Discovery Institute's Blog, page 41

There's Quality Control Even in the Cell's Trash Pickup

Construction workers get more respect than cleanup crews, but both are equally important. Imagine if all the debris from building your house never got hauled away. You could probably not walk anywhere without stepping over piles of junk. Cells, too, have masterful architects, busily constructing proteins and other molecules from ingredients imported through the cell membrane. The waste products, though, could quickly crowd out the productive workers. Worse, some of the waste is toxic, requir...

Solar Eclipse: By Design or "Happy Celestial Circumstance"?

Speaking of fire and intelligent design, our colleague Sarah Chaffee had an excellent post the other day on the upcoming solar eclipse. When the sun's fire is blocked by the shade of the moon, it's not only an awesome visual spectacle. It is also a reminder of the rare privileged nature of our planet, seemingly designed for scientific discovery.

This caught the attention of the estimable Eric Metaxas, who devotes a BreakPoint commentary to the subject. He reminds us of the role of an eclipse...

Now on YouTube, the "Honest Wow" of Michael Denton and Fire-Maker

Yesterday we released the monograph Fire-Maker by Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton and, today, the 21-minute YouTube documentary of the same name, written and directed by John West and focusing on Denton's research:

Of course books and films do different things, which is why you need both. The book, while brief, goes into more detail on the science, but the documentary couldn't be more accessible. It's truly for all audiences, revealing how our planet and anatomy are "uniquely f...

Genetic Similarities Between Fins and Limbs -- Evidence for Evolution, Maybe, but Not for Darwinism

In a recent New York Times article, Carl Zimmer described new research from Neil Shubin's lab at the University of Chicago on the developmental genetics of fish fins. He rightly points out that the work reveals (or more properly confirms, as previous evo-devo work points in very much the same direction) that very deep similarities exist between the development of fins and limbs. This is not surprising. It has been acknowledged since the time of Richard Owen, 160 years ago, that the lateral a...

Darwin's Doubt, Signature in the Cell Will Be Audiobooks; Hear the Prologue to Darwin's Doubt Now!

It's official! HarperOne will soon move into production on audiobook versions of Stephen Meyer's Darwin's Doubt: The Explosion of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. Judging by the number of queries we've received over the past few years about audio versions of these books, this is bound to make a lot of people happy!

And why not? Portable devices of all shapes and sizes are ubiquitous, as listening to book...

How the Body Deals with Gravity

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

Our muscles, under...

The Human Cost of Animal Rights Fanaticism

If you have had any surgery, drug, or other medical treatment developed in the last fifty years, you can thank animal researchers for making it possible.

Animal research is required to obtain basic biological knowledge. It is also a crucial human rights issue, required by the Nuremberg Code as a protector of human research subjects

It is necessary for the safety of human research subjects. Many a human being has been saved from harm because a drug or procedure harmed or killed animals, forci...

New Book by Michael Denton, Fire-Maker, Is the Perfect Companion to Tom Wolfe's Kingdom of Speech

Fire-making and spoken language are the two artifacts of human culture that, more than any other, have made civilization possible. Charles Darwin himself recognized this, calling fire "Probably the greatest [discovery], excepting language, ever made by man."

Speech, as Tom Wolfe explains in his brief, wonderful book The Kingdom of Speech, makes thought possible -- abstract thought in particular, as Michael Egnor reminds us. Fire, as Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton shows in any...

Intelligent Design, from Cicero to Kant

Lest anyone think that discussion of what Doug Axe calls the universal design intuition dates back only as far as the modern ID movement, James Gallant supplies some relevant historical references ("Modernity and metaphysics"). He writes in The Fortnightly Review: The New Series -- a quaint and scholarly blog attempting to revive the famous 19th-century English magazine. The publication is rather what you would expect of several hoary-haired professors sitting around in overstuffed leather c...

Jerry Coyne Ain't Huggin' Mother Teresa's Grave

Today, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. The Albanian nun, who died in 1997, founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation of five thousand sisters (and affiliated brothers) devoted to caring for the sick and dying poor. She was known in Calcutta as the "Saint of the Gutters" because she and her sisters would scour the roadsides in and around Calcutta for destitute people who were ill or dying, bring them to a home, and provide food, c...