Discovery Institute's Blog, page 121

In a Radio Debate, Our Jonathan M. Meets Thoughtful Atheist Cory Markum

Here is an item to feel good about this fine Sunday. On Britain's Premiere radio, our friend Jonathan M. (above left) had a long, interesting radio debate with atheist Cory Markum (right). They talked about whether nature gives evidence of design and whether that in turn supports, obviously without clinching, a theistic inference.

The thoughtful and very lucid discussion, led by host and moderator Justin Brierly, runs to an hour and twenty minutes, something you wouldn't find on U.S. radio....

Cow Cloning Disaster Is a Warning Against Human Cloning

Dolly the sheep was manufactured in 1996 to open the way for cloned "transgenic" animal herds -- that is, cloned sheep containing a few human genes so they exude useful medical substances in their milk.

Dolly died young, perhaps because she was cloned. But the approach continued.

Now, in New Zealand, the manufacture of cloned transgenic cows has proved a disaster. From the Radio New Zealand story:

[The study] authored by Claire Bleakley, president of GE Free New Zealand, who told Morning Re...

More "Design of Life" Evidence: Sea Turtles

You could make a strong scientific case that of all the creatures in Illustra Media's new documentary, Living Waters, the baby sea turtles emerging from their beach nests and crawling to the water on tiny flippers are the cutest. Apart from being adorable, what many may not realize is that their motion on the sand is also amazingly efficient. So much so that engineers are trying to imitate it to put to use in robots that need to traverse loose material.

In an article on PhysOrg last year, Da...

Here's Why We Answer Some of Our Less Cogent Critics

Laurence Moran is the University of Toronto biochemist whose notable contribution to the evolution debate has been to coin the term "IDiots" in referring to advocates of intelligent design. Jonathan M. replied to him yesterday (along with biologist P.Z. Myers) on the question of whether intelligent design is science or "apologetics."

Now Moran follows up with a post in which he concedes, "I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science [sic, he means "scientific"] way of knowing to p...

The Origin of Plants Depended on "Pre-adaptation," Another Word for "Preparation"

One of the most difficult problems for evolutionary biologists to explain is how adaptations manage to appear at the right time for the next stage of evolution to take place. This problem was succinctly summarized by Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist. I paraphrase: It's not the survival of the fittest, it's the arrival of the fittest that needs explanation.

To get around the problem, current evolutionary biologists use a word that stands in for this problem: pre-adaptation. In other words, thi...

Coming in November to Tampa Bay, Florida, Three Regional Premieres of Living Waters

Sea turtles are a star of the new Illustra Media documentary Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth. They are also iconic denizens of Florida beaches -- so what better place could there be than Florida to hold a series of three premiere events for the gorgeous and inspiring film?

The C.S. Lewis Society in partnership with Trinity College will host a trio of Tampa Bay-area premieres of Living Waters. The screenings will feature special guest Lad Allen, Illustra's renowne...

Is Intelligent Design "Apologetics"?

This week, I came in for criticism from biologists P.Z. Myers and Larry Moran as a result of the above short interview in which I am asked about the difference between intelligent design and creationism. In the interview, I explained that whereas intelligent design could be defined as the study of patterns in nature that bear the hallmarks of intelligent causality, Creationism is an attempt to interpret the world in view of a religious text such as Genesis 1.

Myers and Moran both noted that...

ID Inquiry: Jonathan Wells on Codes in Biology

On an episode of ID the Future, hear a new installment of our series "ID Inquiry," in which ID scientists and scholars answer your questions about intelligent design and evolution. Here, Discovery Institute biologist Jonathan Wells explains the concept of codes in living things -- there are five besides the genetic code (epigenetic, RNA splicing code, sugar code, membrane code, bioelectric code), which carry biological information and determine cellular activities, especially embryo developm...

The Ears Have It: Tiny Muscle Supposedly Undoes Intelligent Design

Breaking news -- another silly article was just published claiming to refute intelligent design, this one at Live Science and drawing on another in Psychophysiology ("Evidence for a vestigial pinna-orienting system in humans"). It's based on the existence of a small muscle behind the ear with no apparent function -- except to tell when we are happy. It can't wiggle the ear, so it is ruled to be vestigial -- left over from previously functional muscles to twitch the ears.

You know the way th...

Eric Metaxas on The Information Enigma: Making Intelligent Design "Snappy"

Thanks to Eric Metaxas at BreakPoint for his excellent commentary today ("Unlocking the Darwin Debate") on our new brief video, The Information Enigma. Eric congratulates us on our "snappy" intro to intelligent design, which is a compliment from a guy who can distill it down even further, to a still snappier four minutes.

He begins:

You know Darwinism has problems, but how do you explain them to your friends and family? Well, look no further than a bicycle lock.

More:

Information is at the h...