This blog has been lying fallow for a while, I realize. I do have some new content upcoming. But in the meantime, my attention has been drawn to a quiz called the “Darwin Devotion Detector”. This was posted by Intelligent Design Creationist William Dembski on the Discovery Institute’s website, “Evolution News” (which almost never has any actual news about evolution). Dembski writes that he created this questionnaire a few years ago for an “educational website”, which later removed it “to appease the search engines.” (ID Creationists rarely miss an opportunity to claim victimhood status.)
I’ll be joining John Richards and Tersia du Plessis for a Youtube live stream tomorrow (July 22) at 3:30 PM EST. We’ll be talking about whether dualism is supported by scientific evidence, and any other topics that happen to come up. Hope you can join us!
I’ll be doing a live debate on August 1, 2021, at 3:00 PM ET (7:00 PM GMT) with Ahmed Abdelsattar, a computer engineer who is also an Islamic apologist and frequently makes videos about why he does not accept the theory of evolution. Hope some of you will be able to watch!
I have a new article up at The Panda’s Thumb, about intelligent design founder William Dembski and what his opinions regarding COVID-19 reveal about the ID movement. An excerpt:
His rather detached attitude to the question of the virus’s origin is curious given his self-proclaimed status as one of the world’s leading experts in detecting “design” in nature. It would seem if he really believed his own promotional material, he would be volunteering his services and expertise to help answer a question that has been at the forefront of the single gravest issue facing humanity at this moment: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Surely Bill Dembski can delay his quest to become a cryptocurrency billionaire for just a few days while he helps save the human race, no? Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark do it all the time.
Many Canadian hockey fans were somewhat shocked last Monday when they were watching the opening game of the Stanley Cup playoff series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Their surprise had nothing to do with the game itself, but with the crowd that was attending it. The game was played in Las Vegas before a sold-out arena, with no possibility of social distancing, and few in the crowd wearing masks (see below).
This is indicative of the situation in the city of Las Vegas as a whole, which as of June 1 has been completely open with no public health measures whatsoever to control the spread of COVID-19.
For some reason I forgot to include this in my last post, but I think it is sufficiently entertaining and revealing to warrant a post all to itself. Birger Sorensen (above left) is chairman of Bionor, a company trying to develop a vaccine for HIV. He has been involved in the development of several patented vaccines. Angus Dalgleish (above right) is an oncologist at Cancer Center London. His main research interests are the role of viruses in causing cancer and the development of vaccines against cancer. These two men do not believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, arose naturally. Instead, they believe it was deliberately created by labs in China.
It is not surprising that, when a cataclysmic event like the current SARS-C0V-2 (COVID-19) pandemic occurs, crackpot ideas and conspiracy theories soon follow. Not long after the pandemic was declared claims began circulating that it was caused by 5G wireless signals or that it was a plot to install microchips into the global population. Ideas of such absurdity, persistent though they may be, can be summarily dismissed as the nonsense they are.
One particular claim, however, has not been so easily dismissed. While experts consider it most likely that the virus arose naturally in bats and was then passed on to humans thru another, as yet unidentified, animal host, there is an alternative scenario that continues to draw attention and support: That the virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan province where the pandemic first started. In some versions of the theory, the virus was the result of “gain of function” experiments that increased the lethality of the virus before its escape into the population. An early backer of this theory was Donald Trump, which was only to be expected given his penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories as well as his antipathy towards China. But the lab leak theory has continued to gain traction even among respectable and well-regarded media outlets and authorities. A number of scientists wrote a letter to Science demanding that this possibility be more strongly considered, and the Biden administration has ordered its intelligence agencies to investigate the possibility that the pandemic could have originated from a lab accident.
Courtroom Sketch of Ken Miller testifying at the Dover trial
I have been discussing the the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial which ended exactly 15 years ago last Sunday . Three of the key figures who supported the plaintiffs recently sat down for interviews with S. Joshua Swamidass and (on two of the interviews) Nathan Lents for the Peaceful Science blog. Videos of the interviews can be found at the bottom of the page.
This month marks fifteen years since the conclusion of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial which ruled that Intelligent Design (ID) is a form of creationism and, therefore, could not be taught as a scientific theory in American public schools. Recently, several of the people involved in the trial have given interviews about it, among them biochemist Michael Behe, the most prominent proponent of ID to testify at the trial.
