Discovery Institute's Blog, page 22

Texas Committee: High Schoolers Can't Handle Evidence on Darwinism, Warts and All

Last week, I testified in Austin, Texas, about the latest skirmish over how evolution is taught in Texas public high schools. I want it taught, warts and all. Darwinists want it taught as airbrushed and unquestionable dogma.

The state school board meeting was called to consider initial steps to streamline the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). Streamlining is fine, in principle. The problem is that some of the proposed changes to the evolution section water down four passages that...

The Approval Complex and Darwinian Monoculture -- Further Reflections on the Royal Society Meeting

As important as parenting is, it should be a temporary undertaking. The end result is well worth the effort... when it does come to an end, that is. We've all seen regrettable cases where it doesn't -- fully grown adults who retain an unhealthy need for parental approval and aging parents who foster that kind of lingering dependence.

I left the recent Royal Society meeting in London, "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology," with the distinct impression that I had witnessed a professional versio...

Yale's Steven Novella Argues with Michael Behe -- Here's Why Novella Is Wrong

Steven Novella, a neurologist and noted "skeptic" at Yale University School of Medicine, has commented on a recent Harvard University experiment for visualizing bacterial adaptation to antibiotics. In doing so, he argues with Michael Behe whose take on the subject was noted at Evolution News. Here is why Dr. Novella is wrong.

The Harvard researchers constructed a giant petri dish with spatially varying antibiotics to watch how bacteria adapt over time and space (the researchers came up with...

From the Royal Society Meeting, an Acid, Amusing, and On-Target Report

At the Huffington Post, journalist Suzan Mazur is amusingly acid and on target in a report from the Royal Society meeting, "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology," which sounds more stultifying the more I hear about it.

[O]ne of the opening speakers referred to himself as representing the Jurassic Age of science and pointed out that the content of the previous speaker's lecture -- which put more than the jet-lagged in the audience to sleep -- could be found in existing textbooks. He was right...

Two Mechanisms Proofread DNA Translation. Make That Three.

The very idea that cells proofread their genetic information makes intelligent design intuitively obvious. One doesn't proofread gibberish. If cells had cobbled together haphazard strings of building blocks, it wouldn't really matter in what order they were assembled. We know, of course, that the sequence matters: most mutations cause disease or death. Proofreading is evidence par excellence that genetic information represents real information, the kind found in books and software. ID advoca...

American Lysenkoism

Historian Gerard DeGroot recently published a review of Simon Ing's forthcoming book, Stalin and the Scientists. Amazon's description of the book includes the following:

The Soviet Union had the best-funded scientific establishment in history. Scientists were elevated as popular heroes and lavished with awards and privileges. But if their ideas or their field of study lost favor with the elites, they could be exiled, imprisoned, or murdered.

Stalin's favorite scientist was agronomist Trofim...

Was Darwinism Banned from Nazi Germany?

My new book, Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich, is out today, so I know I am going to hear a refrain I've heard before when my earlier books were published: Darwinism (they will say) not only did not serve as an important component of Nazi ideology, but Darwinism was banned from Nazi Germany.

This notion that Darwinism was banned in Nazi Germany is pretty widespread on blogs, especially those by atheists and freethinkers. For instance, a blog called Skeptical...

Irreducible Complexity -- A Simple Idea with Far-Ranging Consequences, Deadly to Darwinism

Biochemist Michael Behe's observation that many evolutionary innovations are "irreducibly complex" is a simple idea, conveyed effectively in just 2 minutes and 38 seconds in the video above. But its challenge to Darwinian explanations of life's wonders is severe, and one to which evolutionary advocates have found no convincing answer.

This month we celebrate Dr. Behe's work and the 20th anniversary of his path-breaking book Darwin's Black Box. That work is the subject of a new hour-long docu...

London Spectator Hails Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis as a "Best Book" of 2016

Wow, congratulations to Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton! He has won richly deserved praise in the London Spectator. In a feature highlighting "The best and worst books of 2016," with choices from a panel of contributors, the distinguished literary critic A.N. Wilson selects Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis as his best nonfiction work of the year:

Michael Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Discovery Institute Press, 16.80). A sequel to his 1985 book -- Evol...

"There Is Intelligent Design of American History"

Congratulations to our friend Michael Medved whose book The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic will be out on November 29.

He spoke this week on the book's theme at the Reagan Library in Southern California -- a fantastic speech -- and gave a welcome shout-out to ID at the end. "There is intelligent design of American history," Michael declares, meaning a "pattern of happy accidents" not plausibly explained in any other way. Sound familiar? See our post yesterda...