Discovery Institute's Blog, page 454

When the End Comes for Darwinism...

It will come, to begin with -- in fact maybe it's already coming -- in cautious, hedging statements like Raymond Tallis's Wall Street Journal essay assailing reductionist "biologism." Writes Tallis:

The world of academe is currently in the grip of a strange and worrying epidemic of biologism, which has also captured the popular imagination. Scientists, philosophers and quite a few toilers in the humanities believe -- and would have the rest of us believe -- that nothing fundamental separates...

Still Clueless at the Clergy Letter Project

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Michael Zimmerman of the Darwin-lobbying Clergy Letter Project takes to Huffington Post again to demonstrate that his collective of gullible clergy men and women -- or anyway their spokesman -- doesn't understand the debate he seeks to influence or the players in it. In this, Zimmerman succeeds wonderfully.

In a previous HuffPost article he tried to attack Discovery Institute and intelligent design on several imaginary fronts, for being "fundamentalist," for seeking to redefine...

About Those Odd Patterns in the Chinese Desert

New Scientist has the story but do you notice how they attribute the phenomenon to what in another context would be called "intelligent design"? Any real scientist would see that these patterns, while seemingly giving evidence of purposeful design, in fact are the product of chance and necessity alone which fully account for their coming into existence and being picked up by Google Earth:

If you like puzzling over the meaning of the Nazca lines in southern Peru, crop circles in...

Darwinian Theory Explained

Well, actually the video is titled "Global Warming Panic Explained" but anyone with an ounce of video-editing savvy could take about 2 seconds and redub the dialogue, merely changing "Global Warming" to "Natural Selection" or "the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis" as appropriate. Very funny. Enjoy.

No Positive Selection, No Darwin: A New Non-Darwinian Mechanism for the Origin of Adaptive Phenotypes

A new study (Hughes 2011) in the Nature Publishing Group journal Heredity proposes a new non-Darwinian mechanism for the origin of adaptive phenotypes. Its author, Austin L. Hughes of the University of South Carolina, pioneered statistical methods for detecting positive selection at the molecular level with geneticist Masatoshi Nei (Hughes & Nei 1988). He later had the hubris in 2007 to question the majority of inferences to positive selection based on those methods (Hughes 2007)...

New Website Celebrates Darwin on Trial in Its 20th Anniversary

There's a really nice looking new 20th Anniversary edition of Phillip Johnson's seminal ID text out from InterVarsity Press. Reading or rereading Darwin on Trial is the most fitting way to honor the book that, more than any other, is responsible for lighting the fire that became the modern scientific critique of neo-Darwinism with its matched scientific alternative to evolutionary orthodoxy: intelligent design. But don't stop there. We also announce the launch of a rich new website

Phillip Johnson Reflects on Darwin on Trial Anniversary

At Touchstone magazine, Phil Johnson himself, ID's godfather, recalls some of the history that began twenty years ago with the publication of his path-breaking book Darwin on Trial. As he notes, arguably the most important contribution the book made was a philosophical one, providing a fresh and scientifically valid way of framing the debate of evolution. Because of that accomplishment, the controversy around Darwinian evolution has born his intellectual imprint ever since.

My first step in...

Time Flies: Darwin on Trial Twenty Years Later

It launched the modern intelligent-design movement. Had it never been published in 1991, you wouldn't be reading this news site right now. Even liberal reviewers -- such as Publishers Weekly -- were forced to concede the power of its argument, with PW commenting that "This cogent, succinct inquiry cuts like a knife through neo-Darwinist assumptions." It's Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial and we celebrate its twentieth anniversary this coming week.

You Can Now Watch the Craig-Dawkins Non-Debate

That is, last month's entertaining and enlightening event at Oxford's Sheldonian Theater on the question "Is God a Delusion?", a debate from which Dawkins notoriously excused himself by citing concerns about innocent Canaanites having been slaughtered some 3000 years ago. Theologian William Lane Craig showed up anyway and discussed the cosmological and other arguments for God's existence with three Oxford academics. Craig is an intellectual steamroller so you can see why Dawkins...

The Religion Behind SETI

Our friend Tom Bethell has a forceful article in the current American Spectator reflecting on the "hostility to the movement called intelligent design" and identifying the religious impulse behind it, an impulse that also generates the faith that somewhere out there there must be ETs:

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has gone on for more than 50 years. In 1960 Frank Drake, a Cornell University astronomer, cobbled together the Drake Equation, supposedly quantifying the...