Discovery Institute's Blog, page 211

Among Theistic Evolutionists, Still No Consensus on What's Wrong with Stephen Meyer's Argument

In reviewing Darwin's Doubt, even now almost a year and a half since it came out, theistic evolutionists can't agree on what Stephen Meyer got wrong. As David Klinghoffer has written, when Darrel Falk reviewed Darwin's Doubt for BioLogos back in September, he agreed that Stephen Meyer is right to point out that leading evolutionary theorists are rethinking important neo-Darwinian claims. Most fundamentally, they are reconsidering whether the standard model can account for large-scale macro-ev...

Post-Election Special: The Evolutionary Psychologist Knows Why You Vote -- and Shop, and Tip at Restaurants

Ever since Darwin's The Descent of Man, in which he proposed the theory ofsexual selection(how some are selected to pass on their traits), his followers have extended his thoughts to encompass just about all aspects of human nature.

First there wassocial Darwinism, which fell into disfavor after World War II because its theories justified colonialism, exploitation of labor, and eugenics. These policies were developed much earlier and for reasons unrelated to Darwinian theory, but the theory w...

Princeton Theoretical Physicist Paul Steinhardt on the "Multiverse"

Princeton physicist Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at that university. Quanta Magazine notes his view on the multiverse, an idea that is of course the leading prophylactic defense against evidence that the cosmos is eerily fine-tuned:

Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University and one of the early contributors to the theory of eternal inflation, saw the multiverse as a "fatal flaw" in the reasoning he had helped advance, and he remains st...

"Quote Mining" Defined, and the Lena Dunham Business

A National Review editorial published today begins as follows:

Lena Dunham, actress, television writer, and disturbing memoirist, is displeased that a National Review writer quoted passages from her book and characterized some of the episodes described therein as representing the sexual abuse of her younger sister, Grace. Her lawyers have threatened to sue the conservative website Truth Revolt for subsequently doing much the same thing.

It goes on from there, and you're very welcome to follow...

Low Oxygen Suffocates Darwinian Explanations for the Cambrian Explosion

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science publishes a theory seeking to explain the Cambrian explosion, you can be confident you're getting some of the best thinking out there. In Science Magazine's Halloween issue, nine researchers from eight prestigious universities, including Yale, University of Illinois, and Caltech advanced their latest offering on the emergence of nearly twenty new animal body plans in the geological blink of an eye.

The basic idea: animals wanted to...

Brittany Maynard, RIP: We Are Stepping Into an Abyss

Brittany Maynard, the young woman with a malignant incurable brain tumor, killed herself this weekend. She appears to have done so under Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law, by taking an overdose of medication deliberately prescribed by a physician.

Her death is tragic, not only because of her incurable tumor (which was not the medical cause of her death), but because she committed suicide, and because the medical profession and the government of Oregon helped her kill herself, and because her suic...

Dartmouth Physicist: When Science Shades Over Into Faith

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College who treads dangerous ground from time to time. He writes a regular commentary for NPR in which, in the past, he has admitted that even taking the origin of simple life on Earth as a given, the development of complex life poses an additional, extraordinary riddle. With only Darwinian evolution as a resource, to assume that complex biology is out there among the stars as well as on our planet is a tough one to swallow.

Now he provoc...

"Political" Animals: Just More Rights Nonsense

Words lose their meaning. Definitions are blurred. Nothing can really be discussed.

The latest example? University professor (of course!) Justin E.H. Smith's claim that animals are part of the political community.

First, Smith assertsthat animals have their own forms of politics. Well, bucks do cross antlers to decide who gets to enjoy the does -- war being politics by other means. And there is no doubt that animals can act in concert. The question of whether that is "political," let's leave t...

The Varieties of "Atheism"; plus on Kindle Now, Here's Our New Book The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos

Responding to queries from readers, I'm happy to announce that our book The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson's Landmark Science Series is out now in a Kindle edition.

To celebrate the occasion, let's consider this tweet from a critic:

@d_klinghoffer No acknowledgement whatsoever that Tyson doesn't call himself an atheist, I see. Unsurprising from the Disco Tute.

— MikeTheInfidel (@BoredInfidel) November 2, 2014

Nice try. It's true that Tyson rejects the self-d...

Wolf on Dogs: You Haven't Lived Until You've Heard German Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Say "Chihuahua"

Imagine this cute guy, a miniature dachshund, surviving in the wild:

Not going to happen. Not even a week.

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig (Max Planck Institutes) means no disrespect to canines when he calls their evolution a matter of degeneration. On the contrary, like me and millions of other people, he is a dog lover. Nevertheless, the development of dog breeds has been accomplished by the opposite of what Darwinism needs to show: "no increase in information but rather a decrease or...