Discovery Institute's Blog, page 205

Time for Commercially Assisted Suicide?

Assisted suicide's core premise is that being killed to stop suffering is a fundamental human right. In other words, terminal illness may sometimes be the politically expedient entry point to Euthanasialand, but it isn't the point of legalization.

And now, in the journal Bioethics,bioethicistRoland Kipkeargues that if assisted suicide is a right of autonomy, we should permit entrepreneurs to go into the business of making people painlessly dead, what he calls "commercially-assisted suicide" (...

When Atheist Professors Evangelize, Freedom from Religion Foundation Is AWOL

Historian of science Emerson "Tom" McMullen at Georgia Southern University (GSU) is in hot water for criticizing Darwinian evolution in class, which critics have equated with "us[ing] class time to proselytize students and advance his personal religion, Christianity." The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), Richard Dawkins, and Jerry Coyne -- in other words, the usual anti-academic freedom bullies -- are demanding that GSU investigate and censor Professor McMullen.

Not having access to...

Do We Live in a "Golden Ratio" Universe?

Writing recently about the Golden Ratio, we described how spiral shells grow according to that special ratio, designated by the Greek letter phi (φ = 1.618...), based on the Fibonacci series, that the human eye finds pleasing. Since hurricanes and spiral galaxies also follow the same proportions, it seems that natural laws can explain how non-living spirals in hurricanes and galaxies will grow, but living things like ammonite shells require genetic instructions. This is evidence of intellige...

What Do You Know? It's Day Five of Our Twelve Days of Discounts! Save 20 Percent on Metamorphosis: A Companion Book to the Film!

Our 12 Days of Discounts continues -- and remember the day's savings last for just 24 hours, until 6 pm on Tuesday. It's Day Five, so go here, and enter the code EZ29FV2Z for your savings of 20 percent off! Don't forget, CreateSpace is an Amazon company but you'll need to create a new CreateSpace account.

Our offering of the day? Metamorphosis: A Companion Book to the Film, edited by David Klinghoffer, includes essays exploring both the science and artistry of butterflies, how butterflies cha...

Give Me That New Time Transhumanism!

I have a piece in this month's First Things about how transhumanism is a form of materialistic faith. The column describes what I observed at a religion and transhumanism conference back in May. From "New Time Religion" (subscription required):

The West, we are told, has entered the secular age.Religious faith is irreversibly shriveling, opening space for a society governed by reason.

Traditional religion may well fade, but we will never see an end to something like religious belief. We're sub...

Notwithstanding What Bill Nye Says, the Sun Is Not an "Unremarkable" Star

Editor's Note: As a series at ENV, we are pleased to present "Exoplanets." Daniel Bakken is anengineer who teachesastronomy at the college level, and an entrepreneur in compound semiconductor crystal growth. In a series of articles he critically examines recent claims about exoplanets beyond our solar system, asking whether our own planet Earth is a rarity, or common, in the cosmos. For previous articles in the series, see here.

For a planet to be habitable, its star must also meet certain st...

Well, Well, It's Day Four of Our Twelve Days of Discounts! Time to Save 50 Percent on The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos!

It's time to take advantage of today's discount. It's Day Four, so go here, and enter the code EZ29FV2Z for your savings of 50 percent off! CreateSpace is an Amazon company but you'll need to create a new CreateSpace account.

Today's offering: The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson's Landmark Science Series, available at half off the list price of $15.95 for just 24 hours!

Neil deGrasse Tyson's reboot of the classic TV series Cosmos struck a chord with viewers,...

Hooray! Welcome to Day Three of Our Twelve Days of Discounts! For Just 24 Hours, Get God and Evolution at 40 Percent Off!

Well, the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is starting to draw to a close, but our 12 Days of Discounts are just getting started. It's time to take advantage of today's discount. It's Day Three, so go here, and enter the code EZ29FV2Z for your savings of 40 percent off! CreateSpace is an Amazon company but you'll need to create a new CreateSpace account.

Today's offering: God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Remember, yo...

Yay! It's Day Two of Our Twelve Days of Discounts: Get Science and Human Origins by Gauger, Axe, and Luskin at Half Off!

Are you looking forward to your holiday weekend? We are too. That means it's time to take advantage of today's discount in our 12 Days of Discounts. It's Day Two, so go here, and enter the code EZ29FV2Z for your savings of 50 percent off! CreateSpace is an Amazon company but you'll need to create a new CreateSpace account.

Evidence for a purely Darwinian account of human origins is supposed to be overwhelming. But is it?

In a provocative book, Science and Human Origins, by Douglas Axe, Ann Ga...

Biologists Are Getting to Be Less Reticent About Using the Phrase "Design Principles"

We're seeing more instances of biologists (especially cell biologists) writing about "design principles" in their papers. Phrases like that are hard to square with blind evolutionary mechanisms. Yes, they still believe that natural selection finds ways to optimize things, but that gets harder to justify the more the focus is on design. Here's a recent example in a PNAS paper about signaling networks.

Cells continually have to sense their environments to make decisions -- to stay put or move,...