Discovery Institute's Blog, page 189

For Worst Reporting on Academic Freedom Bills This Year, Montana Leads the Competition

The reporting this year on academic freedom legislation seems to get worse as you move west. We're hardly a month into 2015, but media distortions are already multiplying.

It started in Indiana with misunderstandings that a proposed bill opened the door to intelligent design. Then in South Dakota a reporter actively misrepresented Discovery Institute's science education policy. Our policy states that we oppose introducing intelligent design in public schools, but the reporter couldn't keep ge...

Save the Poor Poliovirus!

This is so potentially destructive of human life that it has to be considered part of the "war on humans." The media-friendly Dr. Jack Wolfsonbelieves we should leave the poor viruses that kill us alone by stopping vaccinations. After all, they are part of nature too.

From the Washington Post story:

He said he soon embraced "natural and holistic" medicine. That was when he started challenging vaccines.

He said viruses -- not vaccines -- are a part of the natural world. "Unfortunately, they mean...

Nominations for Censor of the Year Are Now Closed

It's close of the business day here in Seattle and, as promised, that means nominations for Censor of the Year 2015 are no longer being accepted.

Well, it was never a vote exactly, but rather an opportunity to bring candidates to our attention who might otherwise have escaped us. Our way of honoring Darwin Day on February 12, Charles Darwin's birthday, COTY, as we call it, recognizes and condemns outstanding achievement by a materialist in throttling open discussion of scientific ideas and cu...

Bill Gates Joins Stephen Hawking in Fears of a Coming Threat from "Superintelligence"

Bill Gates has jumped into the fray over concerns of a coming machine superintelligence. He did so in a recent Q&A at reddit, reports TechRadar:

Gates was asked: "How much of an existential threat do you think machine superintelligence will be?"

He admitted: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence." He took a somewhat more measured stance than Hawking, but sees AI as a real concern.

"First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That shoul...

Problem 6: Molecular Biology Has Failed to Yield a Grand "Tree of Life"

Editor's note: This is Part 6 of a 10-part series based upon Casey Luskin's chapter,, "The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution," in the volume More than Myth, edited by Paul Brown and Robert Stackpole (Chartwell Press, 2014). Previous installments can be found here: Problem 1, Problem 2, Problem 3, Problem 4, Problem 5. When the series is complete, the full chapter will be posted online.

When fossils failed to demonstrate that animals evolved from a common ances...

Catholics Honor Discovery Fellow Wesley J. Smith

The Cardinal John J. O'Connor award of Legatus, the national organization of lay Catholics, was given in Naples, Florida, on Saturday to Wesley J. Smith, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute, for his tireless advocacy of "human exceptionalism" in bio-ethics, medical practice, and culture.

I was honored to accompany him on behalf of Discovery Institute. The convention was attended by some seven hundred delegates.

Please Keep Our Friend Michael Medved, a Crucial Member of Our Discovery Institute Family, in Your Prayers

Michael Medved is a vital part of our Discovery Institute family. Stephen Meyer, John West, Bruce Chapman, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Casey Luskin, Jay Richards, George Gilder, and I have all been on his daily radio program. As much as anyone else in media, he understands the evolution debate and the case for intelligent design, and discusses the questions we write about here in his masterfully lucid way.

Michael, his wife Diane, and their family are also beloved friends of my own family and...

Welcoming The Stream, an Important News Source on Science, Culture, and More

Our friend and frequent ENV contributor Jay Richards is awesomely gifted. He's a bestselling author who writes brilliantly about science, economics, faith, politics, and literature. With a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary, he's a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, plus as of lately an assistant research professor in the School of Business and Economics at Catholic University of America.

He's also a super nice guy. And an Olympic athlete.

Okay, the part about being an Olympic athlete...

Human Extinction Is the Logical Corollary of Animal Rights Thinking

The animal rights movement accuses those of us who believe in human exceptionalism of having no empathy for animals. In actuality, animal welfare and anti-cruelty laws demonstrate the opposite. It's just that those of us who reject animal rights in favor of animal welfare also take human thriving into consideration.

Besides, animal rights activists should remember the cliché that when they point their index finger at us, three of their own fingers are pointing back at them. Animal rights ideo...

A Third Rotary Motor Has Now Been Found in Bacteria

Howard Berg's latest paper in Current Biology announces an exciting find: another rotary motor has been discovered in a bacterial cell. The Harvard expert on the bacterial flagellum (see him speaking about the "Marvels of Bacterial Behavior" above), along with two colleagues, describes a new kind of rotating motor in a bacterium, separate and distinct from ATP synthase and the kind of flagella found in E. coli. The short title of the paper is dramatic: "A Rotary Motor Drives Flavobacterium G...