Discovery Institute's Blog, page 12

Darwinian Horror Story: Lamarck Back from the Grave

On a new episode of ID the Future, Ray Bohlin interviews Cornelius Hunter, a biologist and Center for Science & Culture Fellow, about the growing problem that epigenetics poses for Neo-Darwinism.

Download the episode by clicking here:

Modern evolutionary theory has long insisted that genes and genetic mutations are where the evolutionary action is, and dismissed the early 19th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for suggesting that new environmental pressures could drive heritable ch...

Fake Science: Mice Changing Color to Match Terrain Is "Evolution, Crystal Clear, in Every Detail"

About 15 years ago researchers discovered genetic differences that probably explain the different fur coloring in desert mice populations in New Mexico and Arizona (see papers here and here). Mice populations living on light colored terrain tend to have light colored fur, and those on dark colored terrain tend to have dark colored fur. Blending in with the terrain helps to camouflage the mice, protecting them from predators.

And that is, apparently, exactly what the mice did about a thousan...

Robots Will Always Be Machines, Not Persons

The mechanical "woman" above -- through her human-written program -- speaks of one day having a family and being a person. Indeed, many in transhumanism and bioethics one day hope to establish robot rights or machine rights.

Never. No matter how sophisticated a computer is, it will always just be a machine -- dependent on its programming, whether or not self-written.

And no robot could ever truly "create" art. Art is a distinctly human and subjective enterprise, not based on wired-in program...

Interview: Biochemist Explains Why Lipids Are "Designed Objects"

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the natural world are best explained by a mind (or minds) rather than by non-intelligent processes like random mutation and natural selection. The case for ID draws upon an array of phenomena, including genetic information, epigenetics, the blood clotting cascade, bacterial flagella, fine-tuning of the physical constants of the laws of nature, and so on. From the far reaches of the cosmos to the intricacies of the cell, nature m...

Biologist "Flabbergasted" by Lungless Frog

Why do biologists travel the world over? They go to the bottom of the ocean and to the tops of mountains, to deserts and jungles. The reason is they are rewarded for their efforts. The one rule in biology is there are no rules. Everything is different, and everywhere is different.

When John Ray toured Europe for three years, from 1663 to 1666, studying the flora and fauna, he found the organisms and their interactions were different everywhere he went. Biology is full of diversity, and it m...

Salamander Offers Two Evolutionary Quandaries: Non-Homologous Development and an ORFan

Salamanders have their own way of doing things. For most animals, if an important body part, such as a limb, is lost, it is gone for good. But for salamanders, they just grow a new one. Also, salamanders use different embryonic development patterns. For example, their digits (fingers and toes for us humans) form in the wrong order -- going, essentially, in the wrong direction.

You can see this from a figure in a paper by Neil Shubin's group. In the figure, the numbers across the top show the...

NY Times on Germany's African Genocide -- Find the "Ghost" in the Story

In journalistic parlance a "ghost" is an obvious but unasked question in a news story. The New York Times the other day ran a fascinating, heartbreaking piece about the forgotten genocide perpetrated by Germany against the Herero and Nama peoples in its African colony of Namibia, from 1904 to 1908, a sort of dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. See if you can spot the ghost in the article.

Yes, the missing question pertains to motivation. What justified genocide in the eyes of German colonial...

Fake Science: Whales as the "Sweetest Series of Transitional Fossils" an Evolutionist Could Ask For

Over the New Year's Day holiday my family and I took in the new IMAX feature Voyage of Time from Terrence Malick. I had been looking forward to that and was not disappointed. It's spectacular visually, and a compelling, unsettling presentation of the director's vision of life, its history and future.

My wife thought the narration by Brad Pitt was a bit "cheesy." That was not because of any shortcoming of Mr. Pitt's but because Malick's script consistently elides the question of how animals t...

Intelligence Is Not Magic. It's a Cause We Know.

Thought experiment: You are a science writer for the Land of Ozma (Ozma being a fictional queen of note in the history of SETI). Your assignment is to explain the origin of life without reference to intelligent design for your munchkin readers, who are all looking to you for enlightenment. The munchkins have a natural inclination to believe in a designer behind the life they see all around them, but they have been taught in school that life emerges naturally. Your job is to reassure them tha...

Fake Science: "About 99 Percent of Our DNA Is Identical to That of Chimpanzees"

Over at National Review Online, recent commentary by the writer Kevin Williamson includes an article advocating good manners...while, perhaps paradoxically, taking this as an occasion to characterize the President-elect and his wife as "cretins," "American Psycho extras," and "genuinely bad human beings," comparing the couple with Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, and more.

Since Evolution News is a non-political information source, I leave it to others to evaluate the wit and wisdom of...