Discovery Institute's Blog, page 167

Are the Ediacarans Transitional Forms for the Cambrian Explosion?

Another paper in PNAS tackles the Cambrian explosion with the usual confident-sounding headline: "The advent of animals: The view from the Ediacaran." This entry by Mary L. Droser of UC Riverside and James G. Gehling of the University of Adelaide (edited, incidentally, by Neil "Your Inner Fish" Shubin) promises much but delivers little. And, like the others published papers in scientific journals, it completely ignores the challenge to evolution presented by Stephen Meyer in Darwin's Doubt.

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How Much Brain Can You Pack Into a Spider Head?

Thirty years ago, state-of-the-art "minicomputers" (as they were then called) were refrigerator-size contraptions loaded with large, flat circuit boards, heavy cables, and noisy fans. Disk drives the size of washing machines spun stacks of large metal plates for a grand total of 300 megabytes of storage. If a minicomputer bore unquestionable evidence of advanced intelligent design just a few years ago, how much more so a modern smartphone (now a smartwatch) with more processing power, and on...

Listen: Casey Luskin on How Convergent Evolution Turns the Logic of Common Ancestry on Its Head

On a new episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin continues his series discussing the top ten problems with biological and chemical evolution.

The series is based on Casey's chapter in the More than Myth, edited by Paul Brown and Robert Stackpole (Chartwell Press, 2014). In this segment, Casey discusses the seventh problem: how convergent evolution challenges Darwinism and upends the logic behind common ancestry.

John Stonestreet on "Scientists Turn to Intelligent Design"

John Stonestreet's BreakPoint radio commentary today, "Scientists Turn to Intelligent Design," picks up our colleague ENV's recent post "Some Scientists Say Intelligent Design Isn't Science -- Until They Have to Use It Themselves." Stonestreet puts his own amusing spin on it, beginning with this:

If you're ever in the mood for a laugh at the expense of your fellow man, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's "Lie Witness News" segment is probably for you. In it, producers hit the streets of...

Darwin's Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails

Editor's note: ENV is pleased to share this excerpt from Nancy Pearcey's new book, Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other b...

Finally, from Darwin Activist Zack Kopplin, a Journalistic Scoop?

That was a bit of an anticlimax. Louisiana Darwin activist Zack Kopplin has been crowing since February about what a big scoop he'd soon have, blowing the lid off how "creationism" is being taught in Louisiana public schools. In the wake of what he had to reveal, I'd be "frothing at the mouth," Zack promised in a series of tweets.

His journalistic coup was supposed to serve as an indictment of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The problem for Kopplin was twofold. First, as I tried to advi...

Madness: Chimps Granted Habeas Corpus?

I have been warning for several years about how all it will take is one judge to break the species barriers. That judge was apparently found by animal rights fanatics at the Nonhuman Rights Project, granting a writ of habeas corpus to two chimpanzees. From the NRP announcement:

For the first time in history a judge has granted an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a nonhuman animal. This afternoon, in a case brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), Manhattan Sup...

The Octopus: More Complex than a Simple Mollusk Should Be

The octopus continues to surprise researchers. Its amazing body, eyes, and behavior seem far too complex for a soft-bodied invertebrate. Yet we are told that these animals (pl. octopuses), along with their fellow cephalopods the squid and cuttlefish, are descendants of clams and snails. Wondrous as those mollusks are in their own right, they lack tentacles with suckers, camera eyes, and the behavioral complexity of the octopus.

Recently, Israeli scientists studied the crawling behavior of O...

Listen: More from Michael Denton on Paradigm Shifts in Science

On another episode of ID the Future, ENV's Casey Luskin continues his conversation with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Michael Denton.

Dr. Denton elaborates on the concept of bottom-up versus top-down causation, and which is the better explanation for the world we live in.

Understanding Respiration: Why Real Numbers Can Mean Debility and Death

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 trillions of cells in your body are mad...