Discovery Institute's Blog, page 191

Once Again Going After Eric Metaxas, Now in The New Yorker, Lawrence Krauss Opts for Misdirection

Now a month after the fact, cosmologist and "skeptic" Lawrence Krauss has made another attempt at damage control in the wake of that wildly popular Christmas Day article by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal. The Metaxas essay, which went viral, argued that science increasingly makes the case for God. The first try by Dr. Krauss was obviously rushed, and wasn't published by the WSJ, though the Richard Dawkins Foundation did post it on their website. His current and much more mature effo...

Jellyfish Sense Their Environment for Controlled Migration

Jellyfish are not exactly the quarterbacks (or leatherbacks) of the animal kingdom, but they have surprised researchers with their ability to swim against the tide, just like baby leatherback turtles do. Scientists even think they may be able to sense the earth's magnetic field, as do turtles, salmon, birds, and other long-distance migrators. The BBC News comments on new findings from Australia:

The scientists think the animals might sense the current across the surface of their bodies. They...

Aristotle on the Immateriality of Intellect and Will

At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne has responded to my post about the immateriality of the intellect and will and the reality of free will. He admits that he doesn't grasp the argument completely, so I'll expand upon it a bit.

First, a note on the provenance of the argument. The argument is not mine. It was originally proposed by Aristotle (De Anima, Book III). For two millennia, it was the common wisdom of educated men, and was widely considered decisive. Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic...

Lucky Us: Turning the Copernican Principle on Its Head

Editor's note: As a series at ENV, we have been pleased to present "Exoplanets." Daniel Bakken is an engineer who teaches astronomy at the college level, and an entrepreneur in compound semiconductor crystal growth. In a series of articles he has critically examined recent claims about exoplanets beyond our solar system, asking whether our own planet Earth is a rarity, or common, in the cosmos.

As we have seen in this series, which concludes today, at present the idea that the Earth is the on...

No Spin: Endogenous Retroviruses Are Important for Brain Function, and Aren't Junk

Ann Gauger recently wrote an excellent piece about interpreting scientific writings minus all the unnecessary evolutionary gloss. Let's apply her methods to a recent news story.

The claim is that junk DNA helped our brain cells evolve. The raw data shows that what we typically have called endogenous retroviruses are not necessarily junk but are genetic elements that are important for controlling brain function. Yet science journalists have been spinning the demise of this evolutionary icon a...

Recalling the Wannsee Conference

Last week marked the 73rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, which was the meeting in 1942 held in a villa in a Berlin suburb where Nazi officials planned the Final Solution.

The SS representative at the meeting was General Reinhard Heydrich, one of Himmler's top deputies. Although genocide was already underway in the occupied portions of the Soviet Union and in Serbia, Nazi officials discussed the need for a more comprehensive program to exterminate European Jews. From the article publi...

Media Wrongly Claim Indiana Academic Freedom Bill Opens the Door to Intelligent Design

An Indiana newspaper, the Journal & Courier, ran an article about an academic freedom bill in the state, inaccurately reporting that the bill would "open the door to any controversial science topic -- whether it includes intelligent design or anything else." That claim has now been picked up by the Associated Press which likewise says that the bill would "open the door for topics such as intelligent design -- the theory that life on Earth is so complex it was guided by an intelligent higher...

Your Computer Doesn't Know Anything

Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True responded to my recent post defending libertarian free will, in which I pointed out that certain aspects of the mind -- intelligence and will -- are inherently immaterial. Because intelligence and will are immaterial, they cannot be yoked to matter deterministically, and are thus free in a libertarian sense. Coyne of course disagrees and raises some (uncommonly) thoughtful questions about the immateriality of intellect and will. I'll reply to Coyne soon,...

The Many Faces of Science Censorship

Each year, evolution enthusiasts, evangelizing atheists, and Religious Left activists celebrate Charles Darwin's birthday, February 12, as "Darwin Day." They've got a spiffy new website with a full calendar of upcoming events. At Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, we also mark the occasion, but our focus is different. We call it Academic Freedom Day. That's in honor of Darwin's own wise counsel that in scientific inquiry, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating...

In Light of New BIO-Complexity Paper, Maintaining Neo-Darwinism Means Rejecting Established Methods of Historical Science

In the new BIO-Complexity paper, "Enzyme Families-Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family," Mariclair Reeves, Ann Gauger, and Douglas Axe find that modern enzymes cannot be easily mutated to acquire new functions. One 2009 study that their paper cites states, "[M]any attempts at interchanging activities in mechanistically diverse superfamilies have since been attempted, but few successes have been real¬ized." This suggests that modern enzymes...