Discovery Institute's Blog, page 468

The False Dichotomy Between Intelligent Design and Natural Causes

Intelligent Design and the Origin of Information: A Response to Dennis Venema

In this article, Part 4, we:• Explain why ID doesn't say God can't use natural causes
• Correct Dr. Venema's misunderstanding that ID creates a "dichotomy" that disallows God from using natural causes
• Understand why theistic naturalism's assumption that God must use natural causes hinders inquiry
• Investigate why ID adopts the motto "let's follow the evidence where it leads"
Other Installments:• Part 1:

National Center for Science Education Defends Its Association with James Fetzer, Peddler of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories

This gets stranger and stranger. The other day I called on the NCSE, the nation's most prominent Darwin-lobbying group, to assure us it has implemented a new policy discouraging staff from engaging in public partnerships, on the evolution issue, with nasty, swamp-dwelling characters like Jim Fetzer. This all arose because NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch co-edited a controversial special number of an academic journal with Fetzer.

He and Fetzer have made defending their editing job a...

Peer-Review and the Corruption of Science

The Guardian features an interesting opinion column by the renowned British pharmacologist David Colquhoun. The article bears the intriguing headline, "Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science." The author laments that "Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed."

Colquhoun explains,

The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a...

At National Review TV, Berlinski on Sidney Hook and the Challenge of Recognizing God's Handiwork

In the final installment of Peter Robinson's interview with David Berlinski for National Review Online TV, Robinson asks Berlinski to react to a comment by Sidney Hook. Someone had asked Hook what he'll say if, when he dies, he finds that counter to his belief when still alive, there's a God after all waiting to greet him. Why had he not recognized God's existence before? Hook answered, "I'd tell God that he had provided insufficient evidence."

Recalling his fond memories of Hook...

Butterfly Mimicry Still a Challenge for Evolution

Earlier this year, Casey Luskin wrote that butterfly mimicry is a "huge" problem for evolutionary biology. Has anything changed since then? No. A new study published in Nature takes just one baby step beyond "preliminary" in providing a genetic basis for this wonder of the living world.

A glimpse of the problem is found in the paper. The first figure shows seven species of Melinaea, a genus of butterflies in Peru, and seven morphotypes of Heliconius numata, a "distantly related genus" ...

In Case You Didn't Think the Whole "Denying Science" Meme Had Descended to the Level of Self-Parody

Science said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice -- on evolution, on catastrophic, human-induced global warming, and on raw milk.

That's right, raw milk, and Food Safety News has the inside scoop on "Raw Milk to Evolution: Americans Disregard Science." Pulitzer Prize-winning (I kid you not) former Seattle Times reporter Ross Anderson has the exposé:

Whatever their politics, these raw milk devotees are at odds with the...

Strange Bedfellows at the National Center for Science Education

People who trade in contentious ideas, advocating and defending them before the public, are well advised to be careful about what kind of other people they join with in partnership. The other day I mentioned briefly the interesting datum that National Center for Science Education Deputy Director Glenn Branch had co-edited a now notorious issue of Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals" with a leading 9/11 Truther, University of Minnesota professor emeritus James H. Fetzer.

I hadn't...

What Is a Proper Test of Intelligent Design?

The very first line of Dennis Venema's first post in his "Evolution and the Origin of Biological Information" series states: "One prominent antievolutionary argument put forward by the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM) is that significant amounts of biological information cannot be created through evolutionary mechanisms -- processes such as random mutation and natural selection." (emphasis added)

While Dr. Venema accurately described this common intelligent design (ID) argument...

Why Did One Theistic Evolutionist Part Ways with BioLogos?

A couple months ago, self-described theistic evolutionist Jon Garvey became disillusioned with BioLogos's tone and approach. Specifically, the British physician and blogger was concerned about cited BioLogos's treatment of Stephen Meyer and his award-winning book Signature in the Cell. In explaining his reasons for leaving the BioLogos camp, Dr. Garvey wrote:

What struck me in all this was that every single contribution contained at least some degree of ad hominem attack, and most...

A Good Question from Michael Denton About the Fixity of Animal Body Plans

Biochemist Michael Denton (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe) was in our offices this week and he casually posed a question that I, for one, had never considered. Hundreds of millions of years ago, all these animal body plans became fixed. They stayed as they were and still are so today.

Before that -- I'm putting this my way, so if I get anything wrong blame me -- of course they had been, under Darwinian...