Discovery Institute's Blog, page 144

What's Revealed in Those Planned Parenthood Videos

Amid calls to investigate and defund Planned Parenthood, Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head. It's not the legality or illegality of trafficking in fetal remains that stands out most prominently from the release of those two videos of top PP personnel chatting at lunch about their trade. It's the "ghoulish banality," the insouciance, the total absence of sensitivity that is revealed:

As a matter of law, Planned Parenthood may be on solid ground. But it isn't illegality...

Flagellar Diversity Challenges Darwinian Evolution, Not Intelligent Design

Over the past week I've been writing about the latest iteration of the Darwinian response to Michael Behe's argument for intelligent design based on what Dr. Behe calls irreducible complexity. I use the word "iteration" not in the sense of our seeing something new, but in the sense that it's another round of the same unworkable objections that we've seen before.

Behe's case for ID goes back nearly twenty years now, yet the objections to it have not evolved much in that time. I have been loo...

Dogs Aren't Human: They Are Dogs

National Geographic often carries stories that explicitly or implicitly seek to undermine human exceptionalism. The magazine has now published another story claiming that animals are people too.

This time, it is dogs. From "Dogs Are Even More Like Us Than We Thought":

Dogs can read facial expressions, communicate jealousy, display empathy, and even watch TV, studies have shown. They've picked up these people-like traits during their evolution from wolves to domesticated pet, which occurred b...

Hear Stephen Meyer and Eric Metaxas on Podcast Now!

Stephen Meyer and Eric Metaxas talked about the Scopes Trial anniversary today and about the debate about Darwin's Doubt. You can hear their conversation now in podcast form. No radio host is more thoughtful, or funnier, than Metaxas.

As Eric points out, the Scopes Trial is "ground zero" for the culture war.

Dr. Meyer was on the Michael Medved Show today as well and discussed our new book documenting the debate about his book, Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy That Can No Lo...

Today at 1 PM on the Medved Show, Stephen Meyer Meets Alex Berezow of Real Clear Science

Today at 1 pm Pacific time, Stephen Meyer will be on the Michael Medved Show to debate Alex Berezow of Real Clear Science. The occasion is the 90th anniversary of the Scopes Trial and today's publication of Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy That Can No Longer Be Denied, edited by David Klinghoffer. If you're on the East Coast, hear Michael, Steve, and Alex at 4 pm.

Berezow is a prominent critic of intelligent design so this should be interesting. Call in and join the discuss...

A Scientific Controversy That Can No Longer Be Denied: Here Is Debating Darwin's Doubt

Today marks the anniversary of the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, decided this day, July 21, 90 years ago in Dayton, Tennessee, in favor of the prosecution. A public high school teacher, John Scopes, was convicted and fined $100 for teaching in favor of Darwinian evolution in violation of what was state law at the time.

While that's nearly a century past, defenders of Darwinian theory still present the conflict between unguided evolution and intelligent design as if it had not advanced a bit...

Will an Impending Earthquake "Devastate Seattle"? About That Terrifying New Yorker Article

While seismology may seem to take us somewhat afield from our usual concerns at Evolution News & Views, the manipulation of science in the service of some unstated cultural or philosophical agenda is very much on topic. So I'll mention the science story of the month here in the Pacific Northwest. No, it's not Pluto. It is earthquakes and tsunamis, occasioned by a devastatingly vivid article in The New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz.

The Northwest indeed faces a very serious, off-coast subduction-z...

Special Birds with Specialized Abilities

Illustra's film Flight: The Genius of Birds showed some amazing specialties in a few bird species: the hummingbird with its nectar-trap tongue, starlings in formation flight, and Arctic terns in long-distance migration. It would take many hours of similar movies, and a book of ENV articles, to even begin to do justice to the many diverse kinds of birds that warrant our admiration. From time to time we can, though, point out particular cases coming to light in new research.

Image Stabilizatio...

Why the Type III Secretory System Can't Be a Precursor to the Bacteria Flagellum

As I wrote here last week, biophysicist Matt Baker recently published an article at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, "The bacterial flagellar motor: brilliant evolution or intelligent design?," arguing against Michael Behe and the intelligent design of the flagellum. Behe first offered his argument for ID based on irreducible complexity (IC) in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. In the intervening couple of decades, Darwin defenders have offered the same assortment of ineffect...

Recommended: Fr. Michael Chaberek on "Thomas Aquinas and Theistic Evolution"

The works of Thomas Aquinas are marshaled by some Catholic scholars in defense of theistic evolution, the idea that Darwinian evolution can be reconciled with Christian faith. In a new paper, "Thomas Aquinas and Theistic Evolution," Fr. Michael Chaberek makes the case that the great medieval scholar and "doctor of the Church" cannot be put to this purpose without contorting his views.

Fr. Chaberek, a PhD In theology from Poland and a Dominican priest, follows the same style as Aquinas in gi...