Stephen C. Meyer discusses Richard Dawkins on the Michael Medved show

The Michael Medved show is a national radio show broadcast out of Seattle, Washington. According to Talkers magazine, he has the fifth largest radio audience. In the last week of April, Mr. Medved accounced a new segment on origins, evolution and intelligent design that will be heard each week.

Here is the original announcement:

Does science conflict with religious faith? Does nature offer scientific evidence of design? Should public-school students learn about all sides of contentious scientific issues? Or should teachers spoon-feed them with only the politically approved views? Should scientists be free to pursue the truth, wherever the search takes them? What if it leads to conclusions that are disturbing to a rigidly secular point of view?

Starting this Thursday, April 25, the Michael Medved Show will shine a bright light on these and other fascinating questions that are vital to the future of our nation and our culture.

[...]From Darwinian evolution to climate change, science has become a major flashpoint in the culture war. In using science as a political and cultural weapon, aggressive, evangelizing materialists count on our not knowing enough to argue back. That’s why, to follow and participate in the greatest debates of our day, you need to know about the science behind the controversies.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery will join Mr. Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture, how bad science and biased science are corroding the best American values. They’ll talk about the assault on human dignity and uniqueness, about attempts to silence dissenting scientists and suppress academic freedom. They will discuss the danger posed by revived Social Darwinism and the new eugenics. And yes, they’ll explore the debate over scientific materialism versus intelligent design.

The Michael Medved Show is one of the top ten most listened to radio talk shows in the United States. Syndicated to some 200 radio stations, it reaches an estimated weekly audience of 3-4 million people.

Here is the second segment from this past week, courtesy of the Intelligent Design: The Future podcast.

The MP3 file is available for download at the link above.

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Stephen Meyer continues his conversation with Michael Medved on the Medved Show’s “Science and Culture Update.” Listen in as Meyer and Medved discuss a recent prominent criticism of Richard Dawkins and take questions from callers about intelligent design.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery Institute will join Mr. Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture. Listen in live online or on your local Medved station, or stay tuned for at ID the Future for the weekly podcast.

In addition to talking about Dawkins, he also discusses the Cambrian explosion and takes calls from angry Darwinists.

Now might be a good time to subscribe to the ID: The Future podcast.

Previous entries

• Episode one: Thomas Nagel and intelligent design

Filed under: Podcasts, Climate Change, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Michael Medved, Radio, Radio Show, Science, Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen C. Meyer on the nationally syndicated Michael Medved show

The Michael Medved show is a national radio show broadcast out of Seattle, Washington. According to Talkers magazine, he has the fifth largest radio audience. Mr. Medved will now have a segment on origins, evolution and intelligent design every week.

Here is the announcement:

Does science conflict with religious faith? Does nature offer scientific evidence of design? Should public-school students learn about all sides of contentious scientific issues? Or should teachers spoon-feed them with only the politically approved views? Should scientists be free to pursue the truth, wherever the search takes them? What if it leads to conclusions that are disturbing to a rigidly secular point of view?

Starting this Thursday, April 25, the Michael Medved Show will shine a bright light on these and other fascinating questions that are vital to the future of our nation and our culture.

[...]From Darwinian evolution to climate change, science has become a major flashpoint in the culture war. In using science as a political and cultural weapon, aggressive, evangelizing materialists count on our not knowing enough to argue back. That’s why, to follow and participate in the greatest debates of our day, you need to know about the science behind the controversies.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery will join Mr. Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture, how bad science and biased science are corroding the best American values. They’ll talk about the assault on human dignity and uniqueness, about attempts to silence dissenting scientists and suppress academic freedom. They will discuss the danger posed by revived Social Darwinism and the new eugenics. And yes, they’ll explore the debate over scientific materialism versus intelligent design.

The Michael Medved Show is one of the top ten most listened to radio talk shows in the United States. Syndicated to some 200 radio stations, it reaches an estimated weekly audience of 3-4 million people.

Here is the first segment, courtesy of the Intelligent Design: The Future podcast.

The MP3 file is available for download at the link above.

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, hear Dr. Stephen Meyer talk with Michael Medved on the Medved Show’s very first “Science and Culture Update.”

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery Institute will join Mr. Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture. Listen in live online or on your local Medved station, or stay tuned for at ID the Future for the weekly podcast.

The podcast is about 15 minutes long, and focuses on work of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, and his views on intelligent design. I highly recommend that you listen to the podcast. It was awesome.

This segment was broadcast in the third hour of the Thursday show, so I am expecting that it will be a regular feature of the third hour. This is cause for rejoicing – a mainstream radio audience is going to have a chance to think about how science and culture interact. Great news!

Now might be a good time to subscribe to the ID: The Future podcast.

Filed under: Podcasts, Climate Change, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Michael Medved, Radio, Radio Show, Science, Stephen C. Meyer

The undisputed best book on intelligent design now has a sequel

The very best book on intelligent design is Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell“, which discusses the knotty problem of the origin of life. And now, a new book by Dr. Meyer has been announced to tackle another huge problem: the fossil record.

