The SciPhi Show, IslamOnline.net

Last week, I did an interview on the podcast program called The SciPhi show (Science Fiction and Philosophy), run by Jason Rennie. It has now been posted (direct link to mp3 – 16 MB). The show previously did interviews with Michael Shermer, and ID guys Salvador Cordova and Michael Behe. I was somewhat annoyed with what the latter two were getting away with in their interviews, so on the spur of the moment I dropped Rennie an email, and boom, he had me on.

In addition to pointing out all the usual ID mistakes, there was an interesting discussion about Star Trek: Remember that Star Trek episode where they discover that the suspiciously coincidental bipedal, humanlike form of all of the Star Trek aliens was (somehow) encoded into bacteria seeded across the galaxy billions of years ago, by an ancient bipedal race, a fact revealed when a 3-D holograph recording is deciphered out of the ancestral DNA genome (somehow!). The only thing the episode left out was an explanation for human-klingon-vulcan interfertility. Great episode, typically ludicrous science, but does it help the ID guys make their case? Listen to find out.

Also, a month or two ago I blogged an online discussion I did at IslamOnline.net with IDist Mustafa Akyol; I forgot to blog Part 2 of the discussion, which answered a bunch of leftover unanswered questions from Part 1, and was posted the following week. Evidently the replies were originally posted, but then Akyol revised some of his answers, and that is what is posted now. Several of the answers in Part 2 make peculiar claims that I have only heard from one other person, DI spokesperson Casey Luskin, which indicates that Luskin might have helped with the revised answers. Alternatively, it shows that at least that Akyol – and, sadly, me – read Luskin’s stuff closely.