February 2007

There’s an old lawyers’ joke about the “cracked kettle” approach to legal argumentation. Jones sues Smith for borrowing her kettle and returning it with a crack in it. Smith’s lawyer then defends her with the following arguments (in order):

1. Smith didn’t borrow the kettle.
2. The kettle was cracked before Smith borrowed it.
3. When Smith returned the kettle, it wasn’t cracked.
4. There never was a kettle.

In my book Icons of Evolution I described a 2000 conference talk in which Kevin Padian (President of the National Center for Science Education) used argumentation very much like this to defend his claim that birds are modified descendants of dinosaurs.¹ Darwinists are now using a similar approach to defend Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings.

In honor of Darwin Day this week we issued our annual update to the Scientific Dissent from Darwin list. Apparently, it is dishonest to point out that 700 scientists are skeptical of Darwinian evolution. Never mind that we have never tried to claim that a majority of scientists are Darwin doubters, not even close. The whole point of the list was to refute the claim in PBS’ 2001 Evolution series that no scientists doubted Darwin. (Then it was ‘no credible scientists’; which became ‘well, not very many scientists’; and so on.) Still. Time magazine journalist Michael Lemonick got himself all in a huff over the list. So much so he even attacked the doctor we quoted in the release about the list. Lemonick attacks Dr. Michael Egnor — professor of Neurosurgery at State University of New York — for not knowing enough about biology, for not having a degree in the field, for only being a brain surgeon. That’s rich coming from a guy who writes for a weekly news tabloid. His credentials:

I’ve been covering science in major publications for more than two decades. Consider the fact that I may have actually learned a thing or two along the way.

Writing in Scientific American Robert Shapiro recounts many criticisms of popular models for the chemical origin of life. Part I recounted why many origin of life theorists reject the possibility that DNA was the first genetic molecule. As noted, Shapiro even takes aim at those who suggest that the Miller-Urey experiment chemistry was important for forming prebiotic molecules on meteorites because studies of these meteorites show “a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life.” Due to these deficiencies, Shapiro then notes that increasing numbers of prebiotic chemists now turn to RNA as the first Read More ›

RIA Novosti news service writer Alexander Arkhangelsky discusses culture, politics and science in an insightful article (“Cartoons and Darwin”) that should give Americans pause. Cultural traditions in Russia today simultaneously bounce off the old Soviet values, pre-Revolutionary values (evoking the prominence of the Orthodox Church) and the rather chaotic commercial and political influences of the present. Where Arkhangelsky comes down seems to us eminently sound: “Students should know about Darwinism and anti-Darwinism, the scientific and the religious.” If he means the science on both sides and the religion ON BOTH SIDES, I would have to agree — for Russians. Here in America, we should stick to the scientific case on both sides. That alone would be a huge advantage. But Read More ›

It looks like mainstream journalists are beginning to take notice of the persecution of Darwin-skeptics. Writing in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Joel Connelly asks us to “Take a look at Seattle in the year 2077.” His satirical history from that vantage point–looking back at today from the future–sees oddities of many kinds. Among them, Darwin-skeptics, including Discovery Institute’s president Bruce Chapman, will be imprisoned because they “refused to recant their criticism of Darwin.” Connelly writes: Conservative scholars of the Discovery Institute refused to recant their criticism of Darwin. Joshua took us past a converted theater on Pine Street reserved for such “hard-core” offenders. The Discovery scholars were forced to watch, 18 hours a day, House speeches by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney Read More ›

In an article titled “A Simpler Origin for Life” — a title which hides the implication of the article, Robert Shapiro, writing in Scientific American, highlights many problems with chemical origin of life scenarios. Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins on his worship of the first self-replicating molecule and says “[a]t some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator.” (emphasis in original) That’s “Replicator” with a capital “R“. But, as Shapiro explains, the conventional explanation is not nearly so simple: Unfortunately, complications soon set in. DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of a number of proteins — members of a family of large molecules that are chemically very different from DNA. Proteins, like Read More ›

We wrapped up our Darwin Day celebration with The Kindlings Muse, a locally produced roundtable discussion and podcast which regularly features thoughtful and engaging intellectuals on its program. This week featured our own Dr. John West and Adrian Wyard, from Counterbalance Foundation. The topic was “The New Atheism,” based on an article of the same name from WIRED.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the Sacramento Unified School District has not yet officially acted on the name change to its middle school.

Like most mainstream American newspapers, the Sacramento Bee is a strong and uncritical proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Bee recently demonstrated its devotion to the Darwinist cause with two news articles spotlighting the celebration of Darwin Day in Sacramento.

Ironically, the day after Darwin Day, the Bee included an editorial that rightly condemns the American eugenics movement and that rightly supports a proposal to remove a famous Sacramentan’s name from a school based on his enthusiastic support of eugenics.

Richard Fortey, President of the Geological Society of London, has found a heretofore unknown formula for attacking ID. In “The Ego and the ID,” Fortey calls his interlocutors “religious hard liners,” says that if they doubt common ancestry it is tantamount to “believing the earth is flat as a pancake,” and calls them “IDiots.” How becoming of the Michael Faraday Prize recipient. I suppose Faraday himself would surely have been a “religious hard liner” by Fortey’s standards.

Fortey continues:

As was expected, earlier today the Kansas State Board of Education voted 6-4 to adopt dumbed-down science standards that delete any mention of scientific data that might be perceived as critical of Darwinian evolution. But that’s not all. The board also gutted a history of science standard that called on students to study both the abuses and the successes of science in history. The history of science standard had encouraged students to learn about such tragedies as the eugenics movement and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. But studying the misuses of science was apparently too much of a downer for the Darwin-only crowd, so they rewrote the standard to ensure that students would be exposed only to the triumphs of Read More ›