Discovery Institute's Blog, page 473

Governor Perry Thinks Texas Schools Teach Creationism, while Texas Education Agency Stifles Even Scientific Criticism of Darwin

It has to be challenging to be a presidential candidate. After all, you are expected to dispense wisdom (or at least comments) on almost everything under the sun, and you never know what question is going to come up next. Still, some questions should be easier to anticipate than others. For example, it has become pretty typical for candidates (especially Republican ones) to be grilled at some point about their views on evolution. So Governor Rick Perry shouldn't have been surprised...

Evolution in Fact and Theory, Revisited

Around the 30th anniversary of the publication of Stephen Jay Gould's essay with a similar name, Larry Moran has reposted his essay "Evolution Is a Fact and a Theory." His article begins by blithely accepting the confused terminological protocol that uses the same word, "evolution," to describe very different things: a) the observation that life forms have changed over vast stretches of time, and b) a set of proposed observations regarding how, by what mechanisms, the forms of life...

Carry On, Jeeves

Evolution is like a really good butler or valet, who's already standing there with a favorite beverage for you just at the moment you realize you're thirsty. Whether you are a vertebrate that goes by land or by sea, in getting your food it helps a lot to have jaws and teeth. The most primitive fishes lacked jaws, so how did they get them? A report in Nature documents the curious brain structure of a jawless fish that swam in Chinese and Vietnamese seas 435-370 million years ago.

As...

Monarch Butterflies: A Natural Wonder in Crisis

One of the most endearing stories in nature is the migration of the Monarch butterfly, told beautifully in Illustra Media's newest documentary, Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, these delicate marathoners stand in jeopardy as their habitat shrinks because of human pressure.

The Monarch butterfly relies for its life cycle on the milkweed, the host plant for its eggs and caterpillars, and on the oyamel fir trees in the Trans-Volcanic Mountains of Mexico where it spends the winter. In a real sense...

How to Become a Whale

Certain Darwinian explanations remind me of a favorite Monthy Python skit, "How To Do It." As a peppy, earnestly grinning host of a mock children's TV program, John Cleese opens up:

Well, last week we showed you how to be a gynaecologist. And this week on "How to Do It" we're going to learn how to play the flute, how to split the atom, how to construct box girder bridges and how to irrigate the Sahara and make vast new areas cultivatable.

First, though, Cleese introduces Eric Idle as...

New Scientist Weighs in on the Origin of Life

This week's issue of New Scientist contains an interesting article bearing the headline "First Life: The Search for the First Replicator." As a means to circumvent the chicken-and-egg problem pertinent to the relationship of DNA and proteins, author Michael Marshall attempts to revive the fashionable (but scientifically bankrupt) scenario of an RNA world.

In brief, RNA exhibits both information-carrying capacity and catalytic activity. Arguments for the RNA world include the fact that RNA...

"Under the Banyan Tree Nothing Grows"

James Le Fanu uses that image, a South Indian proverb, to describe the way Big Science devours billions of dollars a year while the productions of this vast government industry seem startlingly and increasingly barren of significance. We've left behind the era of great discoveries of the century past -- permanently, so it seems -- and now find ourselves awash in outpourings of published research that add up, says Le Fanu, to "surprisingly little." Don't believe him? Just follow the...

"Nonsense Remains Nonsense": Oxford's John Lennox to Confront Hawking's Atheism in Seattle This Friday

Writing about atheist oracle Stephen Hawking's Discovery Channel program "Did God Create the Universe?," an episode of Curiosity, the L.A. Times reviewer candidly threw up her hands in surrender.

[Hawking's] attempts to explain how, exactly, the big bang emerged from a state of nothingness required an understanding of physics that was beyond me. "If you are not a math head," he concedes far too late in the proceedings, "this may be hard to understand." Indeed.

So, like its alternative, ...

A Source of Scientific Bias: The Fear of Boring People

The Guardian notes a source of scientific bias in brain-scan studies that applies more broadly as well:

One way of critiquing a piece of scientific research is to read the academic paper in detail, looking for flaws. But that may not be enough, if some sources of bias might exist outside it, in the wider system of science.

By now you'll be familiar with publication bias: the phenomenon where studies with boring, negative results are less likely to get written up or published.In other...

Joe Lieberman/David Klinghoffer Collaboration on the Sabbath Out Today

Today, Howard Press/Simon & Schuster publishes Senator Joe Lieberman's collaboration with Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer, a "love song" to the philosophy, pleasures and practical observance of the traditional Sabbath. The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath uses Lieberman's unique experience as a United States senator and Orthodox Jewish Sabbath observer to make the case for the Sabbath. It's not just for Jews anymore!

ENV readers will be...