Discovery Institute's Blog, page 116

Meet "Bob," the Speech-Making Robot

Maybe I'm being a bit judgmental. From the news as reported by the :

Bristol TED Talk by robot named Bob is world first

A humanoid robot avatar called 'Bob' gave the first ever TED Talk to be delivered by an android in Bristol.

In other headlines:

Television delivers State of the Union Address

Car radio sings song

Public address system praises graduates

Cell phone orders pizza

Bob is really pretty cute and perhaps most of the folks at TED don't really think Bob is the source...

Remarkable Public Support for Criminalizing Scientific Dissent

Following on Dr. Egnor's comments of yesterday ("Criminalizing Scientific Dissent"), I would add that support for prosecuting climate skeptics is not limited, as you might think, to a fanatical elite in the media or academia.

Rasmussen Reports headlines the news about its new survey, "Little Support for Punishing Global Warming Foes." But the Power Line blog points out that the survey's own figures suggest otherwise. The question posed was this:

Should the government investigate and prosecu...

Criminalizing Scientific Dissent

I've been waiting to find out how the guardians of scientific orthodoxy are going to get skeptics of anthropogenic global warming into court.

A bit of background, though: perhaps the most remarkable -- and troubling -- aspect of the struggle over Darwinism in our public square is the use of courts and civil sanctions by Darwinists to silence dissent. In state after state, Darwinists have dragged teachers and school boards into courts to silence honest scientific discussion of non-evolutiona...

Does Intelligent Design Stand Athwart the History of Science Yelling Stop?

An emotionally powerful argument against recognizing intelligent design in nature is that it seems to place you in the position of standing athwart history yelling Stop! ID begins by acknowledging that in probing the origins of life and of the cosmos, material explanations are not always, automatically the best ones.

Materialists, on other hand, deny that any causal chain can be traced back in the end to purpose, wisdom, intelligence. In this denial, aren't they on the side of history? Brut...

Teaching a Parrot Newton's Principia

Yesterday I responded to ID critic and computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit, asking "Can Animals Be Taught Concepts?" In his comments section, Dr. Shallit has some more questions regarding my observation that animals are incapable of abstract thought.

Shallit:

How about designing an experiment which could test your claim? Tell me how we could determine whether animals reason abstractly or not. Then tell me why the experiments that have already been carried out don't rate.

The fundamental probl...

With ENCODE Results, Evolutionary Biologists Are Forced to Wait in Perplexity

Editor's note: This is Part 5 of a 6-part series on ENCODE that Casey Luskin has been publishing this year in Salvo Magazine. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 have already been published there. The prelude can be found here.

As we recently saw, some evolutionary scientists have responded to ENCODE by attempting to rewrite history and claim that evolutionary science predicted function for non-coding DNA all along. Other evolutionists handle ENCODE's results in a more candid manner. Instead of rewriting h...

Can Animals Be Taught Concepts?

ID critic and University of Waterloo computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit takes exception to my observation in a recent post that animals lack the capacity for abstract thought. Abstract thought is the ability to conceive of universals -- mercy, justice, mankind, logical and mathematical relationships, and the like. It is an immaterial power of the mind, and only human beings are capable of abstraction.

I wrote:

Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animal...

Three More Problematic Findings About the Cambrian Explosion

Whenever you find papers and articles dealing with the Cambrian fossil record in the usual science journals, there are commonalities: more evidence of exceptional preservation without fossil ancestors, and complete silence on the doubts this naturally prompts. Here are three more that follow that template.

Insignificant Bioturbation

Many fossils become disturbed over time by burrowing organisms, a phenomenon called bioturbation. Gingras and Konhauser, writing for Nature Geoscience News & Vie...

"Scientific Literacy" with Grandmother Fish?

The right question isn't when, but how you should introduce a child to evolution. In a recent article on NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, Barbara King praises a new book about common ancestry written for 3-7 year olds. Unfortunately, Grandmother Fish is another attempt to present evolution as dogma, not as a scientific hypothesis.

The book begins:

This is our Grandmother Fish. She lived a long, long, long, long, long time ago. She could wiggle and swim fast. Can you wiggle? And she had j...

Post-ENCODE Posturing: Rewriting History Won't Erase Bad Evolutionary Predictions

Editor's note: This is Part 4 of a series on ENCODE that Casey Luskin has been publishing this year in Salvo Magazine. Parts 1, 2, and 3 have already been published there. The prelude can be found here.

Even in the face of the ENCODE consortium's compelling experimental results, many evolutionists still adamantly maintain that the vast majority of the human genome is junk. Some Darwin-defenders have tried hedging their bets by embracing ENCODE's research. This group seeks to revise history b...