Discovery Institute's Blog, page 64

Killing Harambe -- An Intelligent Design Perspective

Over the Memorial Day holiday, zookeepers in Cincinnati made the correct decision to shoot and kill a gorilla, Harambe, to protect a little boy who had fallen into the animal's enclosure. The same weekend, my family was spending a night vacationing in Vancouver. When we first stepped into our hotel rooms, the thing I immediately noticed was the 17th-floor balcony, totally unprotected but for a flimsy railing. Our twins love to climb, and pay little heed to personal safety. It's a parent's ni...

Shared Errors: An Open Letter to BioLogos on the Genetic Evidence, Cont.

In recent articles (here, here and here) I have reviewed BioLogos Fellow Dennis Venema's articles (here, here and here) which claimed that (1) the genomes of different species are what we would expect if they evolved, and (2) in particular the human genome is compelling evidence for evolution.

Venema makes several confident claims that the scientific evidence strongly supports evolution. But as I pointed out Venema did not reckon with an enormous body of contradictory evidence. It was diffi...

Here's What Happens When You Eliminate Science's Spiritual Foundations

John Zmirak at The Stream nails it in comments on our colleague Richard Weikart's book The Death of Humanity. As Zmirak observes, science depends on certain "pre-philosophic" axioms, having to do with the universe and its underlying transcendent "rational structure," that derive not from science but from elsewhere:

None of these assertions about reality were the fruit of intellectuals brooding about the nature of the universe. Instead, they are the lessons the Jewish people took from God's r...

Foundational Question: Is Intelligent Design Science?

Editor's note: Mr. Laufmann is a consultant in the growing field of Enterprise Architecture, dealing with the design of very large, very complex, composite information systems that are orchestrated to perform specified tasks in demanding environments.

It's long been said that the path to the right answers lies in asking the right questions. Better questions tend to yield better answers. Not-so-good questions may yield little, or even hide the answers. Some questions illuminate, others obfusc...

Can Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously?

Stephen L. Talbott, a senior researcher at the Nature Institute in Ghent, New York, recently published online a fascinating article titled "Can Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously?" (The short answer is, not really.)

I first became acquainted with Talbott's work by reading some articles by him in The New Atlantis a few years ago. Talbott argued convincingly that living things cannot be adequately understood as combinations of machine-like mechanisms, nor are they controlled by g...

Harambe the Gorilla, RIP

I had hoped to avoid comment on the killing of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. But I keep getting asked.

Those who says it is not a close call are correct. However, I think a bit more needs to be written:

The Sturm und Drang over the gorilla's death is a disturbing sign of our emotionally driven times, in which feeling counts so much more than thinking, and many seem to value animal life as highly as -- or higher than -- they do human life.

The life of a child was infinitely more v...

Human Chromosome Two: An Open Letter to BioLogos on the Genetic Evidence, Cont.

In previous articles (here and here) I reviewed BioLogos Fellow Dennis Venema's articles (here, here and here) which claimed that the genomes of different species are what we would expect if they evolved, and in particular the human genome is compelling evidence for evolution.

The claim that the empirical evidence powerfully confirms evolution is an objective claim that can be evaluated in the common language of science. There is no excuse why people holding even opposing views on origins c...

Squid Teeth and Reasons for Repetition

Do squid have teeth? No, but inside the suckers on their tentacles are the next best thing: proteins with tough, crystalline properties. Intrigued by the toughness and flexibility of these "squid ring teeth" (SRTs), scientists at Penn State tried to imitate them.

They programmed bacteria to generate sequences of amino acids similar to the proteins in SRTs. What they discovered and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a story of design imitating design.

Jung et...

Atheist Endows Chair for Study of Atheism; Look What He's Got Cradled in His Hands

Theistic evolutionists are at pains to assure everyone that evolutionary thinking -- the idea that all life arose by an unguided process of blind churning -- poses no challenge to theism. Well, see this from the New York Times about an atheist businesman who's endowed a chair for the study of atheism at the University of Miami:

The chair has been established after years of discussion with a $2.2 million donation from Louis J. Appignani, a retired businessman and former president and chairman...

The Naked Ape: An Open Letter to BioLogos on the Genetic Evidence, Cont.

In a previous article I reviewed BioLogos Fellow Dennis Venema's articles (here and here) which claimed that the genomes of different species are what we would expect if they evolved. For instance, allied species have similar genomes, and genetic features fall into evolution's common descent pattern. I argued that this claim is inaccurate and that the scientific evidence tells a very different message.

In a later article Venema focused his claim on the specific case of human evolution, and t...