Discovery Institute's Blog, page 101

Listen: Wayne Rossiter on Atheism and Theistic Evolution

Our friend and colleague Casey Luskin has left Discovery Institute for other adventures but before departing he recorded an interview for ID the Future with Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God.

Download the episode by clicking here:

In the first part of the interview, Dr. Rossiter talks about his disillusionment with atheism from 2008, and how he wrote his book on theistic evolution. Casey reviewed it here last month.

Image credit: Martin Koitme (O...

An "Exquisitely Designed" Enzyme that Maintains DNA Building Blocks

It's molecular machine time, and today we'll be looking at a particularly amazing one. It's essential, it's "evolutionarily ancient," and it's unique. This machine, named ribonucleotide reductase, or RNR for short, is a beauty. News from MIT explains why your life depends on this machine:

Cell survival depends on having a plentiful and balanced pool of the four chemical building blocks that make up DNA -- the deoxyribonucleosides deoxyadenosine, deoxyguanosine, deoxycytidine, and thymidine,...

The Arrogance of "Doctor Knows Best"

The Texas Advance Directive Act (TADA) allows a hospital bioethics committee and doctors to veto wanted life-sustaining treatment if they believe the suffering thereby caused is unwarranted -- with the cost of care always in the unspoken background. It is a form of ad hoc health care rationing -- death panels, if you will -- that place the moral values and opinions of strangers over those of the patient and family.

Futile care theory would even allow strangers to veto the contents of a patie...

Paul Nelson on "Why Biology Has Nothing to Fear from ID," Tomorrow at Southwestern Adventist University

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson will be delivering a public lecture tomorrow, Saturday, January 16, at Southwestern Adventist University. Please join Dr. Nelson as he explains "Why Biology Has Nothing to Fear from Intelligent Design -- and Much to Gain." The address is part of SAU's Saxon Lecture Series in Science and Religion.

Dr. Nelson is a Fellow of Discovery Institute and Adjunct Professor in the Master of Arts Program in Science & Religion at Biola University. He has been involved i...

Animal Minds: In Search of the Minimal Self

Editor's note: Find the full "Animal Minds" series to date here.

New Scientist suggested, as one of its big ideas for 2015, that the ability of humans to talk to animals would transform what it means to be human. Actually, it wouldn't. But the ability of animals to understand what humans are saying would transform what it means to be an animal.

In a 2009 issue of Nature, Johan J. Bolhuis and Clive D. L. Wynne asked a key question: Can evolution explain how minds work? They identified serious...

The Immune System: An Army Inside You

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The body is made u...

Big News: Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech Is in the Pipeline; Out in August

Ah, this is a big deal for the Darwin debate: Tom Wolfe's book The Kingdom of Speech is now confirmed as being in the pipeline and Amazon gives a publication date of this summer, August 30.

I don't know exactly what he says there about evolution, specifically in relation to human speech, but this is bound to be interesting. Wolfe is one of the great journalists of our time, and he's had spoken out forcefully on the persecution of intelligent design proponents, comparing it to the "Spanish In...

Intelligent Design on Target

In his second major treatise on design theory, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, William Dembski discusses searches and targets. One of his main points is that the ability to reach a target in a vast space of possibilities is an indicator of design. A sufficiently complex target that satisfies an independent specification, he argues, creates a pattern that, when observed, satisfies the Design Filter. There are rigorous mathematical and logical...

Coming Next Month, Michael Denton and The Biology of the Baroque; See the Trailer Now!

My family and I were watching Ninotchka last night -- the sly story of a dour, emotionally repressed Soviet official who travels to Paris and reluctantly discovers the allure of beauty, luxury, and love. Greta Garbo plays the title character. It's full of great lines, and I was especially tickled by Ninotchka's pre-transformation dismissal of herself as, "Just what you see. A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution."

It made me think of our upcoming documentary, The Biology of the Baroque:...

Listen: Ann Gauger on the Limits of Evolutionary Optimization

On a new episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid talks to Dr. Ann Gauger, a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute and co-author with Dr. Douglas Axe of a new paper recently published in the journal BIO-Complexity that probes the limits of evolutionary optimization:

Download the podcast by clicking here:

Gauger explains how she and Axe tested popular hypotheses for protein origins and discovered that while mutation and selection can improve the proficiency of good designs throu...