intelligent design: a discourse

On Wednesday 30 March I will be giving an invited talk before the Indiana University Campus Freethought Alliance. The topic will (conveniently) coincide with my dissertation research: critical analysis of modern design arguments in biology.

The audience should be a diverse one. The Alliance—as its name suggests—is composed mostly of intellectual skeptics. But invitations have gone out to campus Christian groups, and I am going to lobby for advertising on one or two IU-centric blogs as well.

Here's the time and place info:

Wednesday, 30 March 2005
Woodburn Hall 004
Indiana University
7:30—9:00 pm

As regular readers of this blog know, I am conservative in both my theology and political orientation. So although I will be quite critical of the Intelligent Design's epistemic and scientific claims, it will not be out of any hostility towards the movement's advocates.

A formal introduction to my research is here. More on the subject can be found in this category archive.

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Related: While preparing the talk I found the website for the Digital Evolution Laboratory at Michigan State University. The work of this research group—particulary that involving the Avida Digital Life Platform—will be quite useful in answering ID theorist William Dembski's claims over what he calls complex specified information.

But the really cool part? Avida is open-source software, freely available under the GPL, and is downloadable at SourceForge. The project is mostly geared towards *nix OSes, although builds are also available for Windows and Mac platforms (if you are comfortable unpacking from source).

And now I have an honest, academically-validated reason to get a new computer, with smoking processor and about two gigs of memory. Oh, yes.

Wow! I truly wish I could attend. No chance this will be streaming out on the web, is there?

...I didn't think so.

Well, good luck and let us know how it goes!

And don't forget your academically necessary copies of Half Life 2 and Doom 3...

I learned a lesson years ago, after getting hooked for a short while on Civilization II. Horrible: didn't even want to leave the computer long enough to eat.

Still, there just might be an academic application for first-person shooter games. I'll look into it...

And James, I'm going to try to get the talk digitally recorded, but probably it will just be old-fashioned VHS. So no webstreaming. Bummer, that.