Fraternising with the enemy?

Design deniers schooled again?

 Sandgrouse Takes the Royal Society to Design School

Evolution News 

A new episode of ID the Future offers a look at how scientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University are picking up clever engineering tricks by studying the feather design of the Namaqua sandgrouse. Ordinary bird feathers are already a master class in ingenious design, but as Jochen Mueller and Lorna Gibson show in a recent Royal Society Interface paper, the males of this desert-dwelling sandgrouse from southwestern Africa “have specially adapted feathers on their bellies that hold water, even during flight, allowing the birds to transport water back to the chicks at the nest.” Episode guest Brian Miller talks with host Casey Luskin about the details of the ingenious design and tells how these feathers are inspiring human inventions, one of which could help desert communities collect water from the air more efficiently. Dr. Miller takes listeners through a summary of other inventions inspired by designs in biology. He discusses how this invention strategy is proving so fruitful that it’s now treated as an interdisciplinary subdiscipline, known as biomimetics.

Download the podcast or listen to it here. For more from Miller about this exciting field and how it repeatedly highlights evidence of intelligent design in biology, see his chapter in the new book Science and Faith in Dialogue, available as a free digital Download.

Breaking News : Evolution is still a fact.

 The BBC on Evolution: It Just Gets Worse

Cornelius G Hunter

The previous post reviewed Chris Baraniuk’s Article for the BBC about why evolution is such a great theory (“one of the greatest theories in all of science”), a fact, and so forth. The post showed how terrible the evidence is for evolution. In a sense, evolutionists themselves provide the most powerful critique of their theory. Just listen to their own explanations of why it is a fact. But there is more to the story. It gets worse because, well, that previous post didn’t cover Baraniuk’s complete article. That previous post only looked at part of Baraniuk’s article. It only looked at those parts of Baraniuk’s article that at least made some sense.

After discussing Richard Lenski’s long term experiment (LTEE), Baraniuk steps back to discuss the role of genes in evolution. Here is what he has to say

Over the last century scientists have catalogued the genes from different species. It turns out that all living things store information in their DNA in the same way: they all use the same "genetic code".

What's more, organisms also share many genes. Thousands of genes found in human DNA may also be found in the DNA of other creatures, including plants and even bacteria.

These two facts imply that all modern life has descended from a single common ancestor, the "last universal ancestor", which lived billions of years ago.

So, to paraphrase, we have two premises and a conclusion. The premises are:

P1: All living things store information in their DNA in the same way.

P2: Organisms also share many genes.

And the conclusion is:

C1: All modern life has descended from a single common ancestor.

It would be wrong to say this is a false claim. When we say that someone has made a false claim, the implication is that, while wrong, there was at least some logical reasoning present, some logical thread to follow. A false claim is a claim that starts with some evidence and in the process of getting to the conclusion, fouls up in some sort of an observable way. There was a stumble in an otherwise, at least somewhat, logical train of thought. We can at least see what the fellow was getting at. We can sympathize a bit, and reconstruct his attempt, and fix if for him, at least as best as we can. It may still be a hopeless argument, but at least we can see where he was going.

For the evolutionist there is no train of thought—no logical reasoning present. It is closer to, ironically, what Darwin described as “the convictions of a monkey's mind.”

It is complete gibberish.

To say that the conclusion C1 above does not follow from the premises P1 and P2 would be like saying your pet dog failed to beat you at chess when all he did was barf all over the board. Your dog not only failed to beat you, he didn’t even play the game.

It is not that evolutionists make a few mistakes here and there in an otherwise well thought out attempt. It is that they completely fail to provide anything remotely resembling a scientific argument for their Epicurean conviction that the entire biological world (and everything else for that matter), arose by itself.