For those interested in joining the Creation Research Society, they are running a special membership drive at a steeply discounted price:
I just posted a new article on the Classical Conversations website - check it out!
I'm posting this mainly because I was thinking about it today, and it took me over an hour to find it. So I'm saving it here for future reference. Biblo at Telic Thoughts put up some excellent thoughts about being an amateur ID proponent. I also added the following comment:
I think it is dangerous for any discipline to reject the criticisms of amateurs out-of-hand. I have been programming computers for 25 years, have a book on programming that is used at Princeton University, have taught programming, and have numerous papers and articles on programming published by IBM and others. Nonetheless, I still, often, have customers who come up with ways of doing things that I don't think of – customers who have never programmed a day in their life. I know many people who dismiss their customers ideas out-of-hand because they don't believe that non-programmers have valid input. That is total B.S. The fact is, being a non-programmer gives someone an outside look at the issues that aren't obscured with all the things us programmers normally worry about that, and sometimes that opens their minds up to possibilities that we don't see. It doesn't mean that I take their ideas without criticism – there are more bad ones than good ones (which is expected, because they are outside the field, and aren't familiar with the issues). But nonetheless, I would be a lesser developer if I used the fact that these people are non-experts as a reason to dismiss what they had to say. This also often requires translating what the have to say. Non-experts often use terms wrong, have a bad understanding of the way certain concepts work together, and the like. But *my* job is not to use my expertise as a way of beating their ignorance over their heads, but rather to *translate* their conceptualizations of their ideas into full-fledged, implementable ideas. So, rather than using my expertise to knock down, I use it to build up – to find a way to understand the non-experts in the most gracious light, and find a way for them to be right. Doing so improves us both.
The book Sacred Cows in Science was just released. This book is a compilation of issues from 17 authors in 3 countries which each challenge some aspect of science that normally goes unchallenged. I have a chapter in it, so please take time to purchase a copy! My chapter is on genetic mutations and whether they are accidental or not (or both).
The book covers a lot of territory, including astrophysics, biology, sociology, and other topics. Many of the topics deal directly or indirectly with creation and evolution but not all. Anyway, the chapters are all very different, some lay-oriented and some that are more technical. Anyway, purchase a copy today!
One thing that is often missing in ID contexts is a theology of "undesign". That is, if we are going to take our design inferences seriously, that means that there needs to be a real category of "undesign". Yet, if we take our faith seriously, then we also need to understand God as the designer of the whole universe.
David Snoke takes a pass at working through this issue in a paper titled "Defining Undesign in a Designed Universe". Well worth your read.
Ian just pointed me to an excellent link about Chinese Treasure Junks. These are ships built in the 15th century that have approximately the same dimensions as Noah's ark, and built out of wood. Pretty amazing! I wonder what these could teach us about the ark itself, if anything, and if perhaps the technology to build these came from the ark itself.
Please vote for the Little Light House to receive $500,000 from Kohl's Cares. This is a wonderful organization which benefits special needs children without taking any payment whatsoever. They have been a lifesaver to me and my family.
For any of you with questions about creationism, I encourage you to come and ask questions at Creationism Q&A Day on Facebook with Creation Nation X. Our friend Ian hosted the last one, and I'll be hosting this one with a focus on biology.
I was reading Gene Conversion in the Rice Genome, and noticed this:
Pseudogenes in the rice genome with low similarity to Arabidopsis genes showed greater likelihood for gene conversion than those with high similarity to Arabidopsis genes.
While arabidopsis is probably a different created kind than rice, it got me wondering - what if, when two species enter into symbiosis, one species transfers pseudogenes to another, which are then used in gene conversion to set up the biochemical pathways for the symbiosis?
Thus, pseudogenes might act like a symbiosis integration script, giving a template for interacting with it. The other organism then takes that template, and, through gene conversion, uses pieces out of it to alter its own genome to match the symbiosis?
Anyway, that might be an interesting path to look down.
I was having a conversation with someone about fitness functions, who asked how someone could sneak information into a fitness function. I responded. Of course, someone else then asked about how evolution worked in cases where information wasn't snuck into the fitness function - the answer - it is usually snuck into the parameters of evolution! But I hope you can see why online discussions are hard (for any issue). People take the answer to a single *aspect* of the issue to be a universal answer to the whole deal. They mistake the fact that you are having a conversation with a specific person about a specific thing to be a general public service announcement. We can't spend our lives speaking in qualified statements, but we do need to be aware that people listening in aren't familiar with the full context of the conversation.