Discovery Institute's Blog, page 24

In California, Assisted Suicide for the Institutionalized Mentally Ill

In my regular First Things column, I expand my analysis, first offered here, of a rule granting California's institutionalized mentally ill an enforceable right to die if they are diagnosed with a terminal condition.

The law, which is a travesty delivered by bureaucratic promulgation, claims to protect those with a mental impairments. But the regulators smash that seeming protection into shards. As I write there:

These are people denied their very freedom due to diagnosed severe mental disea...

An Evolutionary View on Speech Isn't "Settled Science"

And in large part it isn't even about science. That's the takeaway from an entertaining review at The American Spectator by Larry Thornberry of Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech:

Darwin's theories are not, in the modern phrase, settled science. They aren't even unsettled science. They are educated guesses at best. To be science, Wolfe reminds us, "There are five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Has anyone observed the phenomenon -- in this case, Evolution -- as it occurred and rec...

"Practical as Potatoes" -- Eric Metaxas on Behe, ID, and Revolutionary

Eric Metaxas is a treasure, commenting on an impressive range of subjects, all with smarts, wit, and uncommon common sense. In a BreakPoint broadcast today he reflects on the twentieth anniversary of biochemist Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box and highlights our new documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines, written and directed by John West.

Metaxas offers a new encomium for scientific arguments for design in nature. Behe's case for ID is "practical as p...

What It Takes to Build a Hook for the Flagellum

You've just been hired as a software engineer. Your first project is to write code that will operate robotic machines. The robots need to build a high-speed universal joint and fasten it to a shaft that will rotate at high speed. The code needs to select materials that can tolerate the high stresses they will face, and arrange them into flexible, mutually-reinforcing configurations that will provide high performance and fault tolerance over many cycles of switching between prograde and anter...

A European Scientist on "Beyond Materialism" Meeting

A senior European scientist who was on hand for the "Beyond Materialism" conference at Cambridge University's Hughes Hall says this:

I will concentrate on the truly stunning and encouraging spirit of this event. The audience was extremely interested in the talks, asked very thoughtful questions, and was overwhelmingly sympathetic and supportive of ID.

There were not only people from Great Britain, but also from other European countries (e.g., several people from the Netherlands). It was also...

Prince or Pauper? Researchers Find Functional Pseudogene in Fruit Fly

Suppose we introduced you to a friend and said he works as a pseudoscientist. You would be immediately suspicious of his white lab coat and apparent command of scientific language in subsequent conversation. After all, he just pretends to be a scientist. He's fake. He's false. He is bogus, sham, phony, mock, ersatz, quasi-, spurious, deceptive, misleading, assumed, contrived, affected, insincere, and all the other negative synonyms we associate with the prefix pseudo.

But then suppose we co...

Michael Behe on the Legacy of Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Ever wonder what major and highly original scientific advocates of intelligent design think of each other's work? In a brief video conversation, Michael Behe comments on the impact and significance of Michael Denton's books Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, culminating in the typological understanding of life's structures and the fundamental challenge to Darwinian theory that poses.

Dr. Behe's case for ID, first advanced in Darwin's Black Box twenty years...

BBC: An Iguana with Serious Pluck

Go lizard, go! If you don't like seeing lots of snakes moving very fast, don't watch this. And there's no special relevance to evolution. But if you enjoy rooting for an iguana hatchling with some serious pluck, this is great!

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

ID's British Invasion Is a Hit as We Complete the "Beyond Materialism" Conference at Cambridge U.

With star speakers including Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, Paul Nelson, Ann Gauger, and Alistair Donald, the "Beyond Materialism" conference yesterday was a big success! We hosted scientists from the U.K., Sweden, Germany, and Israel before a full house at Cambridge University's Hughes Hall.

It was a packed day following on the heels of a very busy week, highlighted by the Royal Society's three-day "New Trends in Evolutionary Biology" conference in London.

All of the speakers did a terrifi...

In Arrival, Noam Chomsky's Visiting Martian Gets Hollywood Treatment

A big Hollywood release this week is Arrival with Amy Banks as a linguist seeking to establish peaceful contact with visiting aliens. It looks terrific, and made me think too of Tom Wolfe's amusing sendup of Noam Chomsky and his "visiting Martian." What's the visiting Martian? From Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech:

There were six thousand or seven thousand languages in the world, which made people believe that language was a babbling Babel of biblical proportions.

That was where Chomsky's son-t...