Discovery Institute's Blog, page 165

At Last, Michael Medved Is Back on the Air -- and Profiled in the Seattle Times

It's a huge relief to report that our friend the radio commentator Michael Medved is back on the air, following a bout of throat cancer that silenced him for two months. Nicole Brodeur has a very nice profile in the Seattle Times, "Michael Medved: Beating cancer 'will inform everything I talk about from here on out.'"

Sometimes the most life-changing events come out of the most ordinary moments.

And so it was when Michael Medved, a nationally syndicated, conservative radio host, was getting h...

Never Let Anyone Tell You the Intelligent Design Community Isn't Diverse in Our Perspectives

From time to time here at ENV we've featured ID fans who have taken their enthusiasm for the design hypothesis so far as to have motifs derived from intelligent design arguments tattooed in their skin. (See here and here.) I have some conflicted feelings about these, but you can't help but be impressed by the artistry. Now along comes our colleague Wesley J. Smith, who surprised me by sending along his post today at First Things, "My New Tattoo."

I knew Wesley with his wife Debra has been o...

Save the Date! Premiere of Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth, at Seattle's McCaw Hall on August 7

Our friends at Illustra Media have produced a series of fantastic documentaries revealing the evidence for intelligent design from the cosmic and planetary scale on down to animal life at the macroscopic and microscopic levels. Their work includes Flight: The Genius of Birds, Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies, and Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe.

Now, what looks to be their most stunning and beautiful film yet, on life in the ocean's "liquid unive...

Is Evo-Devo the Answer to Evolutionary Woes?

Scott Gilbert's Developmental Biology is a standard textbook used in college courses everywhere. A beautiful book with great illustrations and clear synopses of classic experiments, it provides an overall summary of what is known about how organisms develop. Yet Gilbert says on page 46 of the eighth edition:

The life cycle can be considered a central unit in biology. The adult form need not be paramount. In a sense, the life cycle is the organism. [Emphasis added.]

It's true that the life cy...

Judge-Approved Mercy Murder Comes to South Africa

I once spoke in Cape Town, South Africa, at a biomedical conference on euthanasia. I was the opening keynote and I mentioned that it would be both a tragedy and a travesty if a country in which large swaths of formerly oppressed people -- with limited access to quality medical care -- legalized euthanasia.

More, I argued that legalizing doctor-administered killing among a population in which some 20 percent were infected with HIV/AIDS would open the door to the worst kind of discrimination.

...

More on the White Space in Evolutionary Thinking: A Critic Responds to How to Build a Worm

Getting to adulthood isn't so simple. An egg does not morph into a chick in a single leap, or a chick into a hen. Rather, the fertilized egg must undergo a series of cell divisions accompanied by complex molecular interactions that bit by bit restrict what each cell lineage can do, and these lineages work together to construct the final integrated functional form. For a hen's egg the result is a hen; in the case of the butterfly egg it's a butterfly. And for C. elegans it's a microscopic wor...

Solving the Problem of Iron: Acquisition, Transport, and Control

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.

Without oxygen (O2) we can't live very long...

First Steps Are Toughest? Not When It Comes to the Origin of Life

The first step is always the hardest, and therefore in a sense the most important in getting where you want to go. It's a popular notion that holds true in many contexts -- for example, just picking up the phone to make a call you're nervous about, yes that can be difficult. But it's a different matter when it comes to the mystery of the origin of life.

Obtaining "building blocks" of life through an unguided natural process is one thing. Putting them together the right way, composing biolog...

How Cells Keep Right-Handed Amino Acids Out

One of the wonders of life at the molecular scale -- a fact that defies chance -- is the purity of left-handed amino acids in proteins. Without this "homochirality," as it is known, proteins would never fold properly into the functional structures that make life possible.

Theoretically, life could be built backwards, using only right-handed amino acids -- as long as the mixture is pure. But the cell's translation machinery (TM) would have to be redesigned to accommodate the change. (Note: l...

New Book on "Junk DNA" Surveys the Functions of Non-Coding DNA

What Discovery Institute biologist Jonathan Wells calls the "myth of junk DNA," long a favorite with advocates of unguided evolution, isn't yet quite dead and buried. You still see it invoked in popular science media. Last month in The New York Times Magazine, Carl Zimmer defended the notion that our genome is mostly garbage, earning cheers from evolutionary advocates like PZ Myers and Lawrence Moran, the latter hailing Zimmer as the "best science journalist on the planet." We devoted some at...