Discovery Institute's Blog, page 75

Forests Use an Underground Supply Network

It was a big surprise. Scientists at the University of Basel report an unexpected finding: trees in the woods -- even unrelated species -- trade large amounts of carbon with each other. How? They communicate through an even more unrelated organism: fungi.

Forest trees use carbon not only for themselves; they also trade large quantities of it with their neighbours. Botanists from the University of Basel report this in the journal Science. The extensive carbon trade among trees -- even among d...

Science as Astrology: A Gene for, or Rather Against, Virginity?

As a kid we used to look forward to visits to the International House of Pancakes, where the highlights included not just pancakes but, just inside the entrance to the restaurant, a device like a gumball machine that dispensed horoscopes. For 25 the Starscroll device offered little scrolls the size of a cigarette, color-coded to the month and your sign. Scorpio was always orange.

The scroll, more detailed than what you'd find in a daily newspaper, included general prognostication and advice...

Richard Weikart on the Revealing Inconsistencies of Scientific Materialism

Historian Richard Weikart's new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, is an important study of the erosion of the most basic values in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West. Many things are striking about Weikart's powerful treatment of his subject, but I noted, in particular, his discussion of some statements from atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. These statements have a curious, persistent, and revealing inconsistency to them.

Here is Weikart, for example, on a 2007 int...

William A. Wilson on the "Cult of Science"

In First Things, William A. Wilson has what may be the most trenchant takedown of the "Science Says" mentality that I've come across. It's a long and fearless essay. Seeing it all put together in one place as Wilson does is liberating.

He utterly disenchants the popular, cult-like notion that science, any field of it -- from physics to psychology and everything in between -- is simply a distributor of objective truth, to be trusted implicitly. The reality is that scientists are built from th...

Haarsma's Pykaryotes -- Another Failed Evolution Simulation

Loren Haarsma is a member of the physics faculty at Calvin College. If his name sounds familiar that may be because he is the husband of BioLogos president Deborah Haarsma. Writing in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Dr. Haarsma recently published a paper with an intriguing title, "Simulating evolution of protein complexes through gene duplication and co-option." In the paper he presents a model of evolution name Pykaryotes. The name is a play on the Python programming language and prokar...

Thyroid Function: When Real Numbers Don't Add Up

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.

By only considerin...

Evolution in Kindergarten

Writing in The Guardian, developmental psychologist Nathalia Gjersoe laments, "Although it is part of the compulsory science curriculum in most schools in the UK and the USA, more than a third of people in both countries reject the theory of evolution outright or believe that it is guided by a supreme being." Her solution is simple.

According to developmental psychologists, children have an intuitive bent toward intelligent design. Thus schools should begin evolution education at younger age...

Now It's Bill Nye the "Jailing Science Skeptics as War Criminals" Guy

Absurd habits of thinking can collapse on themselves, suddenly, like the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century. Something like that is bound to happen with the current madness about sexual and racial identity. Watch this (above) -- it's quite funny. College students at the University of Washington seem ready to entertain the idea that a thirty-something 5'9" white guy may in fact be a seven-year-old 6'5" Chinese woman.

That, I'm convinced, is going to go the way of the Dutch tulip bulb. Not...

A Monarch-Like Wonder from Mountains Down Under

There's a little gray moth in Australia that does something extraordinary. Like the Monarch butterfly of North America, it migrates over long distances. Unlike the Monarch, it flies at night. And it doesn't even need to.

Current Biology describes this dull-colored little wonder, called the Bogong moth, as the "nocturnal counterpart of the migratory Monarch butterfly." Its summer home is as amazing as the mountain forests of Mexico where the Monarchs were discovered.

If you ever have the chan...

Is the Market for Articles that Ask "Is Intelligent Design Dead?" Dead?

Evidently not, because atheists and theistic evolutionists keep pumping them out, as they've done for ten years now since the Dover decision. Yet all these numerous funeral processions later, here we still are.

Here's a partial list of contributions:

"Is Intelligent Design Dead?" (American Policy Roundtable 2006)

"Is Intelligent Design Dead?" (Annals of Spacetime 2007)

"Intelligent Design is Dead! Long Live Creationism?" (Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly 2007)

"Twenty years after Darwin on Tria...