Discovery Institute's Blog, page 28

Egg News PETA Doesn't Want You to Know

Animal rights activists -- as distinct from animal welfare -- want to end all domestication. They don't want us to use animals for any reason, whether food, research, clothing, entertainment, or even companionship.

Toward that end, rightists often lie about food and its safety. For example, they have repeatedly claimed that meat and eggs are intrinsically bad for humans.

Now, Australia's government agency for scientific research, CISRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organiz...

The Road to the Royal Society: The Problems That Matter, the Problems That Don't

Starting next Monday, November 7, the Royal Society (RS) will convene a three-day meeting at its London headquarters that has the potential to rival -- for historical significance -- the (in)famous 1980 Field Museum gathering on macroevolution, or the 1966 Wistar symposium on mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. Structured to include open-ended roundtable discussions, the RS meeting is premised on the view that current textbook evolutionary theory falls f...

On Texas Science Standards, a Breath of Fresh Air -- Accurate Reporting!

Zack Kopplin is a self-described "investigative journalist and activist" who specializes in slinging the scare word "creationist" around where it doesn't belong. His current article at The Daily Beast, where he writes irregularly, is a classic: "Creationism in Texas Could Go Extinct on Election Day."

ENV's Sarah Chaffee and Jonathan Witt have written to urge against "gutting" science standards in the state -- lowering the bar for students when it comes to getting a rounded, objective view o...

Take Two Aspirin and a Darwinian Just-So Story, and Call Me in the Morning

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On a new episode of ID the Future, Discovery Institute biologists Jonathan Wells and Ray Bohlin discuss the hot new topic of "Darwinian medicine."

Download the episode by clicking here:

It's now fashionable to argue that medical students need a dose of Darwinsim with their training, and patients could do with the same in consulting with their own doctors. As Dr. Wells comments, though, this doesn't really add anything and may in fact do serious harm.

For example, a Darwinian perspective w...

New Companion Website Tells the Rest of Intelligent Design's Revolutionary Story

Our new documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines doesn't tell the whole story of the ID revolution that Michael Behe launched twenty years ago with Darwin's Black Box. How could it in only an hour? That's why we're delighted today to introduce you to a companion resource, the Revolutionary website -- RevolutionaryBehe.com -- that does a fantastic job of supplementing the film.

Get your copy of Revolutionary now on DVD or Blu-ray. But don't wait to check o...

Twenty Years of "Revolutionary" Machines: The Case of ATP Synthase

It was a Eureka! moment. When Michael Behe saw that diagram of a bacterial flagellum in his biochemistry textbook, he says, "That's an outboard motor! That's designed. That's no chance assemblage of parts." Thousands of other students must have ignored the obvious, or else meekly accepted what their professors told them, that natural selection was capable of creating such things. But Dr. Behe self-admittedly has a stubborn streak that wouldn't tolerate simplistic answers. From such qualities...

This Science Educator Could Do with a Little More Science Education

Sarah Chaffee last week offered some needed instruction to Sean Illing at the website Vox, which purports to "explain the news." Illing interviewed science educator Amanda Glaze about teaching evolution in the American South, including Louisiana with its academic freedom law, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA). Illing points out a video (above) in which Dr. Glaze and other teachers in the South talk about the challenges they face in discussing biological origins.

I don't doubt their...

Return of the Blind Watchmaker

Oh, the power of metaphor. Richard Dawkins's "blind watchmaker" is back, tinkering in his workshop to make timepieces of elegant craftsmanship. Xiaojing Gao and Michael Elowitz from Caltech begin a piece in the science journal Nature like this:

Living cells keep track of time with exquisite precision, despite using molecular components that are subject to unavoidable random fluctuations, known as noise. For example, natural circadian clocks can track the time of day, even in single-celled cy...

High Tech, Low Life -- The Amazing Flagellum

As Stephen Meyer puts it in a brief video, the bacterial flagellar motor that Michael Behe spotlighted in Darwin's Black Box is a marvel of nanotechnology. Yet this miniature motor is found in some of life's humblest organism. Moving up the scale to more complex forms, obviously the wonder increases.

On the other hand, as microbiologist Scott Minnich points out here, the flagellum is so effective at doing its job that if human swimmers could move that fast, we'd be setting some crazy new Ol...

Medical Martyrdom in Switzerland

Over the last few years I have grown increasingly alarmed at the push in euthanasia circles not just to legalize assisted suicide, but to force dissenting doctors and medical institutions to be complicit in the killing, a phenomenon I have branded "medical martyrdom."

We now see that in Switzerland a Christian nursing home has been threatened with the loss of charitable tax status if administrators refuse to permit assisted suicide on the premises. From the Christian Post story:

A Christian...