Discovery Institute's Blog, page 455

Putting Human/Chimp Genome Comparisons in a Meaningful Context

Editor's Note: ENV is pleased to welcome P.J. Levi as a new contributor.

Knowing that ENV's readers include many teachers and other educators, I thought I would offer a brief teaching idea, especially for those who have their students submit papers to SafeAssign or some similar plagiarism-detection software.

I just had one of my own students email me, quite frantic that SafeAssign gave him a ~30% matching score. SafeAssign compares a student's paper to all other students' papers and the...

With a Startling Candor, Oxford Scientist Admits a Gaping Hole in Evolutionary Theory

This just in: A rather basic question fundamental to any evolutionary account of life's development -- how "genotypes generate phenotypes," in other words how genes build an individual creature -- remains totally obscure to science.

Writing in Cell Communication and Signaling, Oxford University's Jonathan B.L. Bard reviews James Shapiro's Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, and Gissis and Jablonka, eds., Transformations of Lamarckism: from Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology (MIT P...

New Film Exposes Bigotry and Junk Science of Early Twentieth-Century Darwinists

The infamous Scopes "monkey" trial is typically remembered today as a battle royal between ignorant Bible thumpers and the enlightened defenders of evolution and scientific progress. Journalist H.L. Mencken framed his narrative of the trial this way, and the didactic play and film Inherit the Wind spread the caricature to future generations.

In truth, many defenders of evolution during the Scopes trial era were anything but enlightened.

Their politically incorrect views are on...

Where the "Science-Religion" Dichotomy Came From

Many theistic evolutionists seem to think that science explains nature, while religion has nothing whatsoever to do with nature. The historian of science Frederick Gregory in his book, Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1992), explored the issue in nineteenth-century German theology and showed the heavy influence of Kantian philosophy on this development. Kant posited a distinction between the phenomenal...

The Rabbi at the Scopes Trial

Clergy people and other religious folks straining to put their faith's seal of approval on Darwin, BioLogos-style, may seem like a very contemporary sign of our own times. Actually there's nothing new about it at all.

I was looking over a collection of archival photos on the website of the interesting and effective new film Alleged, which seeks to do historical justice to the Scopes Trial in a way that the famously fictionalized Inherit the Wind does not. One photo caught my eye: Two m...

As Alan Dershowitz and the New Film Alleged Remind Us, at the Heart of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial Was a Very Scary Book

In case you're in any doubt that Inherit the Wind presents a wildly distorted (yet highly influential) fictional treatment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, check out this essay by Alan Dershowitz. It appears on the website of the new film Alleged that tells something far closer to the true story. Was the 1925 legal battle really a struggle between blinkered fundamentalist bigotry, in the form of William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, against liberal enlightenment in the form of...

How Ignorance Insulates the New Atheists

Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True is all excited that London Guardian columnist Julian Baggini appears, to Dr. Coyne, to be coming around to a view more sympathetic to the New Atheists. The New Atheists, you remember, are a group distinguishable by the way their aggressiveness in attacking religion is matched by their ignorance of the experience, philosophy, and evidence for faith. In the good old days, they would have been dismissed as village atheists, except that back then the village a...

North Carolina Faces Legacy of Forced Sterilization as Hollywood Releases New Film Alleged Dramatizing Impact of Eugenics in the South

North Carolina is all over the news this week as it deals with the shameful legacy of its eugenics program that forcibly sterilized minorities, the poor, and others well into the 1970s. Ironically, this same week Hollywood is releasing on DVD the film Alleged, a new feature-length movie that dramatizes the personal impact of forced sterilization in the American South.

The main focus of Alleged is the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1920s Tennessee, but a key subplot depicts the...

Butterfly Surveys Find Design, Not Darwin

Thousands of laypeople join scientists each year cataloguing butterflies for science. Not only is it a fun way to focus on the winged wonders around us, it is important for long-term tracking of various species. Some recent articles showed what is being learned in surveys in different parts of the world. Unsurprisingly, Darwin usually has little to do with it.

The Scotland edition of the BBC News had a story on September 15 about Scotland's annual "Big Butterfly Count" with more than 3...

Evolution Is a Movie Running Backward

Kenneth Ford, in Basic Physics (Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1968), writes:

Imagine a motion picture of any scene of ordinary life run backward. You might watch...a pair of mangled automobiles undergoing instantaneous repair as they back apart. Or a dead rabbit rising to scamper backward into the woods as a crushed bullet re-forms and flies backward into a rifle.... Or something as simple as a cup of coffee on a table gradually becoming warmer as it draws heat from its cooler surroundings. All...