The ID Update

We shall analyze a skeptic's remarks and consider the future of intelligent design, about which the skeptic is skeptical. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates (and others who qualify) may wish to continue this conversation at Discovery Institute's Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design (apply here), which is aimed at "the next generation of scientists and scholars."

ORIGINS 2013, the joint annual meeting of the Creation Biology Society and the Creation Geology Society, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA on August 2-4.

The CBS and CGS have now offered a call for abstracts.

You can read the announcement for the CBS here:

You can read the announcement for the CGS here.

Technical sessions will be held in conjunction with the ICC meetings. They are currently soliciting abstracts on any geological, or related topic, pertaining to creation.

While the Craig-Rosenburg was not specifically a debate on intelligent design, a few of the points William Lane Craig argues for the existence of a non-contingent, pure being have to do with fine-tuning.

Here is the audio of the debate.

Here is the summary of the debate.

Truly, DNA is a remarkable information storage medium. One naturally wonders whether the clear intelligent design implications of this project crossed the minds of the paper's authors. In terms of efficiency, DNA far surpasses any current man-made technology and can last for thousands of years. To get a handle on this, consider that 1 petabyte is equivalent to 1 million gigabytes of information storage. This paper reports an information storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram.

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ENV reports...To see is to believe. There is something very powerful, cutting through endless words and arguments, about seeing a clearly designed molecular mechanism at work.

When Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell in 2009, he also narrated and released a companion animation, Journey Inside the Cell, showing how the digital information in DNA directs protein synthesis inside the cell. Produced by Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, the animation offered a unique look at the evidence for intelligent design found in biological nanomachines and has since received more than 445,000 views on YouTube. Because of the video's phenomenal success, the CSC has now launched a sequel animation, freely viewable on YouTube. This one allows viewers to tour an amazing molecular machine known as ATP synthase.

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As reported by ENV...Despite clear evidence of discrimination presented at trial, a California Superior Court Judge has turned down an anti-discrimination claim filed against NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) by a former employee subjected to mistreatment after sharing his views on intelligent design (ID) with some of his co-workers.

David Coppedge, a 14-year JPL veteran and team lead computer administrator on the Cassini Mission to Saturn, faced harassment and retaliation after occasionally lending ID-related DVDs to coworkers. After an angry supervisor forbade him from continuing to circulate the DVDs or even from mentioning the subject of intelligent design, Coppedge immediately complied, but he was reprimanded and demoted nonetheless. Coppedge eventually had to file suit to protect his rights, but JPL then terminated him.

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In The Guardian, Paul Davies writes on the origin of life...The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped. But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.

The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically life - friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.

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Most of the deleterious mutations in the human population arose in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, a survey claims.

According to a study published Jan. 10 in Nature by geneticists from 4 universities including Harvard, "Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants." By recent they mean really recent on evolutionary timescales.

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Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture is announcing two intensive nine-day seminars on intelligent design for college and graduate students during the summer of 2013.

"We're fully aware that ardent defenders of long-entrenched ideas like Darwinism aren't likely to change their minds," says senior fellow Dr. Jay Richards who oversees the seminar series. "So we're investing in the next generation of scientists and scholars. This year we'll welcome 40 students from all over the world, focusing on two distinct study tracks."

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On ID the Future, Dr. Donald L. Ewert continues to explain why the vertebrate adaptive immune system does not use "random" or "chance" processes like Darwinian evolution to generate antibody diversity. Instead, he argues that the immune system is intelligently designed. Listen in as Dr. Ewert shares one of the most interesting stories in science, the generation of antibody diversity.

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