September 2008

Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us:

the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do?

Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes

The media is abuzz about a suggestion made by a Church of England spokesman that it should apologize for initially opposing Darwinian evolution back in Darwin’s day. An Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune says that “[t]he church did not take an official stand against Darwin’s theories, but many senior Anglicans reacted with hostility to his ideas, arguing against them at public debates.” The example given is the account of Bishop Wilberforce: “At a University of Oxford debate in 1860, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously asked scientist Thomas Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed to be descended from a monkey.” According to the legend, Huxley reportedly replied that he Read More ›

Over the coming months, the Texas State Board of Education will be deciding whether to remove or bolster its requirement that students learn the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, “using scientific evidence and information.” The pro-Darwin lobby group National Center for Science Education (NCSE) does not want that standard to be applied specifically to evolution. In fact, Texas Darwinists want that language completely removed from the Texas Science Standards. To reasonable people, it is apparent that investigating the “strengths and weaknesses [of scientific theories] using scientific evidence and information” is exactly what scientists do all the time. Discovery Institute believes that if scientists can dispute the core claims of neo-Darwinism (as these scientists do), then students can learn about Read More ›

[Update 6/16/09: Quote in paragraph 4 clarified to make it clear that the quote did not come from Dr. Catherine A. Boisvert but was rather stated by the journal The Scientist. Any prior lack of clarity on the author of that quote was completely unintentional.] Over the past couple years, Tiktaalik, a fish-fossil touted as documenting key aspects of the transition from fish to 4-legged tetrapods, has become a new celebrated icon of evolution: Clearly, Darwin’s public relations team has invested much rhetorical capital into this fossil. If past experience is to be our guide, the only event that might cause Darwinists to criticize Tiktaalik would be the publishing of a fossil that was claimed to better document evolution. In Read More ›

Nature recently had this to say in an editorial regarding our upcoming election:

The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin. Sarah Palin, Alaska’s governor and McCain’s running mate, opposes all research into human embryonic stem cells. She is a creationist….

Contrast that with Obama’s statement on page 448, in which Nature asked him about the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. It is not easy to address students’ questions about evolution without falling prey to the false
notion of ‘teaching the controversy’, as the Royal Society’s director of education discovered last week in a public-relations meltdown (see ‘Creation and classrooms’). But Obama could not be more clear: “I do not believe it is
helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny,” he wrote.

Now those who have been following the issue know that Gov. Sarah Palin’s position is a bit more complicated than being “a creationist.” In fact she has explicitly said that she does not want to teach only creationism. So I guess if she is a creationist she is a creationist in a sense different than Darwinists at the NCSE are Darwinists, as they want to teach only Darwinism.
Other Brits have been more thoughtful,

In 2004, cognitive scientist Keith E. Stanovich took the position that junk DNA “is essentially a parasite,” and that “junk DNA is a puzzle only if we are clinging to the assumption that our genes are there to do something for us.”1 In 2006, Michael Shermer asserted, “Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution.”2 The following year, a human physiology textbook stated that “junk DNA” is “considered defective” and comprises “inherited sequences [that] perform no currently known ‘genetically useful’ purpose, yet they remain part of the chromosomes.”3 These sources promoting the classic Read More ›

According to a Science Daily news release, engineers are turning to marine biology for insight into building better turbine blades and wings. The article reports that “[t]he shape of whale flippers with one bumpy edge has inspired the creation of a completely novel design for wind turbine blades. This design has been shown to be more efficient and also quieter, but defies traditional engineering theories.” Apparently small bumps on the leading edge of the flippers create vortices as the whale moves through the water, and this uneven flow “help[s] to generate more lift without the occurrence of stall, as well as enhancing manoeuvrability and agility.” The authors of the article seem cognizant of the unwanted design overtones, and thus lead Read More ›

Rick Richman, editor of Jewish Current Issues, has an article in American Thinker about Neo-Atheism and the response to it from three different authors, including CSC senior fellow David Berlinski. In April, David Berlinski, a secular Jew and well-known skeptic of Darwinism, who holds a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Princeton and has written widely on mathematics and science, published “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.” The book defends religion by attacking atheism’s attempt to enlist science in its cause.The book is written with Mr. Berlinski’s characteristic literary verve. To a Nobel Prize scientist’s argument — offered at a conference on “science, religion and reason” — that “for good people to do evil things, [it] takes religion,” Berlinski Read More ›

In an op-ed in Scotland’s The Journal, student Simon Mundy connects the flak over Michael Reiss to Matt Damon’s comments on Sarah Palin, pitying them both for being used by the intelligent design lobby (those cruelly powerful IDers!) and warning that ID “is coming perilously close to respectability.” Quell horreur! But the best is at the very end, where Mundy writes: The right to a dissenting opinion lies at the heart of our society. But future generations will not thank us for undermining scientific theories that have been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. In other words, we have a right to our dissenting opinion, just so long as it doesn’t undermine (I think Judge Jones would prefer the term “disparage,” Read More ›