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These Weeks in Intelligent Design – 07/03/12

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 20th of February to the 7th of March, 2012. 

Semester 1 of my 3rd year of university started last week, so I’ve suddenly found myself with coursework to pore over. Likewise, the Discovery Institute seems to have kicked itself into a high gear, publishing a larger-than-average number of articles about numerous different topics, all of which just so happen to be rather important and weighty. Ah well, someone’s got to cover them, my own studies of evolutionary genetics be damned.

This week [...]

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This Week in Intelligent Design – 19/02/12

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 11th of February to the 19th of February, 2012. 

So, it happened again: the Discovery Institute decided to notice something I wrote about them. I’m not sure if it’s because I write for The Panda’s Thumb and they see me as the weakest, undergraduate link in its strong chain of esteemed, proper biologists, or because my criticisms of their ideas are annoying, but they seem to focus on me quite a lot. Ah well, any recognition is good recognition, right?

[...]

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“Pro-ID”, “endorse ID” and “ID-friendly” – Holy terminological ambiguity, Batman!

Intelligent design, as a scientific hypothesis, is in trouble if it doesn’t have peer-reviewed papers establishing, analysing and providing evidence for its core ideas – so it’s no surprise that proponents of ID are quite adamant that such papers do in fact exist.

Casey Luskin, intelligent design expert and apparent head writer over at Evolution News & Views, is naturally no exception, and he recently answered an objection to the claim that over 50 peer-reviewed articles support ID: namely, that the majority of the articles cited by the [...]

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This [TIME PERIOD] in Intelligent Design – 10/02/12

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 17th of December, 2011 to the 10th of February, 2012.

Huh? Intelligent design, what’s that? Oh, oh, yes. Yes, you’re quite right. I’m sorry, I’ve been out of the loop a bit and I’d forgotten this little movement I like to keep an eye on from time to time. Well, it’s actually supposed to be a weekly thing, but… things have been crazy around here. Leave me alone, I’m a university student on holidays, I have no time to do anything.

Anyway, [...]

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So, Discovery Institute, do I win an award or what?

Getting mentioned on the Discovery Institute’s flagship blog Evolution News & Views never fails to make me smile. I mean, it’s a big deal that they’ve gone out of their way to talk about me – they could be doing some groundbreaking scientific research after all. However, I do wish that one day they’ll have something useful or interesting to say.

Do I sound a little snarky? Perhaps I do. And perhaps I mean to be, just a little. Because, you know, it’s not every day you read [...]

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The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences – Would I be welcome?

From the 6th to the 14th of July, 2012, the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is hosting a seminar on intelligent design for college and university students, entitled “Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences”:

The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences [emphasis in original] will prepare students to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID). The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, [...]

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Thoughts on the first three chapters of Dembski and Witt’s “Intelligent Design Uncensored”

As mentioned, I have a couple of pro-ID books that need to be read and reviewed these holidays: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer, and Intelligent Design Uncensored by William Dembski and Jonathan Witt. While I’ve done preliminary readings of both books, in order to grasp their overall structure and scope, I recently started reading the latter in a greater level of detail.

What I’ve found has not been pretty.

Yes, Intelligent Design Uncensored is not a very healthy book to [...]

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This Week in Intelligent Design – 16/12/11

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 9th of December to the 16th of December, 2011.

It’s nearing Christmas, and here in Australia the weather is heating up, causing the ground to bake beneath our thong-covered feet – and a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in as the “White Christmas” imagery fed to us by popular culture and jolly old Christmas tunes conflicts with the harsh reality of Summer in December. Such is the Southern Hemisphere.

Of course I could, at this point, easily compare that tale with the cognitive [...]

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This Week in Intelligent Design – 08/12/2011

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 2nd of December to the 8th of December, 2011.

It’s well and truly holidays now, and after getting all the fiddly, tricky things out of the way first – such as doing a domain transfer and dealing with responses from the Discovery Institute – it’s time to get back into TWiID and see what the online presence of the intelligent design movement has been like over the past seven days.

What are the notable posts about this week? [...]

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“You Win or You Die” – Unintentionally nourishing the ID rhetoricotrophs

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

~ Cersei Lannister, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”

Bit of a dramatic quote, isn’t it? But for some reason it entered my mind when I read what David Klinghoffer wrote about me and my views on the dismissive rhetoric of the scientific community towards the intelligent design movement (which I maintain is understandable, given the history of ID and creationism), in his Evolution News & Views post “A Darwinist Worries [...]

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