Discovery Institute's Blog, page 206
November 27, 2014
Welcome to Day One of Our Twelve Days of Discounts: Get The Magician's Twin, Book and DVD, for 45 and 35 Percent Off!
Did you enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner? Good! Then it's time take advantage of today's discount on Center for Science and Culture associate director John West's book The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society and its accompanying DVD. Go here and here, and enter the code EZ29FV2Z for your savings of 45 and 35 percent off respectively! (List price $24.95 and $15.95.) CreateSpace is an Amazon company but you'll need to create a new CreateSpace account. To get both book...
One More Thing to Be Thankful For: Animal Research Points to Pain "Off Switch"
On this Thanksgiving Day, let us give thanks for, among other things, the "grim good" of animal research to alleviate human suffering and point us toward methods to cure diseases.
Latest example: In animal studies, researchers may have found a pain "off switch." From the Science Daily story:
In research published in the medical journal Brain, Saint Louis University researcher Daniela Salvemini PhD and colleagues within SLU, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other academic instituti...
November 26, 2014
Have a Blessed Thanksgiving! Here's How to Say "Thank You" to Your Friends at Evolution News and Views
Photo: Editorial staff of Evolution News and Views breaks for lunch at offices of Discovery Institute, Seattle.
Somewhere right now a student is looking for top-notch resources to balance what she is learning in her science class about the evolution controversy. There's an excellent chance she'll land on our front step, searching the archive of continuously updated reporting at the Center for Science and Culture's flagship site, Evolution News and Views (ENV).
ENV is the daily voice of the int...
Protracted Unrest Between ENCODE Researchers and Junk-DNA Advocates Goes On
It's not exactly Fergusson, Mo., but the battle between ENCODE researchers and junk-DNA holdouts goes on. Our ongoing coverage of the hostilities left off with the latter sending over their latest salvo. Now, ENCODE is back. Confident that genomes are not mostly junk, they have set their latest contender in the ring: a mouse.
The mouse genome was sequenced in 2002 as a primary model in which to study gene function and human diseases and to develop drugs. This was followed by maps of transcrib...
November 25, 2014
What the New Atheism's Gender Gap Tells You
Emma Green at The Atlantic has an interesting article about the sociology of atheism, pegged to a newly published scholarly examination of the subject, Atheist Awakening: Secular Activism and Community in America (Oxford University Press), by Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith ("The Origins of Aggressive Atheism"). This a fascinating and under-discussed topic.
What strikes me is the maleness of the "New Atheist" phenomenon. The stereotyped picture of a sea of ponytailed males at the atheist...
Mission Impossible: Trying to Explain the Feather Without Teleology
In an article for National Geographic, "Your Inner Feather," Carl Zimmer writes: "Feathers started out as simple filaments, turning to fuzz, and then diversifying into a lot of different forms -- including the ones that eventually let birds take to the air." Touting a study in Molecular Biology, Zimmer points out that even humans have nearly all of the genetic requirements for feathers. How can this be?
"It may seem strange to consider the fact that you, as a mammal, have all the known genes...
In Search of Circumstellar Habitable Zones
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.
In the search for habitable planets, the circumstellar habitable zone is the spherical shell environment define...
November 24, 2014
Media Are Indifferent to Euthanasia-Victimized Families
Imagine you are at work, going about your day. The phone rings. You pick up and it is a mortuary informing you they have your mother's body.
"What do you mean you have my mother's body!"you exclaim in utter shock.
"She was just euthanized today," the voice on the other end mildly answers. "What should we do with the body?"
That is exactly what happened in 2012 to Belgian chemist Tom Mortier, who spoke (via Skype) yesterday at the very well attended East Coast Conference Against Assisted Suicide...
How Does Modern Medicine Depend on Darwinism?
Scott Russell Sanders, the author of this thoughtless Washington Post review of
E.O. Wilson's new book The Meaning of Human Existence, writes (emphasis added):
Wilson tries yet again, in "The Meaning of Human Existence," to convince ordinary readers of the scientific view that humans have evolved, along with millions of other species, from earlier life forms, entirely by natural processes, without guidance from any supreme being. He has his work cut out for him. According to the most recent...
Our Early Christmas Gift to You: 12 Days, 12 Ways to Save
What a pleasure to settle into a holiday with a good book to read. Better than one book, of course, is two. Or how about twelve new books, plus a few fine documentaries on DVD into the mix? Here's what we've got planned as our early Christmas gift to ENV readers.
Starting this Thursday night, as you're digesting Thanksgiving dinner, we'll post an announcement here at Evolution News and Views of the first of twelve discounts on prime books and documentaries with an intelligent design theme. Ea...
Discovery Institute's Blog
- Discovery Institute's profile
- 15 followers
