Discovery Institute's Blog, page 8

Evolution as Carpenter: Scientist Concludes Repetitive Elements "Are an Important Toolkit"

I'm not an expert carpenter, but if I know what needs to be built I'll eventually get there. It may not be beautiful, but given a blueprint I can build a structure.

What if I didn't have that blueprint, though? What if I had no idea what needed to be built -- no notion of where the task was headed? Furthermore, what if I had no knowledge of structures in general. Just randomly cutting wood and pounding nails probably would not end well. This is the elephant in the room for evolution, for ac...

From Genome to Body Plan: A Mystery

Decoding genomes has been one of the most important advances of the last sixty years, but it's really just a start of a far larger mystery: the mystery of development. You can appreciate the magnitude of the problem in Illustra's animation of a chick embryo in "Embryonic Development" from Flight: The Genius of Birds. An even more majestic depiction closer to home takes you from the moment of conception to the birth of a baby in this animation by RenderingCG. How does a linear genome produce...

Darwin's Doubt Is Now in a New Chinese Edition!

ID's march around the globe continues. A simplified Chinese translation of Stephen Meyer's bestseller Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design () is now available, published through Chongqing Publishing House by arrangement with HarperOne. This edition includes the beautiful full-color photo insert of fossils from China and Canada! We have physical copies in the office, and they look very handsome.

Or get the classic English-language edition now...

Machine Intimacy Would Take the Evolutionary Mindset to Its Logical Outcome

There are some inflection points, cultural and life bends, that, when you encounter them, should make you pause and reassess the landscape. Marriage is one. So is having your first child. Entering and leaving college is another. And, now, the media's contemplation of the possibility of having sex with robots.

Christine Ro at The Week, for one, opines on the impending development and chalks up the negative reaction to unjustified Luddite concerns by "sexbot haters." She sees a spectrum of beh...

"Happy Salmon" and Other Wonders of the Fish World's Migrating Marvel

Salmon may not be happy when we eat them, but we're happy learning about them. So in a symbiotic relationship, we should take care of them so that future observers of these masters of migration can continue to inspire future generations of nature lovers. In Living Waters, Illustra Media tells the story of the salmon's amazing life cycle. What's new about these fish that swim thousands of miles at sea, yet find their native freshwater streams years later? Several discoveries have come to ligh...

Listen: Brian Miller on Letting Alien Feet in the Door to Keep a Divine Foot Out

Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin famously insisted that science must never let a "divine foot in the door." On a new episode of ID the Future, new Center for Science & Culture researcher Brian Miller talks with interview Tod Butterfield about the bizarre place this has taken evolutionist William Hamilton.

Download the episode by clicking here:

Arguing that an "ultimate good, which is of a religious nature," could exist, Hamilton describes this higher source not as God or any other non-...

Irony Alert: Michael Shermer on "When Facts Fail"

When an evolutionist, such as Michael Shermer in this case, warns readers that people don't change their minds even when presented with the facts, the irony should be savored. Shermer writes in Scientific American ("How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail").

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming e...

Review: In Mars Miniseries, Life Is Discovered on the Red Planet...in 2037!

Last month, the National Geographic Channel completed its heavily promoted six-part miniseries, Mars, which was presented in a format that bounces back and forth between the present day and a fictional future mission to the Red Planet about twenty years from now. It's of interest not only as entertainment but for the assumptions it makes about the origins of life. In case you plan to watch Mars yourself at a later date and would prefer to be surprised, beware of abundant spoilers to come.

Th...

Whatever You Do, Don't Say "Irreducible Complexity"

While browsing through the articles forthcoming in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, we ran across the following sentence:

Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term 'complex' because of its association with 'biocomplexity' or 'irreducible complexity'), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life's nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated.

Shhh! Don't say...well, just don't say...

The World's Ideal Storage Medium Is "Beyond Silicon"

The world is facing a data storage crisis. As information proliferates in everything from YouTube videos to astronomical images to emails, the need for storing that data is growing exponentially. If trends continue, data centers will have used up the world's microchip-grade silicon before 2040.

But there is another storage medium made of abundant atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. It's called DNA. And you wouldn't need much of it. The entire world's data could be s...