Discovery Institute's Blog, page 214

Surprise, Surprise! Bioluminescent Organs in Different Squid Species Suggest Convergent Genetic Evolution

As I noted in a recent post, Lee Spetner's new book The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People Are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution compellingly argues that convergent evolution challenges neo-Darwinian evolution. Why? Because it shows how the same structures may appear over and over again in separate lineages, which is an unlikely pattern if evolution really is an undirected neo-Darwinian process.

A new article at Science Daily, "Let there be light: Evolution of complex bioluminescent...

Humans Display Many Behavioral and Cognitive Abilities that Offer No Apparent Survival Advantage

Author's note: More Than Myth? is a new volume featuring chapters from various pro-ID scientists and scholars discussing scientific and theological problems with an evolutionary viewpoint. My contribution is titled, "The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution," but the chapter also includes a brief "bonus problem" at the end, namely: "Humans display many behavioral and cognitive abilities that offer no apparent survival advantage." Here's an excerpt:

In recent years...

Why Advocates of Intelligent Design Owe Atheist Neil deGrasse Tyson a "Thank You"

From living in Manhattan as I once did, I remember many taxi rides listening to the popular news station 1010 WINS with its slogan, "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world." And they did. The producers offered a picture in miniature not only of whatever they regarded as the top stories around the globe, but of their worldview that determined what news is important and what isn't.

The same is true of Neil deGrasse Tyson's highly regarded Cosmos series, whose 13 episodes ran earlier t...

Natural Selection Struggles to Fix Advantageous Traits in Populations

Author's note: As I mentioned earlier, a new book More Than Myth? collects articles from various pro-ID scientists and scholars, myself included. My chapter discusses the top scientific problems with chemical evolution and biological evolution, and Problem 4 was that natural selection struggles to fix advantageous traits in populations. Here's a little excerpt from that section:

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

Can We Talk? Human Language as the Business End of Consciousness

Recently, I wrote about thehard problemof consciousness, made much harder by the effort to reduce consciousness to a -- for example -- fourth state of matter. Which is somewhat like trying to reduce the U.S. Constitution to a flavor of ice cream.

Naturalism (the view that it's material nature all the way down) hasn't fared much better with human language than with consciousness. The problem is that the things we communicate to each other are often stuff that nature never otherwise knew. Wheth...

New Book Discusses Scientific and Theological Problems with Darwinian Evolution

A new book, More Than Myth?, features contributions from various pro-ID authors discussing the scientific and theological problems with Darwinian evolution. The editors include Paul Brown, a professor of chemistry, biology, and environmental studies at the evangelical university Trinity Western, and Robert Stackpole, a Catholic theologian.

Their vision for the book was to show that both Catholics and Protestants can agree that there is scientific and theological evidence showing that intellig...

Biologist Michael Denton Revisits His Argument that Evolution Is a "Theory in Crisis"

A new quarterly journal, Inference: International Review of Science, turns a skeptical eye on the culture and practice of science.

Of particular interest in the first issue is an essay by our colleague, biologist Dr. Michael Denton, on "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis Revisited," first of a promised three-part series. Denton renews and expands his critique of Darwinian theory. This bears some discussion.

Many Darwin defenders are troubled that credible scientists doubt their viewpoint. As a resu...

Protein Folding: A Materialist's Nightmare

It's one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature: a linear sequence self-organizes into a 3-D machine. Try arranging magnets on a string that can fold the string into a working wrench. That's about the level of complexity that happens every day in every cell of your body: gene sequences translate into amino acid sequences that spontaneously fold into functional proteins. How do they do it?

PNAS published a "Perspective" article, "The Nature of Protein Folding Pathways," by S. Walter Engla...

Separating Fact from Fiction: New Book, The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos, Released Today

The other day one of our kids, age seven, came home from school with a garbled account of what he had learned about the moon by watching an episode of "Bill Science Guy." He meant Bill Nye the Science Guy. He went on to talk about how he also learned that "Back a long time ago, everyone thought the world was square. And this guy, he said it was round? So they burned him."

I'm not sure what that was in reference to -- some kind of a mash-up between Giordano Bruno and Christopher Columbus, perha...

Separating Fact from Fiction: Our New Book, The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos, Is Out Today and Available for Purchase!

The other day one of our kids, age seven, came home from school with a garbled account of what he had learned about the moon by watching an episode of "Bill Science Guy." He meant Bill Nye the Science Guy. He went on to talk about how he also learned that "Back a long time ago, everyone thought the world was square. And this guy, he said it was round? So they burned him."

I'm not sure what that was in reference to -- some kind of a mash-up between Giordano Bruno and Christopher Columbus, perha...