Discovery Institute's Blog, page 458

ENV Accused of Spanking Darwinist Lady

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Faye Flam thinks Evolution News & Views has "spanked" her ("I Get Spanked by Creationists for Accepting Reality and being a 'Darwinist'"). Ms. Flam, if we had in fact spanked you, you would know it. So what's she referring to?

Richard Weikart's article yesterday taking issue with Ms. Flam's previous column on Hitler and Darwinism. Professor Weikart argues -- unarguably, we'd say -- that a consistent stance of Darwinian materialism leaves no room for positing...

Bishops' Committee on Doctrine Responds to Elizabeth Johnson Book and Says Some ID-Relevant Stuff Too

Most readers will be blissfully unaware of the Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. I read one of her books year ago -- in Protestant seminary of course. However, she recently came into conflict with the U.S. Bishops' committee on doctrine regarding her book Quest for the Living God. They raised objections several months ago, and had her submit a response which is called "Observations." Having carefully considered her book and her attempted clarifications (read: obfuscations)...

Stylus's Evolutionary Simulation Aims to Bridge Gap Between Real World and Artificial

In 2008, Biologic Institute director Doug Axe co-published an article in PloS One describing Stylus, a computer program created to simulate Darwinian evolution. Many computer simulations that purport to simulate Darwinian evolution have deficiencies: Pro-ID scientists like William Dembski or Robert Marks have shown how programs smuggle in information such that they are pre-directed to evolve their targets. Axe's work demonstrates that such programs typically evolve solutions to...

Here There Be Dragons: The Journalists' War on Science

Republicans reject science, they make war on it, they hate it, they spit on it, they want to repeal the 20th Century. Actually they want to roll back the 20th, 19th, and 18th Centuries. How many times have you heard this from a journalistic opinion-maker? Katrina vanden Heuvel sounds the refrain again in a Washington Post op-ed:

The 18th century was defined, in many ways, by the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement based on the idea that reason, rational discourse and the...

Can Darwinists Condemn Hitler and Remain Consistent with Their Darwinism?

When the Philadelphia Inquirer's science writer Faye Flam interviewed me recently for her article "Severing the Link Between Darwin and Nazism," she pressed me to discuss the implications of the Darwinism-Nazism connection that my scholarship has explored (especially in my two books, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress). I threw down the gauntlet to many of my Darwinian opponents by telling h...

Junk-of-the-Gaps Argument Shrinks Again

Jonathan Wells's book The Myth of Junk DNA has reduced defenders of the Junk DNA thesis to making "junk of the gaps" arguments, hoping that some of the DNA we don't yet understand will turn out to be useless evolutionary garbage after all. But with the direction that research is trending, as we discover more and more functions for non-coding DNA, the gaps keep getting smaller and smaller.

Back in July, we saw that multiple new papers have reported functions for "junk" DNA, including...

Darwinian Logic: The Latest on Chimp and Human DNA

Protein-coding regions of DNA in chimps and humans are remarkably similar -- 98%, by many estimates -- and this similarity has been used as evidence that the two species are descended from a common ancestor. Yet chimps and humans are very different anatomically and behaviorally, and even thirty years ago some biologists were speculating that those differences might be due to non-protein-coding regions, which make up about 98% of chimp and human DNA. (In other words, the 98...

National Center for Science Education Heavily Promotes Darwinist Bullying in New Documentary

Joshua Rosenau of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education read my article here on a documentary the NCSE has been promoting, No Dinosaurs in Heaven, and wrote me a series of overheated letters of protest. He wanted to let me know that my "libelous screed," "defamatory claims" and "baseless accusations" about the film and NCSE's relationship to it were "demonstrably false" requiring prompt withdrawal. Josh went on to quote Virgil's Aeneid that rumors of the kind I am...

On Protein Evolution, PZ Myers Is Way Off the Mark

PZ Myers's latest salvos on protein evolution (here and here) are way off the mark. Of course his attacks are written in his usual insulting style. That's not interesting. What is interesting is how he misrepresents our work, uses faulty logic, and fails to engage our arguments. I know that anything I write here is unlikely to persuade him. So this isn't written for PZ. But there may be other readers with open minds who are paying attention.

PZ begins by expounding on the supposed failings...

A New Voice in the Debate Over Evolution and Intelligent Design

There is literally a new voice in the debate over evolution and intelligent design. If you're a regular listener to the Center for Science & Culture's very popular and thrice weekly podcast, ID The Future, you have probably come to recognize familiar personalities, like ENV's Casey Luskin. (If you're not yet a listener, then you should be.) Now you will be hearing more often from radio broadcaster David Boze of Seattle's KTTH.

Boze is a Pacific Northwest native, born and raised in Washington S...