May 2007

At Townhall.com, David Limbaugh has a critique of the Left’s narrow-mindedness (“Leftist Thought Control”), especially concerning science issues. He reports that intolerance runs rampant where those who believe they hold the monopoly on the truth: “Consider the leftist refrain that red-state conservatives do not merely possess a different worldview, but are not part of the ‘reality-based community.’ Consider the near monolithic liberalism and secularism of our university faculties.”

If you’ve weren’t able to make it to Washington for AEI’s debate on Darwinism and Conservatism, you’re in luck: the video and audio recording are now available online here. The debate features thoughtful analysis from two of Darwin’s conservative champions, Larry Arnhart and John Derbyshire, as well as Darwin’s conservative critics, including Discovery’s own John West and George Gilder. The arguments are lucid and compelling, well worth a listen.

Darwinists sometimes make a highly suspect argument along the lines of, “don’t change evolution education because you’ll divide the community.” Most school districts presently teach only the scientific evidence which supports Darwinian evolution and nothing more on this topic. Does that satisfy the public or divide them? In fact, polls consistently show that Americans want more than just the pro-evolution side of the story taught in schools. A 2005 Harris poll found that 82% of Americans want alternatives to evolution taught. A 2006 Zogby poll corroborated that statistic, finding that a supermajority of Ohio adults want both scientific evidence for and against evolution taught, and 75% of Americans want intelligent design taught alongside evolution. In both polls, under 20% wanted Read More ›

The Florida state legislature has passed legislation that would allow school districts that excell to have unprecedented control over their own schools, textbooks and curriculum.

In speeches in Washington and Philadelphia this week, Discovery Institute senior fellow and former political science professor John West has begun his program to describe the way Darwinism gave birth to the eugenics movement, and he is getting some attention. Protests are expected, but it won’t do any good for Darwinists to huff and puff about West’s linkage of Darwinism and the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany. Indeed, the replies given by the Darwinists in the Crosswalk article were anticipated–and rebutted–by West in his speech.

Who were the Neanderthals? Were they ape-like primitives with low intelligence, or were they more like us–perhaps nearly identical to modern humans in both body and mind? Biology textbooks often portray Neanderthals as unintelligent versions of modern humans. For example, this graphic from Biology: The Dynamics of Life (pg. 483, 2000 ed.) portrays Neanderthals as stooped primitives struggling kill a giant bear using clubs, spears, and incompetently, a burning stick: But according to a recent article in the Washington Post, Neanderthals may have been virtually indistinguishable from modern humans in terms of both their appearance and intelligence. A lead author on the study declared that “we would understand both to be human. There’s good reason to think that they did Read More ›