Discovery Institute's Blog, page 500

NASA's JPL Could Face Wrongful Termination Suit For Firing Darwin Doubter

According to the Pasadena Star News: A computer administrator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was laid off last week plans to add retaliation charges - and a possible free speech violation claim - to a pending discrimination suit against his former employer, an attorney said Wednesday.

You can read the full PSN story here.

Please call (preferably) or at least email Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator, to express your outrage at the fact that Coppedge was fired. Here's the...

Evolutionary Psychology and Darwinism as an Idée Fixe

We need to remind ourselves from time to time that Darwinism is more than a scientific idea, and more than the seed of a social philosophy or worldview. It's also a prime example of the kind of rigid thinking -- the idée fixe or fixed idea -- that bedevils seemingly unrelated fields having to do with diet, therapy, advice, and self-help, with results that are sometimes comic, sometimes more unfortunate than that.

A fixed idea is one that, for the believer, applies everywhere and to...

Information Runs The Show -- The Understatement of the Century!

An interesting paper published in Nature by Evgenia et al. documents the ability of the DNA double helix to exist in a functional alternative form for 1% of the time, called an "excited state." What does this mean for neo-Darwinism?

What is particularly remarkable is that the base-pairs present in these alternative forms show the ability to break apart and come together again to form stable structures which are non-characteristic of Watson-Crick base-pairing (called "Hoogsteen base...

Front-Loading and Theistic Evolution

In this clip, Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Signature In The Cell, discusses the proposal of some theistic evolutionists that all of God's design of the world must have been "front-loaded" at the beginning of the universe. This is based on his essay in "God & Evolution Protestants, Catholics and Jews Explore Darwin's Challenge to Faith".

Homochirality: The Truth Is Out Where?

When it comes to origin of life scenarios, the only way to explain the emergence of life from purely naturalistic premises is that life, and all of its necessary components, arose by chance, or by natural laws or by some combination of both.

Whether life arose in a "warm little pond" or in heat vents or in ice crystals, origin of life scenarios must rely only on chance and natural laws (chemical and physical properties) to explain seemingly impossible phenomenon, such as how DNA...

Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist and Darwin-doubter, Has Expertise Vindicated

Novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov had "furious" Darwin-doubts, so he himself forthrightly said. Back in the 1940s Nabokov was the de facto curator's of Harvard's butterfly collection, writing widely in scientific journals before he became better known for novels like Pnin, Pale Fire, and Lolita. How delightful that his scientific insight and expertise have now been impressively demonstrated, as the New York Times reports.

The article doesn't mention Nabokov's doubt -- or rather, his ...

"But Tantalus, are you saying there are individuals who have more humanity than others?!"

Tantalus Prime and I have had a discussion about the moral status of abortion and the scientific status of the human embryo (shorthand for human zygote/embryo/fetus).

Tantalus has expended quite a bit of effort to deny that human embryos are human beings. My recent post pointed out the absurdity of asserting that human embryos are anything but human beings. And I asked Tantalus this question:

What is a human embryo?

My question is a scientific question, not a moral question (yet). The a...

Thomism Plus Darwinism Is Not Thomism

Indeed, one could argue that Thomism + Darwinism = 0, given how completely the core propositions of the Darwinian worldview stand in opposition to classical Thomism.

Today is the Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Catholic Church.

Thus it's a fitting moment to ask if currently influential readings of Thomas's arguments -- in the writings, for instance, of the Catholic philosopher Ed Feser -- really fit with the entire corpus of Thomas's thought. Does interpreting ...

Protest David Coppedge's Persecution, Direct to NASA!

Every so often there'll be a media story revealing some gross abuse of public resources by government personnel: say, management at a given federal agency who are using a startling percentage of their government work time to look at Internet pornography on government computers -- that sort of thing. Everyone gets outraged for a day then we forget all about it.

The ultimate government resource, much more so than time or computers, is power, especially the power to coerce and punish. So ...

A Fishy Story About AntiFreeze Gene Evolution

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to explain the origin of an antifreeze protein in an Antarctic fish. Though touted by Darwinian activists, this paper presents little more than a just-so story that shows no interest in testing the plausibility of the complex mutational account it gives.

The Darwinian blogosphere is excited about a new study which purports to explain the evolutionary origins of an antifreeze gene in an Antarctic fish, the Antarctic ...