Discovery Institute's Blog, page 207

There's a Gene for That...Or Is There?

A CNN headline reports, "Blame genetics for bad driving, study finds." "Genes for," however, are dangerous words in genetics.

Recently, we looked at evolutionary psychology, the attempt to explain current human behavior as being governed by natural selection acting on how hominoid/hominin/human groups lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, so that the behavior is now encoded in the genes and brains of survivors. For example, we were told recently that men may have better navigation skills...

No Writ of Habeas Corpus for Orangutans

How is it possible to type those words -- "writ of habeas corpus for orangutans" -- without your laptop exploding?

It should be instantly recognized as ludicrous. But animal rights activists are suing, or planning to sue, all over the place looking for just one judgewilling to go radical and grant one animal "personhood." In New York, for example, the NonhumanRights Project has brought a similar suit, for which it won a laudatory cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

A few years ago, a B...

From a 2011 Paper on Bacterial Flagella, Little Comfort for Darwinists

An email correspondent pointed out a 2011 paper to me, "Structural diversity of bacterial flagellar motors," published by the European Molecular Biology Organization. The paper looks at bacterial flagella from a wide phylogenetic distribution using "electron cryotomography" -- a pretty new technique that they say allows them to get greater detail more easily.

They write in the abstract that "While a conserved structural core was observed in all 11 bacteria imaged, surprisingly novel and diver...

Looking Forward to 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...

"A Few Years Ago, We Couldn't Have Filled a Kombi": The Brazilian Intelligent Design Adventure

I have seen the future of intelligent design. It is young, passionately South American, speaks Portuguese, and is not lobbying to get ID into schools. What's more, that future is very friendly, smart, and loves a good discussion during a great meal. Brazilian churrasco and lively conversation about design -- what more could one want?

A couple of days ago, I returned from the inaugural congress of the Sociedade Brasileira do Design Inteligente. Figure 1 shows my new favorite mug (of course I p...

For Overcoming Students' Intuitions of Design, The American Biology Teacher Suggests Employing Evo-Devo

I just finished reading an article by Kostas Kampourakis and Alessandro Minelli, "Evolution Makes More Sense in the Light of Development," in the journal American Biology Teacher. Here's an outline of the authors' argument:

Intuitions of design and of essentialism (the idea that entities have essences) arise during early childhood and persist into adulthood, making evolution seem counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Even though we know evolution is true, childish misconceptions get...

Remembering Arthur Balfour, Friend of Science and Friendly Opponent to Atheist Bertrand Russell

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I -- and this past week provided a terrible reminder that conflicts stirred by the war remain with us. In Israel, a pair of Palestinian Muslims turned a Jerusalem synagogue at morning prayers into a bloodbath, a reminder to Israelis (as if one were needed) of their vulnerability to terrorists fanatically opposed to the existence of the state. Observers with a long memory may have recalled how a 1917 promise by the British Em...

Loeb, Johanson, Wilson: Leading Scientists Bloviate on What Nobody Knows

Nobody knows scientifically if aliens exist. Nobody knows scientifically what the meaning of life is, or the true content of morality. When scientists speculate on such things, their opinions may be interesting -- after all, they are smart people -- or maybe not. However they have left science behind, not that that serves as a discouragement in some quarters. The scientist's only advantage may lie in the sophistication of his ignorance.

Nevertheless, when it comes to ultimate questions, the me...

Don't Try This in the Laundry Room: Materialists Seek to Outsmart Thermodynamics

Entropy is a greased pole, but some researchers believe they can climb it. The fundamentals of thermodynamics were discovered in the 19th century, establishing some of the best-confirmed laws in all of science. Mathematician Granville Sewell has argued in these pages that evolutionary theory is at crosscurrents with the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy), dooming it to failure.

Every once in a while, though, a physicist or biologist tinkers with the laws, looking for ways to s...

Transhumanism's Utopian Fantasyland

I wouldn't mind transhumanism's fantasies -- eternal life, uploading minds into computers, changing our bodies so we can fly. Whatever. Whatever gets people through the night.

I don't think it will ever happen. But: The movement is driven by a neurotic fear of suffering -- terror of death -- and a loathing of the normalvicissitudes of human living.

In short, transhumanistsare on a quasi-religious quest to gain hyper-control over every aspect of living. Add it up, and you have a distinctly Utop...