Discovery Institute's Blog, page 84

With Wells, Gauger, and Denton, Education Day Was a Big Success; Let's Do It Again Sometime

Our Education Day on intelligent design yesterday was a big success, greeted with terrific enthusiasm by students, teachers, and parents alike. Over 170 attended. Hosted in Seattle by the Center for Science & Culture and intended as a field-trip opportunity for private school groups and home school families, it was the first event of its kind that the CSC has offered, and it won't be the last.

Biologist Jonathan Wells kicked off the day with an introduction to science and intelligent design...

The Tully Monster -- Imagine the Gradual Evolutionary Path to This Guy

Because I didn't own a TV back in the 1990s, I missed The X-Files when it first aired. Lately in a nightly ritual my wife and daughter and I have been catching up via Netflix. It's charming -- both a romance and a monster mystery/conspiracy theory mash-up. That explains why when I saw the headlines this morning about the Tully Monster, I misread its name as the Scully Monster, a reference to skeptical FBI investigator Dana Scully.

In fact this bizarre 300-million-year-old creature from the s...

A "Nightmarish Scenario" for Darwinism -- the Curse of Non-Adaptive Order

Stump your Darwinist friends by asking them to explain, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, biological features like the precise pattern of the maple leaf or of an angiosperm flower. "That's a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism," says Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton in this brief but delightful video conversation -- a "nightmarish scenario." Why? Because Darwinism by definition must justify such features, including the taxa-defining novelties, as having been seized upon...

Is There a Scientific Establishment?

The term "Establishment" is controversial. It invariably implies a critical stance, suggesting a system, a power structure, in need of a shakeup or worse. It's not a description anyone would welcome having applied to himself. Nobody wants to be seen as defending entrenched privilege. Depending on the context, some deny the existence of such an entity to begin with.

What about in the world of science, and specifically biology? Is it fair to speak of an Establishment there, primed to be update...

Human Origins and Human Self-Image

It's remarkable how lots of smart people can condemn trends toward barbarism and irrationality in our culture without ever probing the origins of those trends -- lying as they do, at least partly, in scientific materialism. For these men and women who ought to know better, the prestige of prevailing academic opinion is too much to permit asking tough questions.

It comes down to self-image. In a talk delivered in Coeur d'Alene, ID, at a recent conference on human origins, Discovery Institute'...

Collective Motion: A New Level of Design Found in Proteins

A "previously unidentified mechanism for modulating protein affinity" has come to light. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemical Chemistry, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has identified new functional roles for collective motions within protein molecules. These motions, referred to as allostery, allow one end of the protein to affect a distant part through what is termed "allosteric communication."

Intermolecular interactions are...

Identifying "Academia's Bermuda Triangle"

Complete the last word in the second of the following two paragraphs:

This is an essay about how to avoid carpet-bombing your career as a scientist. The academy, in general, is a wonderful place to work, but not everyone plays nice. Veer too far from carefully charted courses and someone may slip quietly up behind you and slide a cold piece of steel in between the ribs of your budding research career.

They'll do this believing that they are serving public interest by snuffing out dangerous r...

Your Personality Uploaded to a Robot Wouldn't Be "You"

Transhumanism is a materialistic religion that seeks to attain the comforts provided by faith through belief in technology as savior. One aspect of the movement is the quest for eternal life. Now, a hyper-rich Russian mogul hopes to live forever by uploading his personality to a robot. From the Telegraph story:

Web entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is behind the "2045 Initiative", an ambitious experiment to bring about immortality within the next 30 years by creating a robot capable of storing huma...

Internal Constraints vs. External Pressures: The Revelations of Evo-Devo

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...

"I Think We're Alone Now"

Last night my wife and I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane, a very tense, effective, and scary thriller. To say more about its precise genre would be a spoiler. I mention it because there's one of many great moments in the film when John Goodman as a bunker-dwelling survivalist plays a 1967 hit on the jukebox in his cellar, "I Think We're Alone Now," by Tommy James and the Shondells. It's prominent in the trailer too, and in the context of the movie the song resonates several different ways.

That coul...