To what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? For example, imagine that we enlisted the service of the worlds most creative and brilliant engineers and tasked them to design a space craft that will carry men to Mars and back. Now, let’s add one constraint – the only material available to the designers is concrete. Would these brilliant designers be able to meet the design objective?

Or consider the computer. Today’s computers are more sophisticated than computers from the 1950s, allowing people to design programs that allow you and me to communicate with great ease and little cost. Why is it that programmers seem to be able to do more with computers today than they could in the 1950s? Is it because today’s designers are smarter than yesterday? Have new laws of nature been discovered? Or does it have something to do with an observation from Hartwell et al.?

An early stored-program computer (left), built around 1950, used vacuum tubes in logic circuits, whereas modern computers use transistors and silicon wafers (right), but both are based on the same principles.

So again, to what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? Furthermore, since natural selection can act as a designer-mimic, wouldn’t it too be subject to similar limitations?

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

HERE

HT: UD

Here is an interesting article:

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

Where Are They?
Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

A major short-coming of Intelligent Design Theory has been its reluctance to identify the designer. This study addresses this problem and firmly establishes the reality of Intelligent Design.

Most design theorists are uncomfortable talking about the designer. Wedgocentric analysis has demonstrated this reluctance to be part of a sinister plot to foist a theocracy on an unsuspecting, scientifically-illiterate, Bush-electing public. If intelligent design is to be recognized for the science that it is, it must eschew this deception and show the scientific community the designer.

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Here. Since there is very little evidence the blind watchmaker can do that much without help from proteins, the next question to ask is: why are proteins so incredibly helpful to the blind watchmaker?

Guts posted this video before, but I thought I would repost it. I especially enjoyed the comments from Sean Carroll (according to Michael Ruse, “Of all the scientists in the world today, there is no one with whom Charles Darwin would rather spend an evening than Sean Carroll.”):

So what this means is in some ways, some sense, evolution is a simpler process than we first thought. When you think about all of the diversity of forms out there, we first believed this would involve all sorts of novel creations, starting from scratch, again and again and again. We now understand that, no, that evolution works with packets of information and uses them in a new and different ways, and new and different combinations, without necessarily having to invent anything fundamentally new, but new combinations.

My, that’s a pretty radical change in the way we view evolution. The old way was far more friendly to non-teleology and also failed to prepare scientists for the more accurate understanding of evolution, an understanding that is now much more friendly to teleology.

I am truly and seriously curious about how other people define ‘Intelligent Design,’ since it appears there are as many definitions as there are people who argue about the subject. So I would like to request that folks from both sides of the aisle provide their own definitions of Intelligent Design. There doesn’t have to be a correct answer, as people can simply provide their own definitions. Furthermore, I am not trying to start an argument or lay any trap. I’m just interested in surveying public perception.

So, how do you define Intelligent Design?

I’ve started a new category to document the manner in which some critics attempt to smear me. I think some of you might enjoy this one.

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After reading The Design Matrix, where next do you turn as you await the appearance of volume 2? I’ve finally finished reading Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart’s, The Plausibility of Life and, if the concept of front-loading tantalizes you, I highly recommend it. In fact, I plan to post various excerpts from the book over the summer and put together a book review.

But let me start with three points.

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