Discovery Institute's Blog, page 494

Jerry Coyne's Blacklist of ID Scientists

Prominent evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne recently has made this remarkable assertion:

... adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.

Notwithstanding Coyne's absolute assertion that scientists who "adhere" to ID are unemployable, Coyne actually claims that his professional exclusion of scientists who endorse ID is not anti-religious bigotry:

...I abhor discrimination against hiring simply...

What Intelligent Design Offers to Agnostics

Intelligent design has as much to offer to the unbeliever or the unorthodox searcher as to the confirmed traditional believer. It might even have more. Does that surprise you?

Could it be a trend, with critics of intelligent design and others outside the familiar world of ID's friends and advocates at last realizing that ID isn't merely NOT the same thing as creationism? More than that, a couple have noted lately, intelligent design isn't necessarily even theistic.

At Panda's Thumb...

Science Article Acknowledges Convergent Similarity Is "Contrary to Expectations" of Neo-Darwinism

A new paper in the journal Science titled "Homoplasy: From Detecting Pattern to Determining Process and Mechanism of Evolution" admits that it is "contrary to expectations" of evolutionary thinking that "similarity evolves in unrelated taxa." A Physorg article about the paper explains that there are two types of homoplasy: "Parallelism/convergence homoplasy occurs when the same trait is present in two lineages that lack a recent common ancestor. Reversal homoplasy occurs when a trait is...

"Junk DNA" and the Molecular Basis of Cell Identity

An interesting research article was published in Nature this week [Wang, K. C., Y. W. Yang, et al. (2011). "A long noncoding RNA maintains active chromatin to coordinate homeotic gene expression." Nature].

In the study, a fascinating new regulatory role is identified for long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). Once thought to be "junk," or functionless vestiges of once-protein-coding-genes which have, through the course of evolutionary history, mutated to a state of non-functionality, the r...

Does New Scientific Evidence About the Origin of Life Put an End to Darwinian Evolution?

How did life begin? Where did the first cell come from? Questions that have plagued scientists for centuries remain unanswered today, but recent scientific discoveries are leading modern scientists to explore the theory of intelligent design as a better explanation for the complexity of life and the universe.

In four television episodes of the John Ankerberg Show broadcast across the US and over 200 nations worldwide, Dr. John Ankerberg interviewed Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of the ...

Lauri Lebo's Amnesia

I first came to know Lauri Lebo when she was a local reporter for the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania, for which she covered the now infamous Kitzmiller v. Dover court case. Lauri was not the absolutely worst reporter I have encountered, but it was pretty clear what side of the controversy she was rooting for. She certainly was not a disinterested observer. Although most of our conversations were at least civil, I still remember one that turned into a shouting match after she repeatedly...

Review of Saving Leonardo

We often focus on individual issues: The latest headline on faith in science in public schools, the latest research paper on biological systems, or the latest book on evolutionary theory. We live in a world of fast-paced news and sound bites. How often do we step back and think about why these issues are in the news?

Why is there a debate over intelligent design and Darwinism? Why are people more passionate about how some scientific theories are taught and not others? And perhaps, an e...

Jerry Coyne: "...adherence to ID... should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor."

Commenting on proposed state laws to protect scientists from discrimination, University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne sums up the Darwinist approach to academic freedom:

"... I abhor discrimination against hiring simply because of someone's religion, but adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor." (emphasis mine)

Actually, Coyne has no problem with discrimination against a scientist...

The Universe Is Haunted: Reflections on the "Nature of Nature"

In the history of modern propaganda with its technique of the Big Lie, it's hard to think of a brazen untruth more successful in shaping opinion than the one that equates intelligent design with Christian fundamentalist creationism. Almost as influential is the related lie that there is no serious scientific controversy over Darwinism, that main support pillar of contemporary materialist or naturalist doctrine.

Anyone who's still unclear on either of these points should take a moment a...

Craig Venter's Typo Shows Poor Design is Still Design

Forbes.com is reporting that Craig Venter's "synthetic" bacterial chromosome contains a "genetic typo."

Molecular biology has ascribed a letter to each amino acid. Venter and his team imported DNA sequences into the chromosome--called watermarks--that coded for amino acids which 'spelled out' sentences in the chromosome. But they got one sentence wrong. As the article reports:

The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, "What I cannot build, I cannot...