Discovery Institute's Blog, page 225

What's Wrong with This Video from PBS? Or Rather, What Isn't?

About this video from PBS, "There Was No First Human," recommended by Jerry Coyne, it's hard to know where to begin. The host's attitude? The snarky graphic "It's Okay to Be Smart"? Well, let's just stick to the factual errors. There is no continuous stack of photos documenting our unbroken history all the way back to our "fishy ancestor" Tiktaalik. It is true that fossils are snapshots of the past. But the idea of continuous gradual change is an inference not documented by the fossil record...

Video: Stephen Meyer on Seeing Ghost Lineages

The problem of identifying the missing ancestors of the Cambrian animals remains a huge, pounding headache for Team Darwin. It's not the only challenge to Darwinian theory posed in Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt, but it's certainly one that traditional evolutionists still struggle to explain to themselves and others. Here is Meyer discussing very accessibly why the use of cladistic analysis -- stem groups, crown groups, cladograms, ghost lineages -- fails to satisfy.

In order to compensat...

You're Welcome: Darwinists Should Thank Us for Quality Control, Fact-Checking

Casey Luskin has an excellent article up now at The Blaze pointing out something I hadn't really thought about ("Defenders of the Evolutionary 'Consensus' Could Benefit from More Fact Checking").

Much as they hate us -- and I don't think that word is too strong in some cases -- Darwinists need us, if nothing else, for quality control. Some will remain fat, happy, and complacent no matter how we check their facts for them, but there can be no doubt that others are more careful about their cla...

Where's the Intelligent Design in Ohio House Bill 597?

Just as they did back in 2006, the Darwin Lobby and the media have concocted a story that intelligent design is going to be taught in Ohio. According to a recent article in the Columbus Dispatch, "Intelligent design could be taught with Common Core's repeal," Ohio House Bill 597 "would allow intelligent design and creationism to be taught alongside evolution in science classes." You might expect that a bill to "allow intelligent design and creationism to be taught alongside evolution" would...

Better Late than Never, BioLogos Promises a Raft of Reviews of Darwin's Doubt

The team of theistic evolutionists at BioLogos have had their ups and downs, undergoing not infrequent evolutions in their leadership staff but maintaining a consistently critical stance in relationship to the scientific theory of intelligent design. So I found it notable to stop by their website today and see they are planning a series of responses to Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.

This is a year and two months aft...

Animals Can Be "Victims" but Are Not Persons

Some animal rights activists are engaging in pronounced wishful thinking thatan Oregon Supreme Court ruling that individualanimals can be"victims" under animal neglect statutes is somehow a "landmark" advancingthe animals-are-people-too cause.

Well, I have read the case. It's not true.

Context: The defendant was convicted of twenty counts of animal neglect. He tried to weasel out of the charge by claiming only humans as "persons" can be "victims." The Supreme Court disagreed. From Oregon v. Ni...

Drawing My Discussion with Laurence Moran to a Close

Ever have a conversation with someone where, try as you might, you just can't seem to get through? Over the past few weeks University of Toronto professor of biochemistry Laurence Moran and I have been responding to each other's posts concerning my book The Edge of Evolution and a recent paper by Summers et al. on chloroquine resistance in malaria (a major topic of the book). For previous entries in this running dialogue, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Unfortunately, I thi...

Paper Finds Functional Reasons For "Redundant" Codons, Fulfilling a Prediction from Intelligent Design

A new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Frontiers in Genetics, "Redundancy of the genetic code enables translational pausing," finds that so-called "redundant" codons may actually serve important functions in the genome. Redundant (also called "degenerate") codons are those triplets of nucleotides that encode the same amino acid. For example, in the genetic code, the codons GGU, GGC, GGA, and GGG all encode the amino acid glycine. While it has been shown (see here) that such redundancy is a...

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, and More on the "My Good Friend" Meme

Coincidentally, Jerry Coyne (at Why Evolution Is True) and I were both thinking over the weekend about the debate this year between physicist Sean Carroll and our Discovery Institute colleague William Lane Craig. I posted about the "My Good Friend meme" -- so named by thoughtful reader Ryan -- employed in origins debates by materialist advocates. That means, guys like Dr. Carroll (and Prothero, Krauss, Ward, etc.) use superfluous references to distinguished buddies in the scientific communit...

In Debates over Cosmic and Biological Origins, Here's the "My Good Friend" Meme

We have a thoughtful reader, Ryan, who is perceptive, generous with his time, and interested in debunking phony debate tactics. Ryan is the guy who tracked down the source of the fake "tailed baby" photo that Karl Giberson used in a debate with Stephen Meyer and in a follow up article for The Daily Beast.

Now Ryan writes in with a further "Ah hah!" insight: Did you ever notice how in debates about cosmic and biological origins, academics on the Darwin Defense Force have a funny way of throwi...