Discovery Institute's Blog, page 176

Think Before You Swat: The Genius of Insects

Remember the days when you assembled model aircraft after Christmas or a birthday, and hung them proudly from the bedroom ceiling? If you were especially skilled, you assembled ones that could actually fly. You would be the first to boast that success didn't happen by chance. But now, imagine assembling a working model a hundred times smaller.

Avian flight is a work of genius, as Illustra's documentary Flight amply illustrated. But in a way, miniaturization is even more a mark of genius. Pac...

Take a Deep Breath: Cellular Respiration

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.

So far in this series we seen that we live...

Origin-of-Life Claims: Triple Header or Strike Three?

Extra! Extra! "Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum," a breathless headline announces in Science Magazine, ablaze with artwork of meteors striking the primitive, lifeless earth. Take me out to the ball game! It's a triple-header today!

Game One

Writer Robert F. Service knows that the hometown team, the Darwin Dreamers, have been down on their luck ever since Charles Darwin's pep talk about a "warm little pond."

The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for...

Canada to Couple Euthanasia and Organ Harvesting?

Long ago, in my very first anti-euthanasia article, published by Newsweek in 1993, I warned that legalizing assisted suicide would lead to "organ harvesting as a plum to society."

That dark prophesy has come true in the Netherlands and Belgium, aimed specifically at people with "good organs," such as MS patients and those with mental illnesses.

And now Canada? From the Ottawa Citizen story:

As the nation awaits legalized doctor-assisted death, the transplant community is grappling with a po...

Another Successful Prediction of Intelligent Design: Cell Paper Reports Functions for Synonymous Codons

In the past we've noted papers finding function for synonymous codons (for example, see here and here) -- but the functions reported in those papers generally pertained to controlling translation speed. Now a paper in the journal Cell has found a new potential function, namely that synonymous codons can control the rate at which mRNA transcripts degrade and are broken down within cells:

Substitution of optimal codons with synonymous, non-optimal codons results in dramatic mRNA destabilization...

Science with a View: Michael Denton at UC Berkeley

I continue to travel with Discovery Institute geneticist Michael Denton for a series of meetings and presentations in California. It's been a busy trip but I had an opportunity to take in the magnificent view from the Berkeley Hills, as you'll see above. I find that Dr. Denton too helps his audiences step back and see things from a certain distance, granting an important perspective we'd likely otherwise miss.

Last night Denton spoke to a student group on the UC Berkeley campus, once again o...

What You Have to Believe to Not Believe in Intelligent Design

Editor's note: The following is excerpted from the new expanded edition of Granville Sewell's book In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design (Discovery Institute Press). ENV contributor Dr. Sewell is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso. He has written three books on numerical analysis, and is the author of a widely used finite element computer program.

The recent success of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt is evidence that the scientific theory of int...

As Leading Nation in the Culture of Death, Belgium Has Surpassed the Netherlands

Belgium has surpassed the Netherlands as the hastened death capital of the world.

A study out of Flanders in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that 18 percent of patient deaths come either fromlethal injection/assisted suicideor from being put into a deep coma and left to die.

"Recent Trends in Euthanasia and Other End-of-Life Practicesin Belgium" reports that 6.3 percent of Flanders' deaths involved "physician-assisted death." This term was defined as lethal injection at the request...

Discovery Institute's Summer Seminars, July 10-18 in Seattle -- What's the Catch?

Over at The College Fix our old friend Greg Piper writes up the Discovery Institute Summer Seminars, acknowledging that meteorologically speaking Seattle in July is "gorgeous and just hot enough." And that is not controversial climate science. Greg gives a fair summary of what we do here:

For those unfamiliar with Discovery Institute(disclosure: I worked there right out of college), this free-market think tank is particularly interested in how science affects policy and culture.

It’s best k...

Stephen Moore Unsettles "Settled Science"

Stephen Moore has an article in the Washington Times that is worth the attention of skeptics of "settled science."

Moore, economics analyst and longtime staple of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, describes the attempts of National Geographic and other publications to marginalize critics of climate change theory. It's an old story, the argument from authority. What Moore does is tear the argument apart.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of "settled science." The embryonic st...