Discovery Institute's Blog, page 477

What's Morality? Don't Ask This Darwinian Philosopher

In the Chronicle of Higher Education today, philosopher Michael Ruse concludes:

The scientific claim is that morality is natural. It is an adaptation produced by natural selection to make us good cooperators.

Yet the "morality" that Ruse describes, and thinks he explains, has little to do with what just about every person actually thinks morality is. According to Ruse, moral beliefs are emotional sentiments that get us to cooperate in kin-survival-enhancing ways. Practically no one who has...

John Lennox Takes On Stephen Hawking in Seattle, Friday, August 19

Is it just me or does the way the media make use of Stephen Hawking descend further by the month to new levels of cornball shtick? Look at this preview of "Did God Create the Universe?", starring Dr. Hawking, that will air on the Discovery Channel (no relation) this Sunday.

I doubt anyone at the Discovery Channel could explain to you Hawking's actual (and of course formidable) scholarly contributions to theoretical physics or cosmology. Nor, I would assume, will viewers come away from ...

Reviewing a Law Review: A Darwin Defending Law Professor Seeks New Ways to Censor Skeptics

[Editor's Note: The following article was co-written by a Discovery Institute Legal Intern and Discovery Institute Staff.]

Associate Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law Louis J. Virelli looks for new legal arguments to squelch freedom of speech on evolution in public schools in his article, "Judging Darwin: Understanding the new Distributive Model of Evolution Instruction," recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Virelli s...

Stephen Meyer Gives the Positive Case for Intelligent Design

The Glory Beyond: David Berlinski's Elementary Mathematics

A video circulating on the Internet tries to show why atheism, compared to theism, is the smart opinion to adopt. The videographer presents his case by stringing together fifty distinguished scientists and philosophers in a series of interviews, all giving their assent to the view that the entirety of existence may be explained in reductive materialist terms. You're supposed to be impressed not by the wisdom of anything that's said -- because no one says anything memorably wise -...

Stephen Meyer on Michael Behe's Irreducible Complexity and the Bacterial Flagellum

William Dembski vs. Princeton Biologist Lee Silver

Princeton biologist Lee Silver, whose ideas on eugenics were promoted by Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, debated intelligent design with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow and mathematician William Dembski at Princeton in 2005:

How Butterfly Wings Display Brilliant Colors

Ever wonder how butterflies flash brilliant colors from their wings? It's not done with pigment. Instead, butterflies use a trick of light that sounds like something out of Star Trek: "photonic crystals."

Photonic crystals are precise arrangements of geometrical patterns at microscopic scales.
On butterfly wings, these patterns might be bumps, holes, ridges, hexagonal arrays or other shapes, often in 3-D arrangements. The shapes are spaced very close to the wavelengths of light i...

The Professor and the Madman

While the establishment media look to fundamentalist Christianity and various right-wing sources to explain the ideology of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, they have completely ignored his virulent scientific fundamentalism and Social Darwinism, including a far-ranging proposal for a revival of eugenics inspired by Princeton University evolutionary biologist Lee Silver.

In his 1518-page "European Declaration of Independence," Breivik reveals himself as an unapologetic ...

Fundamentalist Christian or Deranged Social Darwinist?

Since the horrific acts perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway last week, the newsmedia have been scrambling to uncover the worldview of Mr. Breivik. After initially speculating (wrongly) that the Oslo bombing and subsequent youth camp massacre were committed by a radical Muslim, establishment media outlets like CNN sought to depict Breivik as "a right-wing Christian fundamentalist." Think Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson with a machine gun.

Except, it now turns out, Breivik really...