Discovery Institute's Blog, page 46

Natural Selection Is Hard to Measure

Charles Darwin's idea that an unguided natural process led to all the beauty and diversity of the world, including its Undeniable appearance of design, guides scientific thinking to this day. But what if his signature mechanism -- natural selection -- cannot be measured? Without measurement, a theory reduces to anecdote. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences threatens to do that, at least in regard to "the evolution of human body form." The implications go far...

Canadian Bar Association Wants More Euthanasia

Once a society accepts the premise that killing is an acceptable answer to suffering, there is seemingly no upper limit to which that principle will eventually not apply.

The Canadian Supreme Court recently imposed a nationwide right to euthanasia. The government passed a bill with an extremely loose --nay, close to meaningless -- restriction that death be "foreseeable" to qualify for the lethal jab.

But that small impediment is too much for culture-of-death aficionados. Now, the Canadian Ba...

ALS Suicide Party

The normalization of suicide by the media -- in the guise of celebrating assisted suicide as autonomy -- continues. Now, as I predicted, the AP touts an assisted suicide party complete with pictures of the smiling guest of honor hours before she killed herself. From the story:

In early July, Betsy Davis emailed her closest friends and relatives to invite them to a two-day party, telling them: "These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, cen...

Embryonic Stem Cell Hype -- Was Hype

When George W. Bush put minor federal funding restrictions on embryonic stem cell research -- he funded it in the hundreds of millions during his two terms -- the media and "the scientists" screamed that he was "anti-science" and that he was destroying the "only hope" for CURES! CURES! CURES!

When supporters of Bush's policy, and opponents of embryonic stem cell research on ethical and scientific grounds countered that the better approach was focusing more on adult stem cell research -- they...

For Failing to Have a Considered Opinion on Intelligent Design, the Technical Literature Is No Longer an Excuse

The daunting details of technical literature on evolutionary biology function as a shield for evolution theory against scrutiny. An achievement of Doug Axe's new book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed is to lower that shield and permit thoughtful readers of all backgrounds to evaluate the merit of our near-universal intuition that life is designed.

In a brief video conversation, Dr. Axe explains that his purpose in writing the book was to use his own traini...

Search for a Search: Does Evolutionary Theory Help Explain Animal Navigation?

The living world is filled with searches. Moths find their mates. Bacteria find food sources. Plant roots find nutrients in the soil. Illustra's film Living Waters includes incredible examples of search: dolphins finding prey with echolocation, salmon navigating to their breeding grounds with their exceptional sense of smell, and sea turtles making their way thousands of miles to distant feeding grounds and back home again using the earth's magnetic field.

The subject of search looms large...

Use Your Brain: Scientific Controversies and Intelligence

Acknowledge scientific disagreements; explore controversy and different perspectives. Unless the subject is evolution.

In the Wall Street Journal, Steven Poole reviews Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To, by neuroscientist Dean Burnett. I have not read the book, but Poole's review mentions that it covers various controversial theories, delves into consciousness and the brain, and ultimately concludes that the brain is a simpleton.

But then in the middle of his review, Poole surprise...

Fire Season -- Contrast Evolutionary Speculations with Michael Denton's Case in Fire-Maker

It's fire season, with multiple recent studies out on how man acquired fire and the impact that had on human history. The other day here biologist Michael Denton commented on an article in Philosophical Transactions B, "The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process." Now the New York Times points out another couple of papers, in Molecular Biology and Evolution and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Writes Steph Yin in the NY Times ("Smoke, Fire and Human Evolut...

Cambrian Explosion Explained by Yeast Clumping Together

We've made sort of a hobby of collating and dissecting theories of how an explosion of complex novel life forms, the Cambrian explosion, can be explained without reference to the obvious explanation, intelligent design.

It's almost too much to keep up with:

"Cambrian Explosion Story Hour: Oxygen as a Creative Force, Again"

"Sorry, Faster Mutation Rate Will Not Explain the Cambrian Explosion"

"Geologists Kick Out Props for Evolutionary Theories of the Cambrian Explosion"

"New Solution to...

In Astronomy, the Inference to Design Is Flourishing

Astronomers of late have been studying with great interest KIC 8462852, a star observed by the space observatory Kepler.

The star, nicknamed "Tabby's star" after the astronomer who first noted its unusual behavior, has intervals of extreme occultation. Its brightness dims periodically by 20 percent, which implies that a very large object or structure orbits it. Astronomers have proposed natural explanations for the extreme periodic variation of the star's light, but the possibility that the...