Discovery Institute's Blog, page 77

Keeping Cool, Warming Up: Appreciating the Body's Temperature Control System

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.

As I showed in the...

In the NY Times, Primatologist Frans de Waal Takes a Swing at Human Exceptionalism

Science, properly understood, is a method of obtaining knowledge. But it isn't as simple as that. The way it is approached often reflects the biases and ideology of the scientist. Sometimes a scientists knows what she wants to discover, and by golly, goes right ahead and finds just that.

I've noticed for years that many life scientists -- for example, the novelist (as I call her) Jane Goodall -- seem zealously bent on disproving the exceptional status of human beings. In this they are aided...

Human Language: Noam Chomsky, Universal Grammar, and Natural Selection

Editor's note: In his new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton not only updates the argument from his groundbreaking Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) but also presents a powerful new critique of Darwinian evolution. This article is one in a series in which Dr. Denton summarizes some of the most important points of the new book. For the full story, get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. For a limited time, you'll enjoy a 30 percent discount at CreateSpac...

Another Problem Bacteria Have to Worry About, and How They Solve It Effectively

In 1665, the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens put two pendulum clocks next to each other. To his surprise, after half an hour or so, they started swinging in sync (actually, anti-sync, in opposite directions). No matter where he put them, or how off-sync they started, it happened over and over. This phenomenon, called phase locking, has been confirmed in many different situations, including heart cells that twitch together, fireflies that fire together, and moons that synchronize their spi...

In Regenerative Medicine, Another Very Hopeful Adult Stem Cell Success

Myasthenia gravis is a serious neuromuscular disease that causes progressive disability. Now, MedPage Today reports on an early human study showing success in beating it into remission:

In patients with persistent severe myasthenia gravis (MG), replacing their old lymphocytes with new ones generated by their own stem cells achieved long-term remission without further treatment, a retrospective cohort study showed.

All seven patients in the study achieved complete, durable, stable remission -...

Good News for Summer Seminar Students -- We Are Extending the Application Deadline Through April 14

Just before yesterday's deadline, we had a rush of applications for Discovery Institute's Summer Seminars on intelligent design. Inference to the best explanation? Awareness of this fantastic opportunity was cresting as we were preparing to close the application process.

Being sticklers about the cutoff date would likely mean arbitrarily excluding some interesting students. Our students in previous years have been very interesting, and this year's look to be no less so. This is where the ne...

Darwinism, the Meaninglessness of Life, and of Death

In a video on YouTube, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne states that science has demonstrated that

the universe and life are pointless....Pointless in the sense that there is no externally imposed purpose or point in the universe. As atheists this is something that is manifestly true to us. We make our own meaning and purpose.

He went on:

Evolution is the greatest killer of belief that has ever happened on this planet because it showed that some of the best evidence...

Still Hiding from a Fight, Darwin Defender Uses ID-Friendly Writer as a Human Shield

Atheist biologist P.Z. Myers writes:

Uh-oh. I've disappointed David Klinghoffer. I should probably put that on my CV.

Yes, please do so.

Regarding my post commenting on his refusal to come to blows with Stephen Meyer himself on the matter of Richard Dawkins's argument with Meyer, P.Z. writes:

So everything in [David's] reply was false, and he failed to address one single point in my criticism of ID. I think I know who's running away from substance here.

He thinks I've "disavowed" writer Tom...

Somebody to Loathe -- Eugenics at Harvard

It's a clich that loathing other people is something we do to prop up our own sagging sense of self-worth. Sometimes that's true, but other times not. A candid and interesting article in Harvard Magazine makes clear that not long ago, the vilest eugenic thinking was a phenomenon at the very uppermost levels of the American elite. I doubt there was any deficit of self-esteem among the men chronicled by Adam S. Cohen in "Harvard's Eugenics Era."

Cohen traces the craze for "racial purity" vers...

More on Randomness in Natural Selection and Evolution

A common objection to neo-Darwinian evolution highlights the fact that the theory is based to a large extent on chance events, or chance in general. For decades now there has been an extraordinary volume of grim polemics against that objection. I wrote about this here last week in the context of a dispute between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Meyer. To my earlier comments, I would add the following.

Huxley stated in 1962, p. 44:

The frequent assertion that biological evolution is based on chan...