Discovery Institute's Blog, page 97

Berlinski and Denton: If You Could Pose One Challenge to a Thoughtful Darwinist, What Would It Be?

You can always dream. While the evolutionist side in the Darwin debate is long on rhetoric and insults, serious debate or dialogue is woefully rare. But imagine you had the opportunity to sit down with a thoughtful, honest, well-informed Darwinist and pose one question or challenge. What would it be?

I had the opportunity to pose that question to two of the most brilliant minds associated with the intelligent design community -- Michael Denton and David Berlinski. Take a well-spent 15 minut...

What the Gal��pagos Finches Tell Us About Evolution

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...

Belgium and Canada -- Frontiers of the Death Culture

The more a population accepts killing as an acceptable response to human suffering, the wider the categories of acceptable euthanasia become -- and the more people are killed. Belgium validates that premise. In 2015, a record number of people died by lethal injection. From the Yahoo News story:

Belgium carried out more than 2,000 mercy killings last year, the most since euthanasia was controversially legalised in 2002, the government said Wednesday.

"There were 2,021 cases in 2015," said a s...

Now Is the Time to Get in Your Application for Our Summer Seminars

We have already announced the upcoming deadline -- April 7, 2016 -- for applications to our Summer Seminars, the intensive 9-day session on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences, and the equally immersive C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society. The seminars will run from July 8-16 in Seattle.

Sponsored by Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, these are amazing opportunities intended primarily for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students -- plus a sel...

Superfluous Design: A Problem for Darwinism

In an ID the Future podcast, Michael Denton and David Berlinski discussed traits that exhibit perfection of design. The human eye, for instance, can detect single photons of light. You can't design a light detector better than that! The human language organ (vocal cords, etc.) are perfect, Berlinski says, for communicating abstract thoughts in the mind to others.

Many traits seem to go far beyond the requirements of mere survival. This, indeed, is a theme of Denton's new book, Evolution: Sti...

Oklahoma's Academic Freedom Legislation Authorizes Teaching Scientific Criticisms, Not Creationism

With the recent filing of academic freedom bills in Oklahoma, misinformation about what these bills actually protect is springing up in the media and from Darwin lobbyists -- as it has many times before. Donald McLaughlin already addressed a claim from the National Center for Science Education that the bills -- one in the state House and one in the Senate -- are "anti-science"; let me clarify what they authorize teachers to present.

The NCSE reports:

SB 1322 would, if enacted, in effect enc...

Accepting, or Rejecting, Common Descent Has Real Consequences for Biological Understanding

Some have said that intelligent design does not commit one to accepting or rejecting common descent, and I agree. But it does not follow from the neutral stance of intelligent design towards common descent that accepting or rejecting the latter -- which for brevity I'll abbreviate as CD -- has no real consequences for biological understanding. Quite the contrary.

Before I go on, some clarification may help: "Intelligent design" (ID) holds only that we can detect intelligent causation in the...

Stonestreet Puts the United Methodist Anti-ID Ban in the Context of Liberal Christianity and Its Crackup

Take action now: Contact United Methodist officials and urge them to overturn their ban on Discovery Institute.

We've stressed the way the United Methodist ban on intelligent design reveals a propensity for censorship, group think, and surrender to materialism on the part of that church and similar groups, religious and otherwise, that should know better. But in a BreakPoint commentary, John Stonestreet puts the matter in a different but related perspective: the crackup of liberal Christiani...

Conversations with Michael Denton: The Gal��pagos Finches as a "Two-Edged Sword"

To celebrate the release of Michael Denton's important new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, we present a series of conversations with Dr. Denton, highlighting key points in the book. First, the Galpagos finches -- one of the most famous and cherished illustrations of natural selection in action. Denton explains why these birds, a prime Darwinian icon, are a double-edged sword for evolutionary theory.

Get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis now! For a limited time, you'...

The First Thing to Note about Michael Denton's New Book -- the Title is Correct

Get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis now! For a limited time, you'll enjoy a 30 percent discount at CreateSpace by using the discount code QBDHMYJH.

Michael Denton has written a sequel to his groundbreaking book, published in 1985, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. As readers of Evolution News know, the new book is Evolution: Still A Theory in Crisis. The thing to note, first of all, is that the new title is correct.

Even after thirty years. The problems Denton outlined more tha...