Discovery Institute's Blog, page 154

Listen: Donald Johnson on Programming of Life

On an episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Donald E. Johnson about his book Programming of Life, which compares the workings of biology to a computer. Listen as Dr. Johnson explains what inspired his latest book and how he as an information scientist addresses the origin of life.

Donald Johnson holds two PhDs, one in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and another in Chemistry from Michigan State University. His website is ScienceIntegrity.net.

Let's Get "Science-Savvy"!

Stephanie Keep, editor of Reports of the National Center for Science Education for the organization of the same name, is all atwitter about what she calls "science denialism." Phrases like "science denial" and "evolution denial" are well known to regular readers here at ENV. It is the pejorative label of choice the NCSE likes to apply to anyone who dares question Darwinian biology or the materialist view of science. I should note they also use "climate change denial" on anyone who dares ques...

Recommended Viewing: A Great Talk by Michael Lynch

Larry Moran, the University of Toronto biochemist and maverick "non-Darwinian" evolutionist, is an admirer of Indiana University evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch. The latter is an often-scathing critic of the abuse of natural selection in biological explanation. See, for instance, his open-access paper in PNAS, "The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity."

Today at his blog Sandwalk, Larry posted a link to a YouTube talk by Lynch (above).

I watched the t...

The Church of Transhumanism: Let Us Upload

Did you notice that materialists have invented their own church? It is called transhumanism, and it seeks the same meaning people receive from religion, but perhaps without liturgy or, God forbid -- sorry atheists -- any concept of sin (other than staying fully human).

I follow transhuman comings and going, noting with great amusement how the newest proselytizer on the block, Zoltan Istvan, hustles the quasi-faith as boisterously as Jimmy Swaggart.

I have a piece on all of this at First Thin...

Information from Nothing? The Flatworm's Tale

We've talked a lot about roundworms here recently, but there is another phylum of worms that is not round but flat. The only flatworms most of us know are the planaria we cut up in biology class, watching them grow two "heads" or other grotesque forms. Actually, these members of the phylum Platyhelminthes are complex organisms, important for the study of parasitism, evolution, and especially regeneration. Littlewood and Waeschenbach provide an overview in Current Biology:

Linnaeus had little...

Say What You Want About Intelligent Design

I mean literally say whatever you want. There's a strange ethical tenet in the media that holds that when it comes to ID, you can assert anything that seems expedient, or like it kind of ought to be true given what everyone else in your crowd says -- however far that may be from factual.

It's as if there were a special license issued to ID critics, "The bearer of this certificate is entitled to publicize any untruth about intelligent design that he pleases, and is guaranteed not to be challen...

Listen: Sources of Opposition to Intelligent Design

On a new episode of ID the Future, Brian Mattson and Jay Friesen of Dead Reckoning.tv talk with Casey Luskin about the scrutiny that the intelligent design movement receives. They trace opposition not only to alternate worldviews, but to something that science historian Thomas Kuhn's insightfully noted: new science paradigms inevitably face strong resistance from adherents to older theories. Luskin points to progress in recent critiques of Darwinism published in mainstream science literature...

Do All Life Forms Fall into a Nested Hierarchy?

A biology graduate student and alumnus of our Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design recently contacted me to ask where ID comes down on common descent. I explained to him that in the ID camp, some folks accept common descent while others are skeptical. ID proponents can respectfully disagree on that question (and others too), while agreeing on the powerful evidence for design in nature. But my correspondent asked about an argument in favor of common ancestry he had heard that basically went l...

"Willful Ignorance"? Lee McIntyre Misrepresents Our Position on Intelligent Design in Public Schools

Many critics have falsely claimed that Discovery Institute tries to push intelligent design into public schools. But Lee McIntyre, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is no ordinary critic. A research fellow at Boston University's Center for Philosophy and History of Science, he claims to be nothing less than an authority on the defense of truth. His new book is Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age. Yet McIntyre did not take the time to check the accuracy of what...

Biologist in TEDx Talk: Life's "Complex Interacting Molecular Machines" Appear "Built by an Engineer"

Recently a friend sent me a link to a TEDx talk, "Digital biology and open science -- the coming revolution," which affirms that life's "complex interacting molecular machines" reveal "molecular clockwork is real and pervasive" and appear to be "built by an engineer a million times smarter than" we are. The speaker is biologist and engineer Stephen Larson, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from University of California, San Diego, and is CEO of MetaCell, a systems biology research and consulti...