Discovery Institute's Blog, page 7
January 30, 2017
Academic Freedom Legislation: Understanding South Dakota's SB 55
South Dakota's SB 55, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Monroe, just passed the Senate.
The text of SB 55 reads:
No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to �� 13-3-48.
The Argus-Leader has been covering the bill's journey -- in a fairly evenhanded way. Several of...
Darwin's Corrosive Idea: The Case of Stephen Matheson
Our recent report of survey data, "Darwin's Corrosive Idea," by CSC associate director John West, documents the impact of materialist ideas about origins on religious faith, as well as on ethics and the belief in human uniqueness. The report is meticulous, objective, and highly detailed. A painful personal story that came to my attention may serve as an illustration of the phenomena Dr. West reports.
Biologist Stephen Matheson is a longtime critic of the theory of intelligent design. His ext...
January 29, 2017
Inside the Cell: DNA as a Library
On a new episode of ID the Future, biologist and CSC Senior Fellow Ann Gauger talks with Sarah Chaffee about the library of the cell: DNA. She draws a thought-provoking analogy to a famed institution in our nation's capital.
Download the episode by clicking here:
If you've ever been to the Library of Congress, you know it's a very special place, not like the local branch of the county library in your neighborhood. In fact, it's the world's largest. The result of James Madison's vision and...
January 28, 2017
How Big Is Evolution's Closet?
When a theory repeatedly fails its fundamental predictions, and is unable to explain even the basic facts, well, there is bound to be doubt.
No evolutionist who has ever peered into a microscope can look in the mirror and maintain self-respect. So I wasn't too surprised when a friend told me that all across the country, life science professors "have told me in private they have questions about evolution," and he keeps their identities secret.
One wonders: How big is the closet?
Photo credi...
January 27, 2017
Sea Anemone Is a Proverbial "Precambrian Rabbit"
When asked what evidence would disprove evolution, the famous 20th-century evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane is famously said to have responded, "a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian." In other words, a fossil rabbit would have to be found in strata dating to long before rabbits, or mammals for that matter, are normally found.
And by "long," we mean somewhere between roughly one-half a billion years to several billion years. It was an exercise in what philosophers refer to as theory protectionism --...
January 26, 2017
Event: In Billings, MT, Paul Nelson Will Speak on Intelligent Design and Scientific Freedom
This weekend, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Paul Nelson travels to Billings, Montana, to speak on "Intelligent Design, Evolution, and the Future of Free and Open Science." His venue is the Big Sky Worldview Forum, to be held Friday and Saturday, January 27-28.
Dr. Nelson has subdivided his theme into four parts:
Design as the Only Reasonable Explanation for Biology
The Metamorphosis Paradox and the Unsolved Problem of Macroevolution
Minimal Complexity as the Key Clue to the Origin o...
The Spike Code: Another Information-Rich Signaling System in Neurons
It's time for another paradigm change. "These findings suggest that a fundamental assumption of current theories of motor coding requires revision," as the Abstract of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes. Neuroscientists from Emory University have uncovered another coded signaling system, this time in nerves and muscles. The paper's categories include "Computational Neuroscience" and "Information Theory."
Neurons and muscles have a strong relationship...
January 25, 2017
Theory of Evolution? Call It a "Narrative" Instead
The whole business about "fake news" misses a point that's relevant to considering how questions of biological origins are handled in professional science literature. Nate Silver edits the political site FiveThirtyEight, but the political context of his remark is irrelevant. He tweets:
6. A story can be 100% factually accurate (narrowly true) and yet basically be BS. Many stories driven by "the narrative" have this problem.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 21, 2017
My read as a science...
Compare Nature's Sublime Art to Man's
Science News throws out some striking figures:
Have you ever felt weighed down by your material possessions? The boundless variety of stuff that humans manufacture -- tractors, buildings, ballpoint pens, Hello Kitty backpacks -- has serious heft: 30 trillion metric tons, a new study estimates. That's about 50 kilograms for every square meter of Earth's surface.
The human-made "technosphere," all the manufactured goods around today, surpasses the natural biosphere in mass and variety, geologi...
January 24, 2017
In Cabinet Confirmation Hearings, Science Is a Tool of Political Harassment
In confirmation hearings for Tom Price, nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, New Jersey senator Bob Menendez wielded "science" as a tool of partisan harassment. Watch the video at the Huffington Post. In rapid-fire queries intended to taint Dr. Price, a Georgia congressman and respected orthopedic surgeon, Senator Menendez threw out a series of oddball science claims and demanded that Price reject each in turn.
Swerving from purported leprosy-bearing illegal immigra...
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