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September 5th, 2012 | Category: miscellaneousWhoa! Haven’t seen you guys for a while! There’s a good reason for this – it’s my last undergraduate semester of uni before I kick off my Master, and my coursework has completely inexplicably increased dramatically. There are assignments and tests flying at me from all four subjects I’m taking, it’s crazy. Add in my weekly podcast commitment, the relaunch of the Young Australian Skeptics blog and my newfound penchant for caring about my fitness, and there’s little time for some good ol’ Homologous Legs blogging. Very [...]
» Continue reading “Business time/month/semester/era!”
March 13th, 2012 | Category: skepticismRegular readers of this blog may know of “Will”, a frequent commenter on my posts about evolutionary biology and intelligent design who seems to disagree with absolutely everything I say. Some would, and have, called him a troll – I’m a little more lenient in my descriptions, but I usually restrain from responding to him too much, given that his comments are often filled with semi-decipherable appeals to “natural genetic engineering” and consciousness in bacteria and other organisms. In short, I really don’t have time to wade through the murky [...]
» Continue reading “Am I an evolutionary ideologue?”
April 23rd, 2011 | Category: tabletop transitionals
This SMBC comic is brilliant. So brilliant – brilliantly large, in fact – that it’s below the fold. Just don’t break your brain in the process of absorbing its contents.
– - – - – - – - -Is that the right term to use? Well, you know what I mean.
This SMBC comic is brilliant. So brilliant – brilliantly large, in fact – that it’s below the fold1. Just don’t break your brain in the process of absorbing its contents….
March 15th, 2011 | Category: intelligent designWhile reading Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer, I realised something important that I had previously overlooked in the debate between pro- and anti-ID camps. It’s always perplexed me why ID proponents, especially those at the Discovery Institute, constantly talk about “materialistic evolution”. If their contention is that ID is secular, why muddy that position by bringing in what seems like a theistic idea – non-materialism?
In Chapter 2 of Signature, Meyer goes through a reasonably brief history of the scientific debate between biological materialists and [...]
» Continue reading “Does intelligent design have a dualistic assumption, not a theistic one?”
March 7th, 2011 | Category: intelligent designI was born 19 years ago today, on the 7th of March, 1992, which means that, as one of my friends put it, it’s my Placenta Independence Anniversary! Hooray for breathing air!
Anyway, it’s time for a reverse birthday present and what better than a new pro-intelligent design website I found a little while ago? Meet How To Debate Evolution, the love child of my thoughts on the possibility of advanced alien bioengineering and either Casey Luskin, William Dembski and/or Jonathan Wells
November 22nd, 2010 | Category: tabletop transitionalsSigh. I thought I would have enough time to get back to my usual Monday Science Link and This Week in Intelligent Design, but it looks like that won’t be possible until after TAM Australia. Damn, another week where I let you all down in a way that you’ll probably get over very quickly.
Anyway, to somehow help ease the pain, here’s another brilliant SMBC comic. Oh, and Zach, the guy behind it, has a book that he wants you to buy, the newly-released print version of another [...]
» Continue reading “Tabletop Transitional – SMBC on self-identity”
November 17th, 2010 | Category: intelligent designThe central, supposedly “scientific” argument in intelligent design is that of William Dembski’s design inference (DI), first proposed in his book of a similar name, The Design Inference. Dembski’s DI (also known as an explanatory filter) effectively claims that events can be put into one of only three categories: those that are due to regularity, chance, or design. Supposedly, by assessing the probability of an event occurring, one can work their way down the structure of the DI and, after eliminating regularity and chance, conclude that an event was due [...]
» Continue reading “Agency markers and Dembski’s flawed design inference”
November 10th, 2010 | Category: intelligent designBarry Arrington on Uncommon Descent has just posted something a little strange:
I am not satisfied with our definition of “Darwinism” in the glossary over to the right of our home page. The definition is, I think, accurate as far as it goes, but it is incomplete and somewhat vague. In this thread I invite friend and foe alike to provide a brief definition of “Darwinism.” The best entry or a synthesis of the best entries will obtain pride of place as permanent fixture in the UD [...]
» Continue reading “Redefining Darwinism? How about not doing that?”
November 2nd, 2010 | Category: this week in intelligent designIntelligent design news from the 27th of October to the 2nd of November, 2010.
I’ll get straight into it this week, no time for idle chit-chat. My end-of-year exams (yes, yes, I know the Australia university system is different) are fast approaching, so this will probably be the last TWiID for at least two weeks – unfortunately, I have two exams (Biology and Chemistry) that fall perfectly on Tuesday and Wednesday next week, exactly around the time that I write and publish this regular segment. I’ve done the calculations and [...]
» Continue reading “This Week in Intelligent Design – 02/11/10″
November 2nd, 2010 | Category: intelligent designOne of the main problems with the claim that intelligent design is scientific is that ID doesn’t add anything to our state of knowledge – we cannot draw out any other information about an object with only the knowledge that it was designed as a starting point.
This point was deftly made in Wesley R Elsberry and John S Wilkins’ “The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance” (2001)
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Homologous Legs is the personal blog of Jack Scanlan, an Australian science communicator and biology student.
Topics of interest here include the intelligent design/evolution "war", biology, philosophy, religion, music, and mostly coherent thoughts from a scattered brain. Contact
homologouslegs(at)gmail(dot)com
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