Here is the description of the new book, entitled “Darwin’s Doubt”:

Darwin’s Origin of Species launched a revolution whose scientific, cultural and spiritual effects are still with us. Now a new revolution is on the horizon. On June 18, the HarperOne imprint of HarperCollins will publish Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, by Stephen C. Meyer.

[...]Meyer begins with what Darwin himself regarded as a troubling enigma, a subject of doubt and even some scientific distress. It is a mystery from which subsequent generations of Darwinists have sought to distract the public’s attention. Some 530 million years ago, in the event called the Cambrian explosion, there sprang suddenly into existence the majority of animal body plans (phyla) that have existed on Earth. The shallow seas of the Cambrian period abruptly teemed with diverse, exotic animals.

Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have struggled to explain this epic event. Dr. Meyer takes his readers on a journey through scientific history, starting with the discovery of the Burgess Shale by Charles Walcott in 1909. He shows how failed attempts to give a satisfying Darwinian explanation of the Cambrian explosion have opened the door to increasingly profound questions, posed by evolutionary biologists themselves, leading to a far greater mystery: the origin of the biological information necessary to build the animals of the Cambrian and all the living creatures that have existed on Earth.

I have already pre-ordered my copy!

Filed under: News, Cambrian Explosion, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Fossils, Information, Intelligence, Intelligence Cause, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin

New study: function found for beta-globin pseudogene that was labeled “junk” during Dover trial

Casey Luskin tells us about a new study in Evolution News.

Excerpt:

A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution argues that the famous beta-globin pseudogene is functional. Why is this pseudogene famous?

Well, it’s been Exhibit A — literally, offered as evidence in a court case — for critics of intelligent design who argue that our genome is full of useless, functionless junk, and therefore can’t be a product of design. Near the beginning of his testimony on the very first day of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller testified to the court that the beta-globin pseudogene is “broken, and it has a series of molecular errors that render the gene non-functional.” (Day 1 AM, p. 79.) He further told the court:

And the fact that all three of these species have matching mistakes leads us to just one conclusion, and that’s the same conclusion that Charles Darwin predicted almost a century and a half ago, and that is that these three species share a common ancestor. Matching mistakes are evidence of common ancestry. (Day 1 AM, p. 81)

In his 2008 book Only a Theory, Miller is even more explicit in asserting that this pseudogene refutes intelligent design. He writes that “A detailed analysis of the beta-globin pseudogene shows a series of mutations have rendered it nonfunctional” (p. 102). In Miller’s view, that takes care of ID:

The gorilla and chimpanzee pseudogenes have exactly the same set of molecular errors [in their beta-globin pseudogene] … There’s no escaping the implication of these matching mistakes, and there’s no point in arguing that six identical mistakes could have turned up independently in three unrelated species. The only sensible interpretation is that the original errors developed at random in a single common ancestor of these three species. In a court of genetic copyright law, any motion that a designer could claim originality for the human genome would be tossed out in a flash. (pp. 102-103)

Now a new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, “Evolutionary Constraints in the β-Globin Cluster: The Signature of Purifying Selection at the δ-Globin (HBD) Locus and Its Role in Developmental Gene Regulation, argues that the beta-globin pseudogene is not broken, but in fact performs an important function in regulating gene expression.

Remember, Darwinists are still reeling from the ENCODE study that found that the non-coding DNA that they said was 100% junk was actually 80% functional. The trouble is that they are always letting their philosophy of naturalism get in the way of their science. They assume that nature is all there is. They assumed that everything is not designed. Then they are quick to say that things that aren’t junk are junk, in order to confirm their assumption. Problems occur later when good science comes along and proves their philosophical assumption of naturalism wrong. Do they then give up the philosophical assumption? Heck no – that’s their religion! But they ought to give it up if they were honest, and stick with the science instead. Too much bad religion among the Darwinists – that’s the problem.

Filed under: News, Atheism, Darwin, Darwinian, Darwinism, Design, Dogma, Evidence, Evolution, Experiment, Junk, Junk DNA, Naturalism, Religion, Science

What is intelligent design? Dr. Stephen C. Meyer explains the theory

A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“.

You can get an MP3 of the lecture here. (30 MB)

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

• intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
• Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
• Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
• but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
• even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
• can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
• there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
• overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
• the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
• meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
• it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
• although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
• similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
• the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
• so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
• however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
• there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
• but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
• the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
• the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
• the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
• if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
• the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
• the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
• we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
• the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

A sequence of amino acids forming a protein

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

Related posts

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

Filed under: Videos, Law, Science, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Stephen C. Meyer, William Dembski, DNA, Specified Complexity, Darwinism, Naturalism, Faith, Evidence, Materialism, Chance, Life, Protein, Sequence, Cell, Amino Acid, OOL, Origin, Information, Bonding, Gene, Doug Axe, Software Engineering, Design Patterns, RNA, Self-Organization, Ribosome, Protein Folding, Necessity, Protein Synthesis, Side Chains, Specificity, Messenger RNA, Polymerase, Assembly, Message, The DNA Enigma, Replicator