Discovery Institute's Blog, page 31

Fairy Circles? The Design Inference at Work

From time to time we point out illustrations of how scientists outside the ID movement use the design inference, demonstrating how natural and pervasive design reasoning is. Everyone, scientist or layman, uses such reasoning. It's both valid, when correctly applied, and inescapable.

In Undeniable, Douglas Axe talks about the "common science" that even children engage in, employing what he calls a "universal design intuition" with which we are all born. Axe is careful not to take this too far...

Darwin Under the Microscope

Editor's note: The following was published in the New York Times on October 29, 1996. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of biochemist Michael Behe's pathbreaking book Darwin's Black Box and the release of the new documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines, we are highlighting some of Behe's "greatest hits." Remember to get your copy of Revolutionary now!

Pope John Paul II's statement last week that evolution is "more than just a theory" is old news to...

Hitler's Religion? Evolutionary Pantheism

That says it about as briefly as possible. Ahead of the release next month of our Discovery Institute colleague Richard Weikart's new book Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich, Dr. Weikart spoke with PJ Media's Tyler O'Neil about his thesis.

The book debunks the triad of misconceptions that Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, or an occultist. Instead, he identified a higher power with nature and its laws, especially the law of evolutionary struggle. It's an exce...

Fact-Check: Inside Higher Ed Misrepresents Eric Hedin at Ball State University (Again)

In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty makes the same harmful, erroneous statements about physicist Eric Hedin that she did back in May in a piece on Hedin's earning tenure.

She writes:

Scientists aren't always hostile to creationist colleagues -- Ball State University granted tenure earlier this year to Eric Hedin, a professor of physics previously accused of proselytizing creationism in a science seminar, for example.

Hedin was not "proselytizing." Neither was he prom...

Fact Check: Inside Higher Ed Misrepresents Eric Hedin at Ball State University (Again)

In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty makes the same harmful, erroneous statements about physicist Eric Hedin that she did back in May in a piece on Hedin's earning tenure.

She writes:

Scientists aren't always hostile to creationist colleagues -- Ball State University granted tenure earlier this year to Eric Hedin, a professor of physics previously accused of proselytizing creationism in a science seminar, for example.

Hedin was not "proselytizing." Neither was he prom...

Listen: Bruce Buff, Human Exceptionalism, and the Gift of Storytelling

Tom Wolfe and Michael Denton emphasize speech as a unique gift underlining the exceptional status of homo sapiens in nature. It's also an endowment that is inexplicable on Darwinian evolutionary terms. An embellishment of our ability to speak is the gift of storytelling: not merely recounting stories but drawing them from your own head. Inventing fiction, writing a novel, is truly creation ex nihilo. And where is the gene for that?

In a new ID the Future episode, Sarah Chaffee chats with nov...

As Behe's Revolution Reminds Us, the Evolution Debate Pits Icon Versus Icon

Presidential elections dramatically pit figures iconic of their respective political and philosophical outlooks. The hardly less dramatic contest between intelligent design and Darwinian theory, posing the ultimate question of biological origins, likewise often seems to come to down to a match between icons -- in this case, classes of scientific evidence.

The full trailer for the new hour-long documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines highlights one catego...

Many Disease Genes are Sheep in Wolves' Clothing

Everyone has heard about genetic mutations causing serious disease. Finding one in your genome was like getting a death sentence. Recently, however, geneticists have been surprised that many people with these mutations don't ever get sick.

You're probably among them. "Lurking in the genes of the average person are about 54 mutations that look as if they should sicken or even kill their bearer," says Erica Check Hayden in Nature. "But they don't." [Emphasis added.] And therein lies a scienti...

Michael Behe and Revolutionary: The Truth Will Out!

Biologist Michael Behe is the star of the new documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines which goes on sale today. The film tells the hitherto largely untold story of how Behe wandered (and wondered) his way into intelligent design, how his work ignited a furor in the scientific community, was subsequently vindicated, and where the ID revolution is headed today.

See the trailer here:

Dr. Behe spoke to packed auditoriums twice in the Dallas-Forth Worth are...

More on That Gecko Anti-Design Claim

David Klinghoffer responded earlier to a Science Daily article where evolutionists from U.C. Riverside said that their findings about a certain species of gecko "serve as good evidence against intelligent design ideas." The toes of this gecko, they say, are not as advanced as those on tokay geckos. Therefore, they must have evolved by gradualistic Darwinism. We argued that simpler tools, like screwdrivers, are not evidence that they and more complex tools, like power drills, originated by un...