Discovery Institute's Blog, page 490

When Atheists Attack (Each Other)

The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats.

On the other side, so-called...

When Enzymes Don't Lie

New research published in Bio-Complexity calls into question some fundamental assumptions of neo-Darwinian theory and enzyme evolution.

Enzymes are proteins that catalyze reactions that are necessary for life. Enzymes play such a fundamental role in life that many researchers are interested in how they originated and how they have evolved. They are composed of amino acids, a string of chemicals with specific properties, and these amino acids then fold to form a protein structure that l...

Primate Phylogenetics Researchers Swinging from Tree to Tree

A recent article on ScienceDaily, titled "A New Evolutionary History of Primates," claims that by combining genetic data from 54 genes (totalling 34,927 base pairs) from a variety of primates, researchers have created "[a] robust new phylogenetic tree" which "resolves many long-standing issues in primate taxonomy." That sounds great--until you read the fine print. The paper used dozens of genes or "large-scale sequencing" to create the phylogeny--a method which is designed to smooth over...

Diluting the News, or Why You Should Be Careful When Reading The Associated Press

This weekend the Pope's Easter vigil message made headlines as he gave his Easter Vigil homily on creation (which Bruce Chapman expounds upon here). What's worth noting in the news coverage is how different agencies reported and framed the Pope's comments.

Zenit, the official news agency of the Catholic Church, gives a direct and thorough account of Benedict's remarks:

"The world is a product of the Word," Benedict XVI stated, "of the Logos, as St. John expresses it. [...] 'Logos' means...

Et tu, Pseudogenes? Another Type of "Junk" DNA Betrays Darwinian Predictions

Evolutionists have long cited pseudogenes as a type of "junk" DNA that demonstrates an unguided evolutionary origin of the genome. Richard Dawkins typifies this view:

Genomes are littered with nonfunctional pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing, while their functional cousins (the word doesn't even need scare quotes) get on with their business in a different part of the same genome. And there's lots more DNA that doesn't even deserve the name pseudogene. It...

The New Evangelism: Michael Dowd's Evolutionary Christianity

BACKGROUND

Who is Michael Dowd? He calls himself an evangelist. Not surprisingly, he can be found in churches preaching. But Dowd's gospel is not one where sin is rebellion against God, but rejection of Darwin.

Likewise, salvation doesn't come from Jesus on a Roman crucifix, but merely embracing the emergent Universe. Thus, we should Thank God for Evolution, the title of his 2008 magnus opus. Subtitled "The Marriage of Science and Religion," the popular book-endorsed by no less than ...

Catholics and Intelligent Design, Part Three

This is the third in a series responding to certain Catholic critics of intelligent design. In the previous installment, we examined the various meanings of the word "mechanism," and the ways in which nature's teleology is immanent and extrinsic. In this installment, we ponder whether ID ought to be considered "teleo-mechanistic" in its assumptions and implications. We also discuss the ways in which ID is really a tertium quid that should not be simply identified either with Aristotelianism o...

NCSE Tries to Blacklist Synthese for Upholding Civility (Updated)

In January, we reported on the condescending, sneer-filled, inaccurate, and simplistic and outdated articles critical of intelligent design (ID) published in an early 2011 issue of Synthese. Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) was apparently largely responsible for organization the issue, which explains its attack on ID. As explained here, articles in the issue made comments like:

comparing ID to "an irrational set of beliefs" or "rational pathologies"

The CSC Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design Could Change Your Life

It's a familiar scene -- a classroom full of students, most in their early twenties, their fingers flying over laptop keyboards as a lecture races on. Their agile minds soak in the dense material presented by an engagingly brilliant Ph. D. -- but this is like nothing they teach in college.

This is the CSC Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, an intensive study program for college juniors, seniors and graduate students interested in ID. In just nine days, students from around the world...

Is the Human Genome Garbage? Biologist Jonathan Wells Says No in New Book, The Myth of Junk DNA

Forty years ago scientists discovered that more than 95% of our DNA does not encode proteins. Since then the non-protein-coding portion was labeled "junk" and attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.

Now, biologist Jonathan Wells exposes The Myth of Junk DNA (Discovery Institute Press 2011) and shows that contrary to being just evolutionary flotsam and jetsam, much of our non-protein-coding DNA performs essential biological functions. Wells, author o...