Discovery Institute's Blog, page 10

At Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Patron Reports Errors in Displays, Gets Brushed Off

Misrepresentations of the scientific evidence on evolution are everywhere. Check out the displays at your local science museum, for example, and you can't help tripping over them.

We received a note from a friend of ours who visited the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. In addition to exploring the new robotics exhibit with his grandchildren, Discovery Institute supporter and intelligent design enthusiast Jim Campbell decided to visit the origins-of-life section. Two of the displays, on the...

Robert Wright Asks: Can Evolution Have a Higher Purpose?

Editor's note: We are delighted to welcome Dr. Miller as a new contributor to Evolution News. He is Research Coordinator for Discovery University's Center for Science & Culture, and holds a BS and PhD in physics from MIT and Duke University respectively.

Writing for the New York Times philosophy forum "The Stone," journalist Robert Wright asks a good question: "Can Evolution Have a 'Higher Purpose'?" He describes an interview with evolutionist William Hamilton, who developed the theory of ki...

University of Wisconsin Geoscience Postdoc: Bury Carbon, Get Animals

Jon Husson, a geoscience postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sits by an outcrop of black shale in Nova Scotia, where he gets a bright idea. His insight, according to an announcement from UWM:

For the development of animals, nothing -- with the exception of DNA -- may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere.

Oxygen enables the chemical reactions that animals use to get energy from stored carbohydrates -- from food. So it may be no coincidence that animals appeared and evol...

On Martin Luther King Day, Consider This About Intelligent Design

I've observed here before that intelligent design poses not only a scientific challenge to Darwinism but also a challenge to think a little more broadly about civil rights:

As we were reminded in the final and likewise shameful resolution of the David Coppedge matter, evolution is a civil-rights issue as much as it is a scientific one. Coppedge's right to dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy was crushed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the judge in the case accepted NASA's slickly constr...

As January 17 Cabinet Appointment Hearing Approaches: Advice for Betsy DeVos on Evolution

CNS News was kind enough to publish this from me, "Trump's Education Secretary Nominee DeVos Should Challenge Darwinism." I've speculated that among all of Trump's Cabinet picks, Mrs. DeVos may face some of the most acid questions -- specifically on the subject of evolution and science education.

If she's challenged on these topics, the three key points, already shared here at Evolution News, to keep in mind for a reply to critics are as follows:

First of all, it isn't the role of the Secre...

A Royal Pain: Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe on Five Problems for Evolution

Author and radio host Frank Turek debriefed Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe on the significance of November's Royal Society Meeting in London. Helpfully, he led the pair of ID theoriests in a discussion of the top five big problems for evolutionary theory: namely, the fossil record, the origin of biological information, the necessity of early mutations in development, the existence of epigenetic information, and Dr. Axe's recent contribution in his new book Undeniable, the universal design int...

Whether in Bacteria or Humans, Quality Control Systems Operate Everywhere in the Cell

Search for the phrase "quality control" in our pages and you will find a lot of entries. Both words, "quality" and "control," fit a model of intelligent design beautifully.

By contrast, why would an unguided Darwinian process care about "quality"? Why would evolution care about "control"? That's especially the case where the two occur in combination. The phrase presupposes a mindful goal of controlling quality. It's always satisfying, therefore, to find these loaded terms in scientific liter...

Was Hitler a Creationist? A Christian? Decoding a Famous Quotation from Mein Kampf

In the many years I have studied Hitler's ideology, I have seen the following from Mein Kampf more often than any other: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Because of its theological language, very often this quotation is offered as proof that Hitler was a Christian. Since he used the term Creator here, some even maintain that Hitler was a creationist.

In my...

Prediction: Betsy DeVos Will Attract More Liberal Venom than Any Other Trump Cabinet Appointment

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that of all Trump's Cabinet picks, Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education may attract more liberal venom than any other. We'll see when her confirmation hearing begins on Tuesday, January 17.

The accusation will be that she is "anti-science," an imagined thought crime that provokes elite loathing like almost no other. Of course, there's zero evidence for the charge. They will cite her husband's comment on teaching intelligent design, which I addresse...

European Parliament Committee Wants Robot Rights

Every time I warn that transhumanists and other assorted futurists want to destroy human exceptionalism by granting personhood and citizenship to sophisticated computers, some readers mock me with the "It will never happen here" complacency. (Anyone who says that has been in a coma for the last fifty years.)

Yes, it could "happen here." In fact, a committee of the European Parliament has voted in favor of robot rights:

The draft report, approved by 17 votes to two and two abstentions by the...