Discovery Institute's Blog, page 470

Intelligent Design Discrimination Lawsuit Wasn't the First Time California Science Center Paid Money to Avoid a Trial over Misconduct

We've devoted considerable commentary here to the recent settlement of an intelligent design (ID) discrimination lawsuit against the state-run California Science Center (CSC). However, it's worth bearing in mind that this was not the first court case arising from CSC's misconduct that ended up settling. Last year, the CSC settled a separate (though related) lawsuit filed by Discovery Institute. That was after CSC violated California's Public Records Act in refusing to turn over...

Ends and Means: More on Meyer and Nelson in BIO-Complexity

Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson recently published a paper in the journal BIO-Complexity addressing the findings of Yarus et al. that there may be a chemical connection between nucleotides and amino acids after all.

ENV has already noted and commented on Nelson and Meyer's article, providing background on the DRT model that the Yarus group proposes. (See Ann Gauger's article and Jonathan M's article.) There is more to say, however, about this important paper.

Meyer and Nelson assess...

A Misguided Attempt to Critique Intelligent Design: A Response to John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One

This weekend I'm giving a presentation on the scientific evidence for intelligent design (ID) at a conference in Chicago where the keynote speaker is the BioLogos-affiliated Old Testament scholar John Walton. On the plane flight here, I decided to read Walton's book The Lost World of Genesis One (InterVarsity, 2009), which aims to convince readers that the best way to interpret Genesis 1 is to assume it carries no meaningful scientific implications for the modern reader. As I'm not...

A Misguided Attempt to Critique Intelligent Design: A Response John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One

This weekend I'm giving a presentation on the scientific evidence for intelligent design (ID) at a conference in Chicago where the keynote speaker is the BioLogos-affiliated Old Testament scholar John Walton. On the plane flight here, I decided to read Walton's book The Lost World of Genesis One (InterVarsity, 2009), a book that aims to convince readers that the best way to interpret Genesis 1 is to assume it carries no meaningful scientific implications for the modern reader. As...

At HuffPost, Rabbi Boteach on Evolution and Atheism®

At Huffington Post, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has a pretty strong piece asking "Does Questioning Evolution Make You Anti-Science?" He recalls being the campus rabbi at Oxford University and hosting debates on religion and science pitting, for example, Dawkins against our David Berlinski. Boteach sums up:

What I learned from these debates, as well as reading extensively on evolution, is that evolutionists have a tough time defending the theory when challenged in open dialogue. Indeed...

On Climate Change, Shades of Sternberg

Just in case you were thinking that ID is the only subject on which Big Science tolerates no dissent, the editor-in-chief of Remoting Sensing has just resigned. His crime? Allowing a seminal article by Roy Spencer and William Braswell to be published. Shades of Sternberg. The paper has gotten a good bit of media attention, for an obvious reason: they show that one of the feedbacks that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been treating as a positive feedback is really a n...

Darwingate: What You Get When the Los Angeles Times "Covers" a Cover-Up

A free and independent press? Not quite. Our national media do not always operate at arms-length from state-backed science, as the California Science Center (CSC) affair has demonstrated.

As you probably know by now, in 2009 the state-run CSC cancelled a contract with the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) to screen a pro-ID documentary, Darwin's Dilemma, triggering a lawsuit over unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That lawsuit was recently settled. By the terms of the settlement ...

You Never Know What Will Prove to be Controversial

I gave a talk last night to a Jewish group here in Seattle about my current book, a collaboration with Joe Lieberman, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath. Before I spoke, the organizer implored me not to say anything "controversial."

A reasonable request -- where's the advantage to her and her organization in alienating people? I hadn't planned on saying anything remotely combustible anyway. Though you never can tell! Who would ever expect, for instance, that...

Nation's Leading Science Magazine Covers $110,000 Settlement in Intelligent Design Lawsuit

And unlike some other prestige media sources that have covered the story, Science, the journal in question, gets the story right, mostly. Particularly telling is the cited opinion from our Darwin-lobbying friends at the National Center for Science Education:

Steven Newton, a paleontologist at National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an Oakland, California-based nonprofit organization that monitors creationism activities, disputes [Casey] Luskin's characterization of the...

Can't Live Without 'Em: The Logic and Implications of "Essential" Genes

In a classic scene near the end of Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg buys the Henrietta, the steamship on which he is racing across the Atlantic. His first order as new owner is to tell the captain, "Have the interior seats, frames, and bunks pulled down, and burn them" -- all this to maintain pressure in the ship's boiler. Over the next two days, everything else nonessential and flammable on the Henrietta is fed into the boiler, until the ship is "only a flat...