Discovery Institute's Blog, page 451

A Darwinist Worries about Darwinian Rhetoric

Jack Scanlan, Australian blogger and contributor to Darwinist group blog Panda's Thumb, picks up on Casey Luskin's comments here about anti-ID rhetoric and adds an unintentionally humorous suggestion for ID critics.

Casey is currently writing a series on the rhetorical tactics of ID opponents, his bottom line being that most such critics avoid grappling with the substance of intelligent-design arguments and prefer to engage in crude insults. Casey reasonably suggests this may be...

Josh Rosenau's "Potemkin" Arguments

Earlier this year, Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) apparently felt the need to find a way to deal with the fact that Discovery Institute is funding scientific research that challenges neo-Darwinism, and is being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. (Discovery Institute has been funding such research for over a decade, so I don't know why Mr. Rosenau suddenly became so concerned about this only in 2011 when he blogged about it.) Mr. Rosenau's blog...

Rallying to Darwin's Defense: Robert J. Richards and the Historical Record

Robert J. Richards's essay "Was Hitler a Darwinian?" and part of his essay "The German Reception of Darwin's Theory, 1860-1945" attempt to refute my two book-length treatments dealing with the ideological connections between Darwinism and Nazism (From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress). In his zeal to disprove my position, the University of Chicago historian makes a number of serious...

The Uncivil Style of Intelligent Design Critics

I'm going to let ENV readers in on a little secret: When many of us in the intelligent design (ID) movement read the arguments coming from our critics, we're surprised at their low quality and style. We don't rejoice at this -- we'd much rather see a robust, civil, and fruitful scientific debate over the relevant questions. But the incivility, basic inaccuracy, and unserious tone characteristic of so many criticisms of ID all make you wonder: If the critics had stronger rebuttals to offer...

Stephen Meyer Debates Keith Fox on Premier Radio UK

During a recent visit to London, Dr. Stephen Meyer was invited to debate Keith Fox on Premier Radio UK about issues raised in Meyer's 2009 book Signature in the Cell. In the book, chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Meyer builds a compelling case for intelligent design by revealing how the digital code in DNA points powerfully to a designing intelligence behind the origin of life.

Fox, the man chosen to debate with Meyer, is professor of biochemistry at the University of...

Stand Up Now for David Coppedge's Right to Speak about Intelligent Design!

Urgent Action Required: Contact the leaders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and demand they make things right.

The Facts
According to a discrimination lawsuit filed in California Superior Court, supervisors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) illegally harassed, demoted and retaliated against computer systems administrator David Coppedge without warning after he occasionally loaned pro-intelligent design science videos to some of his colleagues. Coppedge's actions were deemed...

SETI Astronomer Says Life's "Not All That Special" Even as His Own Program Suggests Otherwise

A CNN.com video is making the rounds in which SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak hunches his eyebrows in a worldly-wise manner and shrugs off the possibility that there's anything "special" about life: "Every time we learn something new about the universe, what we learn is that our situation doesn't seem all that special. And that suggests that life is not all that special either." Reporter John Zarrella, meanwhile, is all agog about the number of supposedly Earth-like planets...

Please, NASA, No More Galileos!

In 1610, Galileo peered through his telescope and saw Saturn more clearly than any other human being before him, thus making Galileo the first to use a device to examine the ringed gas giant. For his inventive efforts to get a closer look at the heavenly body, and to thereby better understand man's place in the cosmos, Galileo came under the critical eye of the Roman Inquisition who ultimately placed him under house arrest until his death.

Four hundred years later, man is still using ...

Lynn Margulis, Acclaimed Biologist and Critic of Neo-Darwinism, RIP

Lynn Margulis, an eminent evolutionary biologist, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has died. She was 73 years old.

Dr. Margulis was well known for advancing the theory of endosymbiosis, which hypothesizes that eukaryotic cells arose when prokaryotic cells engulfed other prokaryotic cells and formed a symbiotic relationship. According to the theory, the engulfed cells ultimately evolved into cellular organelles like...

Phillip Johnson on the Scientific Nature of Opposition to Darwinian Theory

While we have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of Darwin on Trial, I was reminded of the impact that Phillip Johnson has had in shaping the debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design (ID). Johnson's work showed that there are credible criticisms of Darwinian evolution that come from a strictly scientific standpoint rather than a religious one. In fact, Johnson adamantly opposed attempts to characterize this debate as one pitting "religion vs. science." In his book Defeating...