Discovery Institute's Blog, page 90

Physicist David Snoke on Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis

I highly recommend reading a review, by University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke, of Michael Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. It's fascinating and wonderfully lucid. While expressing some disagreement, he concludes that the book deserves to sit on the same shelf with Stephen Jay Gould's work -- a high compliment whatever your position on evolutionary questions.

I think that Dr. Snoke's comments as a physicist are particularly helpful and illuminating. He draws a comparison...

The Great Cambrian Whitewash

Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt has been out for almost three years. Paleontologist Mark McMenamin called it a "game changer for the study of evolution..." It has over 700 reviews on Amazon (78 percent five-star, 6 percent four-star). When it came out in 2013, it ranked #7 for hardback nonfiction on the New York Times bestseller list. And last year, a follow-up book, Debating Darwin's Doubt, addressed all the known objections to the original work.

To read most of the scientific journals...

Stephen Meyer Meets Lawrence Krauss, and More -- March Is Going to Be Interesting

Next month is going to be eventful, to say the least. From Toronto to Oregon, California to Seattle, you'll have opportunities to see top ID scientists and scholars up against some of the best that the other side has to offer. On Saturday, March 19 from 7-9 pm at the University of Toronto's Wycliffe College, Stephen Meyer will participate in a dialogue with arch-atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and theistic evolutionist Denis Lamoureux. Their subject: "What's Behind It All? God, Science,...

Count on It: Bach, Biology, and the Baroque

If you haven't yet watched our new short documentary based on geneticist Michael Denton's work, The Biology of the Baroque, you must. As Denton shows, there is an excess and an opulence to the beauty and order of life that goes immeasurably beyond utilitarian evolutionary considerations of survival and reproduction. Perhaps, though, the parallel between what Denton calls "non-adaptive order" in biology, and the art of the Baroque period, goes a little further.

The video, scripted by our coll...

Mississippi Legislators Should Drop Academic Freedom Bill or Make Clear It Doesn't Permit Creationism

In most states where academic freedom bills for science education are considered, it's the critics who are wrongly claiming that the bills would authorize the teaching of creationism.

But if media accounts from Mississippi are accurate, it appears that at least some legislators who support academic freedom legislation wrongly think it would permit creationism. The Mississippi legislature is currently considering HB 50, which was taken virtually verbatim from Discovery Institute's model acad...

Nature's Dis-Continuum: Why Structural Explanations Win Hands Down

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...

You Are What You Eat: The Beginnings of the Digestive Process

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.

Take a good look...

New and Old Eugenics United by Rejecting Human Exceptionalism

Buck v. Bell was one of the most pernicious Supreme Court decisions ever written. Authored by the odious social Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 1927 8-1 ruling permitted an innocent woman named Carrie Buck to be involuntarily sterilized.

There is a book about the case just out, Imbeciles, the title taken from Holmes's infamous statement in the ruling: "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." The issue is discussed by Charles Lane in the Washington Post:

At its peak, in the years befo...

Is It a "Pumpjack"? An "Unsewing" Machine? In Search of the Right Metaphor for a New Molecular Wonder

Never presume that the list of molecular machines in the cell is exhausted by the bacterial flagellum, kinesin, and ATP synthase. Those are just three that we have animated thus far. There are so many thousands of machines in living cells, we don't stand a chance of running out of examples to talk about. Here's a new one: the "eukaryotic replicative CMG helicase." Call it CMG helicase for short (the -ase suffix indicates that it operates on a helix, namely the DNA double helix).

Of the many...

What Should We Make of Gravity-Wave Detection?

What should we make of the detection of gravitational waves, reported last week to spectacular acclaim? I would judge this discovery to be the real thing, as opposed to the now discounted "detection" of cosmic-inflation-stretched gravity waves at the BICEP2 facility in Antarctica back in spring 2014. I wrote about that alleged discovery here at Evolution News ("A Matter of Considerable Gravity: On the Purported Detection of Gravitational Waves and Cosmic Inflation").

The gravity waves detec...