Discovery Institute's Blog, page 480

Stephen Meyer on the Heuristic Benefits of Intelligent Design

PZ Myers Replies With Incendiary Rhetoric Instead of Scientific Arguments

We're a little past midway through my series responding to PZ Myers on evolution and embryology, and PZ has already posted a short reply. Unsurprisingly, PZ's reply is full of his typical name-calling . He writes that my recent article is "embarrassing," a "cacophany of inanity," and "stupid." In case you didn't get the message, PZ closes his post saying, "Go back to third grade, Casey. You are a very silly, ignorant fellow."

I'm not angry at PZ for how he's treating me. Rather, I find it ...

Darwinian Evolution: A Scientific Pip-Squeak in a Suit of Cultural Armor

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), leading contributor to the evolutionary "New Synthesis" during the 1930s, once declared, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of [neo-Darwinian] evolution." Richard Dawkins has called Darwin's theory of evolution "the most powerful idea ever." Indeed, for Dawkins, On the Origin of Species "gave biology its guiding principle, a governing law that helps the rest make sense." Of Darwin himself David Quammen has said, "Work was his opiate, and...

Of Hen's Teeth and Neutral Mutations

Evolutionists often cite an experiment which purportedly induced tooth growth in chickens, supposedly confirming that birds have genes for teeth and are descended from toothed reptilian ancestors. For example, in his book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Stephen Jay Gould discusses this experiment, and suggests that "we are seeing, in part, the actual form of a latent bird's tooth--the potential structure that chick epithelium has encoded for sixty million years but has not expressed in the...

Fewer Mutations Means More Time

Evolutionary theory incorporates several ideas: Adaptation to the environment, speciation, random mutations coupled with natural selection, and common ancestry. ID addresses the part of evolutionary theory that asserts mutations coupled with natural selection result in novel traits, and through this mechanism life, once it emerged, then formed the diverse biological structures that we see today. ID argues that biological structures are designed with an end in mind and cannot be the...

Less Mutations Means More Time

Evolutionary theory incorporates several ideas: Adaptation to the environment, speciation, random mutations coupled with natural selection, and common ancestry. ID addresses the part of evolutionary theory that assumes mutations coupled with natural selection results in novel traits, and through this mechanism life, once it emerged, then formed the diverse biological structures that we see today. ID assumes that biological structures are designed with the end in mind and therefore...

What the Collapse of the Case against Strauss-Kahn Suggests about the Darwin Debate

This isn't a space where we normally report on stories like the sudden collapse of the rape case against Dominque Strauss-Kahn. But Bret Stephens's commentary in the Wall Street Journal struck an unexpected chord, relevant to the issues we do cover here at ENV.

Just after Strauss-Kahn was taken into police custody on charges of sexually assaulting a chambermaid at a luxury Manhattan hotel, our friend Ben Stein, writing on the American Spectator website, raised the possibility that DSK might...

Caught in Contradictions, PZ Myers Claims "Evolutionary Theory Predicts Differences as well as Similarities" (and Therefore Predicts Nothing) (Updated)

In the second point of my recent article, "Demystifying the PZ Myers' Arguments over Evolutionary Embryology," I noted that PZ Myers cites both differences and similarities between vertebrate embryos as evidence for common ancestry. To elaborate, when addressing PZ Myers at the recent Glasgow Skeptics event, undergraduate student Jonathan M. explained that there are many differences between the early stages of vertebrate embryos, and that these differences dispute claims that early...

Caught in Contradictions, PZ Myers Claims "Evolutionary Theory Predicts Differences as well as Similarities" (and Therefore Predicts Nothing)

In the second point of my recent article, "Demystifying the PZ Myers' Arguments over Evolutionary Embryology," I noted that PZ Myers cites both differences and similarities between vertebrate embryos as evidence for common ancestry. To elaborate, when addressing PZ Myers at the recent Glasgow Skeptics event, undergraduate student Jonathan M. explained that there are many differences between the early stages of vertebrate embryos, and that these differences dispute claims that early...

Michael Denton on the Collapse of the Darwinian Paradigm and the Coming Revolution