Discovery Institute's Blog, page 114

Animal Magnetism Comes to Light

Perhaps you saw them in Living Waters: sea turtles navigating alone for thousands of miles in the open sea, then returning to the exact beach where they had hatched; salmon swimming from Canada halfway to Japan, then finding their way back to the mouth of their natal stream.

The only global force available to make long-distance migration possible for sea creatures is the Earth's magnetic field -- something humans cannot sense. A compass can point a hiker north, but it cannot tell her the in...

Life Is a "Distinguished Outcome"

In a series at Evolution News adapted from Debating Darwin's Doubt, my colleague Stephen Meyer is in the process of responding to a review of his superb book Darwin's Doubt by philosophers Robert Bishop and Robert O'Connor. Published in Books & Culture, a sister publication of Christianity Today, Bishop and O'Connor's review was more thoughtful on the issue of design than many other reviews, which generally evaded Meyers' salient point. That point is that functional biological information is...

Denying the Signature: Was My Argument Subjective?

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately...

Commodifying Human Life

Human life is increasingly commodified, and nascent human beings treated as mere objects and chattel. We see this in the efforts to perfect human cloning techniques, embryos manufactured as an experiment, and in the increasingly profitable surrogacy industry.

Now we see it in a California court ruling enforcing a contract to destroy frozen embryos in the event of a divorce. From the San Francisco Chronicle story:

A judge ruled Wednesday that the frozen embryos of a divorced San Francisco cou...

Fare Thee Well, Kepler 438b

That was fast. Excitement about the "most Earth-like planet ever," the potentially habitable and therefore hypothetically inhabited Kepler 438b, launched in January with an announcement at the American Astronomical Society meeting here in Seattle. Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics bore the good news.

From the story in The Guardian:

An alien world that orbits a distant star in the constellation of Lyra may be the most Earth-like planet ever found outside the sol...

Denying the Signature: Functional Information Is the Fact to Be Explained

Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately...

The View Takes on Intelligent Design, Sort Of

You have to grant some grudging admiration to evolutionary advocates like our friends at the National Center for Science Education. They've done an impressive job of misleading the media with the false equation between creationism and intelligent design. Case in point? Read this. It's from Raw Story and describes an exchange today on ABC's The View:

Candace Cameron Bure, the sister of evangelist actor Kirk Cameron, insisted on Wednesday that creationism was compatible with science. But she w...

Transhumanism's Next Frontier -- Men as Mothers?

There has long been a subversive "anything goes" streak in bioethics. For example, Joseph Fletcher -- one of the bioethics movement's founding fathers, who also gave us situational ethics -- sighed ecstatically at the prospect of men giving birth. From page 45 of his 1988 book The Ethics of Genetic Control:

[T]ransplant or replacement medicine foresees the day, after the automatic rejection of alien tissue is overcome, when a uterus can be implanted in a human male's body -- his abdomen has...

In a Grain of Sand, a World of Design

These familiar words by William Blake aptly conclude a TED talk by microscopist Gary Greenberg:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...

Greenberg photographs "the beautiful nano details of our world," particularly sand grains. Using innovative 3D techniques, he turns ordinary sand into artworks of color, light, and shape (see examples on his Sand Grains website).

In his talk, after showing and explain...

Denying the Signature: A Response to Bishop and O'Connor

Editor's note: Most readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accura...