Discovery Institute's Blog, page 174

Revisionism About Kevorkian and His Purposes Won't Stop

The revisionism about Jack Kevorkianand his purposes will not stop -- and it can't be allowed to stand. The truth about K and what he was really after -- his true motive, namely human vivisection -- is important because it not only shows the seductive nihilism of our present day that a ghoul like him could become widely admired, but how hard the media work to tell the story they want to tell rather than report the facts in front of their very eyes.

Time is the latest journalistic offender, w...

Nature Credits Evolution for Biomimetics Revolution

If you could just strip out the superfluous evolution-talk in Nature's special Outlook feature on biomimetics, you'd be left with a showcase of intelligent design. The series, "Biomaterials: inspired by the natural world," focuses on amazing traits of various living things that inspire scientists and engineers, but evolution keeps trying to steal the credit. Herb Brody begins the overview:

Millions of years of evolution have made the biological world into a supremely effective materials-de...

Hegel's Deity: How Evolution Gave Us Postmodernism, Deconstructionism, and Political Correctness

Editor's note: ENV is pleased to share a second 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 oth...

Prometheus Unbound: The Fitness of Nature for Large Trees

Editor's note: Dr. Denton is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, whose work is featured in the new documetnary Privileged Species which premiered online this week. See it here. Denton holds an MD from Bristol University and a PhD in biochemistry from King's College in London.

One of the critical requirements for sustainable fires, sufficiently hot to smelt metal ores, is wood. Thin twigs, dried grasses will burn, but such materials are unsuitable for maki...

Group Delusions Aside, Sentient Robots Aren't on the Way

Our colleague Wesley Smith commented yesterday on a piece in Nature, "Intelligent robots must uphold human rights." We read there:

There is a strong possibility that in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences (AIs), perhaps in the form of robots, will become capable of sentient thought. Whatever form it takes, this dawning of machine consciousness is likely to have a substantial impact on human society.

More:

Academic and fictional analyses of AIs tend to focus on human -- ro...

From Ars Technica, Bogus Objections to Academic Freedom Bills

Whenever you see an article about science education that refers to academic freedom bills as being "concocted by the creationist Discovery Institute," you can almost be guaranteed that it's going to contain a lot of misinformation and fallacious arguments in favor of censorship. This is exactly what we find in Scott K. Johnson's piece at Ars Technica, "Teach the controversy: Education bills contain a revealing confusion."

Over the years, I've heard a lot of bad arguments against academic fre...

Dr. Denton, Call Your Office: Is Earth's Position a Lucky Accident?

As we celebrate the online premiere of Privileged Species, featuring Discovery Institute's Michael Denton, here's an opportunity to compare design science with its materialist competition. Which makes the more plausible case?

Two astronomers, one from Caltech and one from Lick Observatory, have just published a paper in PNAS that portrays Earth's position as a lucky accident. Konstantin Batygin and Greg Laughlin notice that our solar system is rather peculiar as planetary systems go. Many st...

Good Grief, Now They're Pushing for "Machine Rights"

As if the world isn't already mad enough, the futurists are at it again, assuming that machines programmed to the level of artificial intelligence (AI) -- in other words, to self-program independently,without human input or control -- should be treated as if they were moral beings capable of rights,responsibilities, and being harmed.

An article in Nature by Hutan Ashrafianseriously proposes that AI machines could be victims of injustice. From "Intelligent Robots Must Uphold Human Rights":

W...

A Big Problem for Common Descent: Hundreds of "Active 'Foreign' Genes" Don't Fit the Standard Evolutionary Phylogeny

A new paper in Genome Biology, "Expression of multiple horizontally acquired genes is a hallmark of both vertebrate and invertebrate genomes," reports the discovery of many genes that do not fit the standard evolutionary phylogeny. Science Daily states:

Many animals, including humans, acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges conventional...

Wheels Within Wheels: Michael Denton on the "Coincidences" that Make Us Possible

The online premiere this week of the documentary Privileged Species, featuring Discovery Institute geneticist Dr. Michael Denton, calls for some special comment. We have all heard too often that human beings are a mere speck in a cosmos that never cared about us. The argument seems to be of a piece with the view that we are an accident of nature that didn't have to be, that could have been something else, or might have been nothing at all. In a very large way, this documentary film stands in...