Discovery Institute's Blog, page 71

What to Do if You Live in a Jurisdiction with Legalized Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia

Over at First Things, I offer some suggestions for those living in the few jurisdictions that have legalized assisted suicide/euthanasia. In brief: refuse all participation and complicity.

What would that look like? From "Declare Total Non-Cooperation with Assisted Suicide":

Do not participate in efforts to regulate medicalized killing;

Refuse to attend an assisted suicide;

Doctors should declare their offices assisted-suicide-free zones;

Mental-health professionals and clergy need to hel...

A Limit to Evolution? Where Is Their Imagination?

Why do we only see twenty amino acids in life? While there are a couple of lesser-known amino acids used (selenocysteine and pyrrolysine), those follow special pathways that don't use the genetic code. Hundreds of amino acid forms exist, yet life universally uses the same subset of twenty. Here's a contest for the explanatory power of design over evolution.

In Science Advances (the open-access publishing arm of the AAAS), evolutionists from Spain tackled this question with a new proposal: th...

Is Free Will Just "Your Brain Tricking Itself"?

The fallacy of free will denial won't die. From The Independent, with my commentary:

Free will could all be an illusion, scientists suggest after study shows choice may just be brain tricking itself

Free will might be an illusion created by our brains, scientists might have proved. Humans are convinced that they make conscious choices as they live their lives. But instead it may be that the brain just convinces itself that it made a free choice from the available options after the decision i...

Redefining Death as a "Sociological" Event

Maintaining the concept of "death" as a biological, rather than sociological, event is one of the few remaining impediments to exploiting the most weak and vulnerable among as mere natural resources.

If death can be "redefined" -- an ongoing project in bioethics -- to include the end of the subjective concept of being a "person," then the unborn -- supposedly, not yet persons -- and those who through injury or illness have lost the ability to express personhood, can be deemed dead, or perhap...

Watching The Jungle Book; Thinking About Fire-Maker

You could hardly ask for a more auspicious week for the Pacific Northwest premiere of our new short documentary, Fire-Maker: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet. It's tonight in Seattle; register here. Featuring the work and thought of our colleague, biologist Michael Denton, the film picks up on the theme of the top grossing movie out from Hollywood right now: The Jungle Book.

Both films are awesome in their different ways. Jungle Book is a remake of the classi...

Crime and Punishment, and Darwin's Theory

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The 150th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species passed into history seven years ago. In the years that followed 1859, the impact of evolutionary thinking seeped across the culture of Europe and America. It occurs to me that me that now and for years to come we'll be tracing a series of century-and-a-half anniversaries of the effects of that seepage, and reflections on it as it was happening. This year, among other things, it's the publication of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866)....

Evolution in Kindergarten: Now Brought to You by the National Science Foundation

I wrote here the other day about UK developmental psychologist Nathalia Gjersoe who supports reeducating kids as young as five years old to reject "promiscuous teleology" -- that is, the intuition that life reflects purpose and design ("Evolution in Kindergarten"). She drew on the research of Deborah Kelemen at Boston University who "published a promising, child-friendly intervention: illustrated storybooks about natural selection."

Now your taxpayer dollars will be going toward research on...

Cosmic Archaeology: Taking the Sting Out of the Drake Equation

Here's a clever way of taking the sting out the Drake equation. Frank Drake's work has previously been a stumbling block for materialist understandings of the cosmos. As Tom Bethell has explained ("The Anxious Search for Extraterrestrials"):

Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer, took it upon himself to demonstrate that life arising by chance was highly probable. By 1959, scientists could listen for signals from aliens using radio telescopes and a listening post was set up in West Virginia. Drak...

Paul Nelson and Wolf-Ekkehard L��nnig on Randomness in Natural Selection

The question of whether evolution is "random" is a perennial. Darwinists respond to the challenge, often delivered casually, by exasperatedly pointing out that the natural-selection component of evolution is hardly a matter of chance. Actually, though, as geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lnnig explains in an ID the Future podcast interview with Discovery Institute's Paul Nelson, this is not quite true:

Download the podcast by clicking here:

Everyone understands, or should understand, that the evol...

Understanding Temperature: Cold-Blooded versus Warm-Blooded Animals

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

Among the other dy...