Discovery Institute's Blog, page 231

Science and Faith and Alaska

This week some 150 members of the Discovery Society, including speakers and staff, have been finding that there is more to Alaska -- even just the island expanses of Southeast Alaska -- than can be covered, let alone explored, in seven days. The 2014 Discovery Society conference is taking place aboard a Holland America ship, the Westerdam, with participants hearing about various angles on the theme "Science & Faith: Friends or Foes" while visiting the ports of Juneau (the colorful state capi...

Evolutionary Studies Suggest that Atheists, Whatever They Say to the Contrary, Really Do Believe in God

Over the past few weeks, a theme of discussion on the Internet has been the proposal that atheists may not exist. Of course people who think they're atheists exist, but a study discussed in Nature proposes that people really aren't functionally atheists because we're innately predisposed toward religion. In an article titled "Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that's not a joke," Science 2.0 has a nice summary:

While militant atheists like Richard Dawkins may be convinced...

Hummingbird Versus Drone

It's just a short "Science Shot" from Science Magazine, but it has a big message. A new study on hummingbird wings compares their performance with our best intelligently designed imitator:

The study, published online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, shows that the power needed to sustain a hummingbird midhover is highly dependent on the bird's wing aspect ratio. During the down stroke, wings with a larger aspect ratio (3.5 to 4.0 for hummingbirds) use significantly less p...

Here's a Dumb Idea: To Eliminate All Suffering, Eliminate Predators!

I have written that our fear of suffering is becoming so neurotic that it threatens not only the recognition of human exceptionalism, but our rationality itself. Not only does the desire to eliminate suffering shade over into a desire to eliminate the sufferer, but the concept has become so elastic that it even now includes the suffering of nature.

Case in point: One of the world's most notable transhumanists, George Dvorsky -- whom I saw advocate "uploading" animal consciences into computers...

Video: You Didn't Know that Rays Can Fly?

I didn't either. But as the narrator points out, why not with wings spanning two meters? These sleek creatures got together in a fantastic and beautiful school of "tens of thousands," a kind of flash mob off the coast of Baja California. They jump out of the water and fly a short distance -- amazing -- and are clearly having a blast.

MicroRNAs Still Do Not Support an Evolutionary "Tree of Life"

As we reported here and here in 2012, biologist Kevin Peterson at Dartmouth (pictured at right) sent shock waves through the Darwin community when he studied microRNAs and found they did not track expected evolutionary relationships as expected. Thinking that microRNAs should be clear windows on evolution because they are generally well conserved, he kept "uncovering problems, from the base of the animal tree all the way up to its crown."

Now Nature News has an update on the story. The headlin...

A Writer in The Guardian Laments, "Remember When Dawkins Was Widely Respected?"

Read this from Eleanor Robertson in The Guardian, a very funny lament, "Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?" She takes off from Dawkins's recent, how shall we put it, philosophizing on Twitter.

Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.

She means this:

Date...

What We Mean When We Talk About the "Value of Human Life"

At Evolution Blog, Jason Rosenhouse offers "Replies to Smith and Klinghoffer," meaning Wesley and myself on assisted suicide versus the idea of life's sacredness. Rosenhouse insists that "Human origins have no implications for the value of human life."

The source of his confusion seems to be that in writing about the "value of human life," Rosenhouse and I are talking about two different things. I'm referring to the idea that a human life per se has an exceptional value, a sacredness, which de...

Good News, South Carolina Won't Require Students to Study Evolution as Dogma

In South Carolina, the newspaper The State reports that South Carolina's newly proposed science standards won't require evolution to be taught as dogmatic fact:

A proposed change to the state's science standard for teaching evolution -- OK'd by education leaders Tuesday and sent to two South Carolina education boards for a final approval -- will not allow a teacher to lecture on creationism, said state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville.

Instead, it asks teachers and students to treat evolution as a...

Junk DNA: Darwinists Say They Are "Largely Free from Assumptions or Hypotheses"

According to a recent Science Daily news item, Oxford University researchers say that only 8.2% of our DNA is likely to be functional. The rest is "junk."

The 8.2% figure contradicts the conclusions of the ENCODE Project (for "Encyclopedia of DNA Elements"), which was established after the Human Genome Project to make sense of our newly sequenced DNA. In September 2012, the results from over a thousand experiments -- involving dozens of laboratories and hundreds of scientists on three contine...