Discovery Institute's Blog, page 131

Extinct Aliens Could Yield a Design Inference

National Geographic jokes about the silence of the space aliens.

For more than 50 years, we've been eavesdropping on the cosmos, searching for transmissions that would reveal the existence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life.

To date, nobody's bothered to call.

Is it something we said?

If the silence keeps up, the alternatives get narrow. (1) We are alone in the universe as intelligent beings or (2) "the morbid alternative: Intelligent life periodically emerges on other worlds, but has an...

Do Transhumanists Want Realists Dead?

Transhumanists crack me up, but I also find them a bit unsettling. They claim the mantle of scientific rationalism. But they are really desperate to escape the reality of mortality, and so pretend that "the singularity" will save them.

It's sad really, and the eugenics values of the movement can be dangerous. But sometimes, a transhumanist posts an article so steeped in fantasy, hyperbole, and wishing their detractors ill, that it just begs for a little poking.

One such article has been pub...

Understanding Cardiovascular Function: Evolutionary Biologists Face a Catch-22

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 & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The last several articles in this series ha...

Hummingbird Tongue Design Gets an Upgrade

One of the memorable moments in Illustra Media's documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds is the hummingbird tongue animation (see it on YouTube). The unique nectar-trapping mechanism of unfurling flaps (lamellae) on supporting rods that automatically fold over to seal in the nectar was discovered by two biologists at the University of Connecticut in 2011 (see the paper in PNAS). This was cutting-edge science at the time the film was made, because most biologists previously had assumed the to...

In The New Yorker, a Rant from Lawrence Krauss Makes "Militant Atheism" Sound Pretty Good

Turning from Richard Dawkins, here is another scientific atheist who doesn't know when to stick to science and withstand the temptation to lecture on religion, politics, the law, and more. In The New Yorker, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss executes a weird pivot on the theme of Kim Davis to argue that "All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists."

Whatever your feelings about her, I'm not aware of anything the jailed-then-freed Kentucky county clerk has said that seeks to casts her views on marri...

Dawkins's Contributions as a Scientist Are Already Past Their Sell-By Date, Says Nature Reviewer

In the journal Nature, Nathaniel Comfort delivers a softly devastating review of Richard Dawkins's memoir, part two, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. Or let me rephrase that -- it's a devastating review of Dawkins himself as a scientist, including his enchantment with computer simulations. The problem with computers is that they're only as smart as the assumptions you bring to them. Garbage in, garbage out:

Much of Dawkins's research has been in silico, writing programs for evol...

Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Suggests Our Solar System Is Exceptional

Back in July, around the time I was busy running our Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design, biologist Jeff Schweitzer wrote a polemical article in the Huffington Post, "Earth 2.0: Bad News for God." Schweitzer, who served under the White House Science Advisor in the Clinton Administration, rails against religion, contending that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would refute the great Abrahamic faiths. I could go on about Schweitzer's simplistic and nave theological analysis, including t...

Dynamic Genomes in Bacteria Argue for Design

Recent research described in a review article in the Journal of Biochemistry & Analytical Biochemistry ("Rethinking the Bacterial Genetic Regulation") indicates there is more to bacterial genetics than was previously suspected.

Bacterial geneticists have had tidy maps of genomes, with promoters and transcription units and operons neatly outlined -- all components that make sure that genes that work together are expressed at the same time. Those things are all still true. But nobody knew unti...

Listen: Evolutionary Biologist Richard Sternberg on the Problem of Whale Origins

On an episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Dr. Richard Sternberg, evolutionary biologist and CSC Senior Fellow, whose discussion of whale origins is featured in Illustra Media's new documentary, Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth.

Sternberg critiques conventional accounts of whale evolution, noting that the timespan available is too short for the extensive body-plan modifications required for the transition from a dog-like land mammal (Pakicetus) to a...

As a Taxonomic Group, "Homo habilis" Is Challenged in the Journal Science

The limits of our genus Homo have long been controversial. One problem is that evolutionary biologists sometimes try to shoehorn un-human-like fossils into Homo in order to make it appear that ape-like and human-like creatures are kin. It's a classic case of scientists letting their evolutionary bias direct taxonomy.

What's less common is to see evolutionary paleoanthropologists admitting this has happened. Now in a recent article in Science, "Defining the genus Homo," Jeffrey H. Schwartz a...