Discovery Institute's Blog, page 193

In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design?

A student emails me to ask how long it will be before the "tide turns from Darwinism to ID." He follows the debate over intelligent design and is aware that the Darwin lobby's rhetoric typically fails to address ID's actual arguments (which are scientific in nature), instead focusing on personal attacks or trying to claim ID is religion. This student feels it is obvious that ID has the upper hand in the argument, but wonders when the majority opinion will also recognize this.

I agree that in...

Evolutionarily Unrelated Animals Use Geomagnetic Navigation

A female baby sea turtle hatches out of its egg in the sand on a Florida beach. It races for the ocean to catch the waves and swim out to the open sea. After years at sea traveling thousands of miles across the open ocean, the turtle, now a pregnant mother, finds its way back to the exact same beach where it was born. This amazing feat is described in a new paper in Current Biology by Roger Brothers and Ken Lohman at the University of North Carolina:

Ever since John James Audubon tied silver...

Regarding Today's "Intelligently Designed" Seahawks Victory, Our Friend Michael Medved Expresses Discovery Institute Sentiment

Mr. Medved is at center. Photo courtesy of Diane Medved (left). At right, Harry Medved.

Live on ESPN, Sportscaster Dave Pasch Offers to Educate a Colleague on "Irreducible Complexity"

With our hometown Seattle Seahawks battling the Green Bay Packers for the NFC Championship, basketball just now is not the sport of the hour. But here's a charming and interesting interaction between sportscasters Bill Walton and Dave Pasch. Pasch is known as a forthright Christian and, we learn, a Darwin skeptic. In the course of a live telecast of a basketball game on ESPN, his colleague Bill Walton offers him a copy of the Origin of Species as a birthday present, remarking that "We want t...

Kenneth Miller Steps on Darwin's Achilles Heel

Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller has posted a reply to my challenge to him to give a quantitative account for the extreme rarity of the origin of chloroquine resistance in malaria. I'm grateful to him for doing so. Although I strongly disagree with nearly everything he wrote, his essay gives the public a chance to see directly how one informed Darwinist reacts to a basic empirical challenge to the theory. This is the last in a series of four posts responding to it.

In my last thre...

From PBS, Nonjudgmentalism on Belgian Euthanasia

Well, at least they reported accurately that Belgium doctors euthanizementally ill people. But the utterly non-judgmental tone of this PBS story is truly chilling. From "The Right to Die in Beligium":

MEGAN THOMPSON: As she opens the door to her home...this 34-year old Belgian woman known as "Eva" seems at ease. But actually she's chronically depressed. More than once she's tried to commit suicide. And now she's asking doctors to help her. Help her die by euthanasia...all of it captured in a...

Problem 4: Natural Selection Struggles to Fix Advantageous Traits in Populations

Editor's note: This is Part 4 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. When the series is complete, the full chapter will be posted online.

In 2008, 16 biologists from around the world convened in Altenberg, Austria, to discuss problems w...

The Many Paths of Kenneth Miller

Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller has posted a reply to my challenge to him to give a quantitative account for the extreme rarity of the origin of chloroquine resistance in malaria. I'm grateful to him for doing so. Although I strongly disagree with nearly everything he wrote, his essay gives the public a chance to see directly how one informed Darwinist reacts to a basic empirical challenge to the theory. This is the third in a series of four posts responding to it.

In my last two...

Notwithstanding Grand Claims to the Contrary, Human Color Vision Still Presents a Major Evolutionary Enigma

Stephen Meyer commented earlier on the recent review of Bill Nye's new book in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer, science writer Nicholas Wade, claims that major strides have been made lately in understanding the evolution of human color vision. Is that true?

Writes Mr. Wade:

A recent paper in the journal PLOS Genetics, for instance, describes the seven DNA mutations that occurred over the past 90 million years in the gene that specifies the light-detecting protein of the retina. These mut...

Free Will Is Real and Materialism Is Wrong

I've written before in reply to materialist Jerry Coyne's assertion that free will is an illusion. The gist of Coyne's denial, shared by others of course, is that nature is deterministic and that the mind is a wholly material process, yoked to the laws of physics and to an organism's evolutionary history. Thus, our choices are completely determined and free will is an illusion.

I've already pointed out his error on the question of determinism. Today I'll focus on his error regarding the mater...