Discovery Institute's Blog, page 45

Butterflies, Birds, Sea Turtles, and Whales -- News from the Design of Life

Research on the stars of the Design of Life films continues to reveal marvels beyond the reach of unguided processes.

Butterflies

Metamorphosis, one of the Design of Life films from our friends at Illustra, shows butterflies finding their host plants with extreme precision, utilizing multiple sensory modalities to ensure that the eggs would be laid on the right food source for the caterpillars. Now, researchers have added leaf shape to the list of cues, Phys.org says. Observations of the red...

Can a Determinist Change the World?

G.K. Chesterton told an amusing story of a young man who wrote to him extolling the truth of solipsism. The young man believed it was the only rational viewpoint he could take, and he wondered why it wasn't a more popular viewpoint.

Witless self-refutation is amusing. Which brings us to a post by determinist and free will-denier Jerry Coyne, who writes:

Our behaviors are solely and uniquely decided by our genes and our environments, and nothing else. [I]f you returned to the "original situat...

Students, Scientism, and Straw Men

At the NPR website, Barbara King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, recently addressed Ken Ham's Ark Encounter, stating that we could use more "explicit pushback to anti-science creationist discourse" ("There's No Controversy: Let's Stop Failing Our Children on Evolution"). She recommends that readers speak to local school boards and media, educate their children on evolution at home, and ask politicians about their views on origins. Deluged with comments and emails, King...

When You Don't Have Time to Think: Reflexes

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.

It is our muscles,...

New Precambrian Embryos Are Equivocal at Best

Precambrian embryos? Old news. Paleontologists have been looking at them for over a decade, yet the Cambrian explosion remains one of the strongest empirical challenges against Darwin's theory. A new paper tries to show that some of them were "possibly" embryos of metazoan animals that emerged long before the explosion, thereby lengthening the time during which evolution could have worked its magic.

In Darwin's Doubt, Stephen Meyer pointed to the embryos as evidence against the "artifact hy...

A Sense of Balance: Understanding the Vestibular Apparatus

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.

Everyone knows tha...

Artificial Intelligence and the Language Barrier

If you have a few free minutes, try, for fun, filling them with Google Translate. And you need not be multilingual to enjoy it. Start with something straightforward: Enter an English phrase or sentence (idioms bring particular pleasure). Click a language, say, Spanish, and then "translate." Copy and paste the translated results over your original English phrase, reverse both languages (so that, in this example, Spanish is now where you begin and English is where you end), and again click "tr...

Putting Words to the Universal Design Intuition

The silliest objection yet to the argument in Doug Axe's new book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, is that he's saying because we share an intuition of design, therefore the intuition has merit. Of course not. Many intuitions are flat-out wrong. With others, though, as Dr. Axe explains here, you can put words to them, spell out their logic, and that logic turns out to be compelling -- in this case, valid and confirmed by science.

"Putting words to it" i...

Teleology and the Mind

Modern materialists reject both teleology in nature and (implicitly or explicitly) the existence of the mind as a power distinct from matter (in which they understand matter as quantity extended in space). This rejection, which is a profound error, has an interesting history.

Perhaps the turning point in modern philosophy of science was the abandonment of teleology by Francis Bacon in 1620 in his book Novum Organum Scientiarum. Bacon advocated the abandonment of Aristotelian teleological an...

Thank You for Sharing Our 20th Anniversary and the World Premiere of Revolutionary!

Friday night we marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture. It was a convivial event on a lovely warm Seattle evening before an eager standing-room-only crowd, sprinkled with old friends and new acquaintances, ID scientists and our generous supporters. Thank you to all who joined us and of course to CSC staff and fellows. You all made this possible!

The whole affair was characterized by a true sense of celebration, of how far we've come...