Discovery Institute's Blog, page 156

Chimps Can Cook! -- Or Not

We are continually told: "Humans are not exceptional!" Scientists and advocates huff and puff to show how animals are just like us, and the media eats it up.

This one made me laugh. The other day, the Guardian ran an article with a title that declared chimpanzees can cook. The title, however, ended up being a bit misleading:

A study found that chimpanzees prefer the taste of cooked food, can defer gratification while waiting for it and even choose to hoard raw vegetables if they know they w...

Paper Reports that Amino Acids Used by Life Are Finely Tuned to Explore "Chemistry Space"

A recent paper in Nature's journal Scientific Reports, "Extraordinarily Adaptive Properties of the Genetically Encoded Amino Acids," has found that the twenty amino acids used by life are finely tuned to explore "chemistry space" and allow for maximal chemical reactions. Considering that this is a technical paper, they give an uncommonly lucid and concise explanation of what they did:

[W]e drew 108 random sets of 20 amino acids from our library of 1913 structures and compared their coverage o...

From Chemicals to Codes at the Origin of Life: A Bridge Too Far?

A report from the University of North Carolina, "New evidence emerges on the origins of life on Earth," opens on a deliberately Biblical note. We picture the two UNC scientists hovering over the waters of the primordial soup:

In the beginning, there were simple chemicals. And they produced amino acids that eventually became the proteins necessary to create single cells. And the single cells became plants and animals. Recent research is revealing how the primordial soup created the amino acid...

John West on Alfred Wallace and the Road Not Taken

Sadly it's behind a paywall, otherwise I'd simply tell you to go read our colleague John West's terrific essay in First Things, "The Church of Darwin." West recounts some of the terrible currents in thought outside science that have flowed from Darwin's theory. But he also shows that it didn't have to be that way.

At the inception of the theory of evolution, Darwin and co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace represented two paths forward, one headed in the end to nihilism, atheism, and despair...

Stephen Hawking: Suicide if I Become a Burden, Can't Contribute

I have been warning that the high-profile normalization of assisted suicide -- and the media celebrating those who kill themselves in the face of disease -- is leading toward an ethic in which people kill themselves to avoid being a "burden," imagining what is, in essence, a moral duty to die.

Now the famed physicist Stephen Hawking has joined the parade, saying he would commit assisted suicide if he was no longer contributing or felt like a burden. From the story in the Telegraph:

When aske...

Research Paper: "Common Design Principles" Explain Patterns of Retinal Cells in Insects

A new article in the journal Trends in Genetics bears an intriguing title: "The evolutionary diversity of insect retinal mosaics: common design principles and emerging molecular logic." The mention of "common design principles" doesn't mean that the authors advocate intelligent design, but their research unwittingly bears on the subject.

They write about patterns, or mosaics, of light-receptor cells in insect eye retinas that are found repeatedly in widely diverse types of insects. These fe...

Understanding Cardiovascular Function: The Vital Role of Sodium

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 laws of nature demand that each cell ha...

Word Engineering in the Service of Euthanasia

The euthanasia movement is about killing -- which simply means to intentionally end life -- as a response to human suffering.

The euthanasia movement has always tried to change the meanings and definitions of descriptive words and phrases as the honey that helps the hemlock go down. That is why assisted suicide -- again accurate and descriptive -- is called by movement propagandists "death with dignity" or "aid in dying."

In this regard, it is worth noting that Quebec's euthanasia legalizati...

From Slate, More Agitprop on Louisiana's Academic Freedom Law

Here is Zack Kopplin's new contribution at Slate, "The Bible v. the Constitution," which he twice promised would cause me to collapse in a catastrophic health reversal at its revelations about Louisiana public schools teaching "creationism."

@JoshRosenau @d_klinghoffer @AlexBerezow Josh, the story is in the queue at Slate. Klinghoffer is literally going to have an aneuryism

— Zack Kopplin (@ZackKopplin) June 1, 2015

@d_klinghoffer Just wait, like I said, you're going to have an aneuryism. I...

If Evolution Has Implications for Religion, Can We Justify Teaching It in Public Schools?

In my recent article on the constitutionality of teaching evolution, I discussed how courts have found that it is legal to teach evolution in public schools. Evolutionary biology is a science, so it can be legally taught in public schools when it's treated as a science and isn't promoted as a support for atheism or materialism.

That said, few would deny that Darwinian evolution has larger implications that aren't friendly to theism. Even if those are not discussed in a public school science...