over the past couple of decades have served to underscore the thesis that biological systems are chock-full of complex and specified information content, even beyond the sequence of base pairs along the sugar-phosphate backbone of the DNA molecule.
This article will consider an example of how a cell can reorganize and rearrange its own DNA sequence. The most spectacular known example of this is the ciliated protozoa, or ciliates, and so we will be presenting them here as a case study.
All of this calls to mind a comment from biologist John Mattick, a critic of the junk DNA paradigm.
Mattick himself is no proponent of intelligent design. But his willingness to state upfront that a common argument against ID has been “threatened in the face of growing functional indices of noncoding regions of the genome” deserves commendation.