Discovery Institute's Blog, page 461

Fact-Checking Wikipedia on Common Descent: The Evidence from Comparative Anatomy

In my previous article, I presented a critique of the first of Wikipedia's eight lines of evidence for common descent: the evidence from comparative physiology and biochemistry. In this article, I will discuss the second of those lines of argument, namely, the evidence from comparative anatomy.

Atavisms

Wikipedia's first subheading regarding the evidence from comparative anatomy is "Atavisms." What is an atavism? Wikipedia explains:

An atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits...

The Caterpillars Who Came to Dinner (and Lunch and Breakfast): An Interview with Lad Allen, Director of Metamorphosis

In film, it's the final cut that counts. Crazy things can go on outside the viewfinder as long as the finished product looks good. Nobody knows that better than director Lad Allen, producer at Illustra Media.

While filming his latest documentary, Metamorphosis, he faced some challenges that tested his patience, but ended up being extremely rewarding. We asked him to describe some of those behind-the-scenes adventures.

Kin Selection Goes to Kindergarten

By kin selection I mean the evolution of characteristics which favour the survival of close relatives of the affected individual, by processes which do not require any discontinuities in the population breeding...

Textbooks Cherry-Pick the Evidence for Evolution

In presenting their case for evolution, the textbooks reviewed in our 2011 textbook report, "An Evaluation of 22 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution," repeatedly cherry-pick the data to support evolution. There are more examples of this than I could possibly ever hope to have time or space to discuss here on ENV. The report details many such examples, but this article will highlight just a few of the many distressing instances where textbooks overstate or...

California Science Center (You Remember Them) Gets Space Shuttle Endeavor

Ah yes, the CSC which had to shell out $110,000 to settle a First Amendment viewpoint-discrimination lawsuit over the Center's canceling a screening of Darwin's Dilemma at their state-run facility. Launched in 1992 and retired this past June, Endeavor flew 25 missions for a total of 122,883,151 miles or 4,671 orbits around the earth. Now the CSC has taken ownership of Endeavor and will permanently exhbit the craft. Good for them. Maybe it will help those fine folks hone their appreciation of ...

Corticosteroid Receptors in Vertebrates: Luck or Design?

An important new paper came out recently that supports claims made by intelligent design scientists. Mike Behe has already addressed this paper here at ENV, but because its implications are so important I want to draw them out further, and make the connections with intelligent-design research explicit.

Doug Axe and I published a paper this year in which we examined how many mutations are required to convert the function of one enzyme to that of another. The two enzymes are structurally very...

Darwinian Dogmatism Permeates Recent Biology Textbooks

Part of our updated 2011 textbook review, "An Evaluation of 22 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution," looked at interesting comments in textbooks that didn't fit under classical "icons" categories. Here I'd like to review some of these comments as they further illustrate the inaccurate and biased treatment of evolution in many textbooks.

Faux Critical Thinking Exercises

Many textbooks surveyed contained what I would call "faux-critical thinking exercises,...

(Not) Making the Grade: An Evaluation of 22 Recent Biology Textbooks and Their Use of Selected Icons of Evolution

In his 2000 book Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells reviewed ten then-current biology textbooks for their treatment of what Dr. Wells calls the "icons" of evolution, well-known lines of evidence commonly used to support evolution. (Wells's 2000 textbook review can be found online, here.) Now, in 2011, we present an updated 2011 textbook review that applies Wells's evaluation criteria to 22 recent biology textbooks, all published since 2005. The full report can be read here.

This...

Climate Change and White Males: The Growing Scientific Consensus

In case you'd noticed that conservative white males disproportionately doubt global warming and wondered what's wrong with them, Scientific American explains it all to you. Citing a new study, SciAm clarifies: "Conservative white males' motivation to ignore a certain risk -- the risk of climate change in this case -- ...has to do with defending the status of their identity tied to the white male establishment."

Makes sense, right? No, it's not a parody!

But while we're on the subject, here's a...

Dante on the "Angelic Butterfly"

We open the new e-book from Discovery Institute Press, Metamorphosis: The Case for Intelligent Design in a Chrysalis, with a citation from a 1923 poem by Vladimir Nabokov: "We are the caterpillars of angels." Nabokov himself was a fierce Darwin doubter, as I discuss in Chapter 8 of the book. (Download it, a FREE companion to the Illustra documentary Metamorphosis, here.)

As an epigraph that little verse is a winner for the additional reason that, apart from the suggestion of design that a...