Discovery Institute's Blog

Changing Lives, Building Community -- Apply through April 4 for the Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design!

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Over the last 20+ years, supporters of our work at the Center for Science & Culture have been vital in educating talented young people about the corrosive and science-stopping impact of neo-Darwinian and other naturalistic explanations for biological origins. Because of the generosity of our visionary donors, students around the world are being inspired and energized to contribute their talents to the intelligent design (ID) movement.

Our next Seminar program is July 7-15, 2017, in Seattle,...

Bill Nye the World-Saving, Comedy-Monologue-Delivering, Model-Schmoozing, Pop-Psychologizing Guy

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On Fox last night, Tucker Carlson skewered "Science Guy" Bill Nye as "Bill Nye the Psychoanalyst Guy." Take a few minutes and watch it (click on the image above). It's a gem. Nye's new line on science "deniers" is that they are in the grip of "cognitive dissonance," a psychological condition that allows them to disregard scientific evidence in deference to their "world view."

The specific subject of the conversation is climate "denial" but no doubt Nye would extend the courtesy of his psych...

Epigenomics "Gold Rush" Is Underway

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More than a century ago, hardy individuals dropped everything to search for Klondike gold. Today, a new breed of adventurers is changing course to search for a different kind of gold: information at a scale so tiny, it couldn't be read until recently. It's called "non-genetic information."

Biochemists are as excited as prospectors without having to haul packs up remote snowbanks. More secrets of the cell are coming to light, revealing new levels of regulation in the burgeoning field of epig...

Introducing Our Long-Term Media Accountability Experiment

If you follow us at Evolution News, you're likely familiar with Richard Lenski's Long-Term Evolution Experiment with E. coli bacteria, which has been the subject of much media spin over the years. Well, guess what, we've been conducting our own long-term experiment -- not on E. coli, but gauging media accountability and truthfulness.

Writing over at The Stream, I give a sense of the results we've obtained.

Following the national news lately has been a frustrating exercise in "He said, she s...

Peter Singer Thinks Intellectually Disabled Less Valuable than Pigs

In his apologetics for infanticide, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has used a baby with Down syndrome as an example of a killable infant based on utilitarian measurements. (He actually supports infanticide because babies -- whether disabled or not -- are, in his view, not "persons.")

To Singer, moral value primarily comes from intellectual capacities, and that means developmentally and cognitively disabled human beings (also, the unborn and infants) have less value than other human being...

Listen: Signature in the Cell Is Now an Audiobook; Hear an Excerpt!

The mystery of the information at the heart of life is the focus of Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The book is now out on audio (CD and Audible). On a new episode of ID the Future, hear an excerpt, read Derek Shetterly.

Download the episode by clicking here:

What is information? And how does DNA pose a problem for Darwinism? Listen and find out.

Doug Axe: Hidden Figures and the Engineering Challenge to Darwinism

Ahead of tomorrow night's Academy Awards ceremonies, Doug Axe has an excellent post up at The Stream on the film Hidden Figures and the engineering challenge to Darwinism. The film, with several nominations including Best Picture, is the story of African-American women who were math prodigies, or "computers," at NASA.

Hidden Figures -- the true story of three brilliant African-American women who proved themselves in a 1960s NASA culture dominated by white men -- is sure to inspire. The film...

Happy Engineers Week -- Let's Remember Intelligence Is at the Heart of It All

It's National Engineers Week -- so we wanted to give a shout out to our CSC Fellows and Evolution News contributors who are in the world of engineering. As we've observed in the past, engineering and medicine differ from evolutionary biology in that they focus on how things work. Evolutionists can seem at times to disregard function, but doctors and engineers never can.

Speaking of engineering, here's a rundown of news on one of the most exciting fields where the science of intelligent desig...

Smaller Voles: "Evolution in Action" Is Rare, Trivial

News from the University of Zurich is notable both for how underwhelming it is and for a "rare" admission. Researchers documented that as winter came earlier, snow voles got smaller. That seemed counterintuitive since, as the title of the publication in PLOS Biology asks rhetorically, "Bigger Is Fitter?"

Well, isn't it? Not so in this case, apparently. Why?

In principle, larger snow voles are fitter: They have better capabilities to survive and reproduce. Despite this positive correlation a...

Putting the RNA World Theory to the Test with "Pistol"

Proponents of the RNA World theory for the origin of life need to produce the goods: RNA molecules that can store information and perform useful reactions and reproduce themselves and form spontaneously in a plausible prebiotic environment. A new candidate has emerged.

Behold Pistol: a "self-cleaving ribozyme," announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We know that the three authors from Yale -- Nguyen, Wang and Steitz -- think it is relevant to the origin of life, be...