2005

Supporters of intellectual engagement in academia and a public marketplace of ideas would do well to check out the latest edition of Academe, which features letters from philosopher and legal scholar Francis J. Beckwith and distinguished Mechanical Engineer Walter Bradley. (See the bottom quarter of the page, here). The two Baylor University professors set the facts straight and defend the continuing debate over intelligent design theory in the academy. The letters come in response to earlier ad hominem attacks and wild-eyed conspiracy theories thrown their way by Barbara Forrest and Glen Branch — previously blogged about here. t would be one thing if Forrest and Branch chose to vigorously argue for neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory based upon the scientific merits. That Read More ›

Leading Darwin defender Richard Dawkins had a piece in The Times of London recently, reassuring readers, “The eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called ‘The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment’ in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.”

Only someone who does not know, or does not care to know, the myriad problems with eye evolution could make such a claim with a straight face. Leading Darwin doubter David Berlinski shows just how feeble the Darwinists’ account of eye evolution is in this excerpt from Commentary. And here Berlinski’s critics criticize his critique and he responds.

Dawkins’ claim is also rebutted in this cogent Times letter from Andy McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory, University of Leeds:

A new poll of medical doctors suggests that a significant minority (34%) support intelligent design over evolution. This alone is enough to show that there is a lively debate over the adequacy of Neo-Darwinism to explain intricate structures like the human body.

However, if one looks past the press release at the details of the poll itself, one finds that actually a majority of doctors favor intelligent design over Neo-Darwinism.

Darwinists are making hay out of a mistake in a press release I wrote recently about National Academy of Sciences member Dr. Philip Skell and his open letter to the Kansas SBOE endorsing the teaching of scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution. My apologies to Dr. Skell. I mistakenly listed him as a biochemist in the very lead of the release, even though he is clearly a chemist and listed as such everywhere else, including the original letter on our website. This is doubly unfortunate, because many Darwinists will seize on any error in an effort to avoid discussing the scientific issues that really matter.

That great bastion of journalist integrity (no not the Washington Post) L.A. Beat has a laughable story about the recent Kansas SBOE hearings on evolution.

Andrew Gumbel, Darwin’s pitbull in this instance, reports in breathless tones of the evolution of creationism and warns left-coasters that it could happen there too.

“They no longer talk about creationism or biblical literalism but rather about Intelligent Design – a much more sophisticated argument that merely seeks to leave open the possibility that science, on its own, cannot account for the full story of life on Earth and that therefore some designing consciousness (for the sake of argument, God) must have been involved.”

CSC fellow Jonathan Wells wrote a short response taking a Nature letter writer to task for spreading the old flat-earth BS knee deep. The spherical shape of the Earth was known to the ancient Greeks, who even made some pretty good estimates of its circumference. Christian theologians likewise knew that the Earth was a sphere. The only two Christian writers who seem to have advocated a flat Earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century eccentric, Cosmas Indicopleustes. And he makes a couple of suggestions of how to keep your feet clean in those Darwinian pastures. For an objective and very readable account of the Flat Earth Myth, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (Praeger, 1991).

There’s no doubt that Nature got an earful for publishing an article in which writer Geoff Brumfiel didn’t adaquately skewer the theory of intelligent design. Nor do the letter writers think he delivered a satisfactorily vicious enough savaging to the theory’s proponents. One letter writer proclaimed:

ID creationism is not science, despite the editors’ suggestion that ID “tries to use scientific methods to find evidence of God in nature”. Rather, advocates of ID pretend to use scientific methods to support their religious preconceptions.

Another was aghast that Nature published a short sidebar that actually verified some of the persecution scientists suffer for criticizing Darwinian evolution or even mentioning ID.

World has a good news story on the Kansas science hearings, one that goes well beyond the MSM’s rusty boilerplate about scientists clashing with Bible thumpers:

In Kansas, Darwinists won back control of the State Board of Education in 2000 and restored the older standards. But conservatives have now retaken the board, and they are expected to vote this summer to adopt the revisions debated in Topeka.

The Darwinist response to such a challenge is no secret. “My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999,” wrote Liz Craig of Kansas Citizens For Science on the group’s discussion board in February. “Notify the national and local media about what’s going on and portray them in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc. . . . we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do.”

Then there are these facts, widely misreported by several major newspapers and magazines:

Biologist and Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells takes The New York Times and physicist Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for persistent misreporting of the science curricula battles in the state of Kansas.

Associated Press reporter John Hanna’s story about the definition of science currently used in Kansas appeared in papers all across the country over the weekend, and other reporters have touched on this issue as well.

And rightly so. This is one of the most important issues before the Kansas state board of education, namely, what is the proper definition of science.