Anika Smith

NYT Book Review editor Gregory Cowles has attacked William Steig’s Yellow & Pink. It seems that not even children’s books are safe from Darwinian scrutiny at The New York Times.

Well, sort of.

From Biologic’s Perspectives:

Researchers at Biologic Institute have stunned the scientific community with the announcement today of a fully functioning automobile capable of replicating itself. Although simple autocatalytic versions of self-replication have previously been demonstrated, the complexity of the system described today–complete with GPS navigation, DVD player, and onboard WiFi–has taken everyone by surprise. In the minds of many, this discovery has forever altered the once fundamental distinction between life and non-life.
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According to lead scientist Otto Cloner, “In the right kind of environment the process of self-replication just takes off. I still get goose bumps watching it.” The prototype self-replicator is a slightly modified version of the popular Jeep Wrangler–unmanned. When just one of these self-propelled prototypes is placed in an appropriate environment (one lacking any other self-propelled vehicles) magic happens. Or so it seems. Dr. Cloner himself takes the more modest view that “the replicative mechanism is really quite simple when properly understood”.

To better explain the replicative mechanism, check out the diagram below:

Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield has an excellent critique of evolution published by Forbes.com, where he is more commonly debating feminism or discussing Solzhenitsyn. In a book review of Men: Evolutionary and Life History, Mansfield takes a look at the moral implications of Darwinian theory when applied to the obvious differences between the sexes: What ought a man to do, given this discrepancy between men and women? Like many scientists, Bribiescas lives under the yoke of a crude positivism which denies that scientific fact has any ethical implications. “Darwinian evolutionary theory does not support any moral stance.” But of course it does. The trouble is not that Darwinian theory has no implications, but that it contradicts itself with two opposing implications. Read More ›

In all the excitement of the debate over Texas science standards last week, one thing was made eminently clear: generally speaking, there is one side of this debate that focuses on the science at hand, and another side that keeps bringing up religion. Contrary to the stereotype (but not the actual experience of those who care to see things as they actually are), it’s the Darwinists in this debate who keep wanting to talk about religion. People who question Darwin’s theory want to talk about the scientific evidence for and against it, as John West explains in The Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog: Evolutionists typically cast themselves as the champions of secular reason against superstition, but in Texas they tried Read More ›

Chances are you have heard the story of Phineas Gage at some point. Most of us get it in our General Psychology courses in high school and college, the story of a man who had a horrible accident and was never the same again — sort of like Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, but the other way around.

The idea this anecdote supposedly supports is that personality = the brain, as evidenced by changes to the brain (like a spike through the head) that cause changes in personality. Pretty straightforward stuff. There’s only one problem.

It’s not true. Denyse O’Leary explains at Uncommon Descent:

As we reported earlier, Michael Behe has been responding to critics of his scientific arguments in Edge of Evolution over at his Amazon blog, concluding with this thought: Here’s a final important point. Genetics is an excellent journal; its editors and reviewers are top notch; and Durrett and Schmidt themselves are fine researchers. Yet, as I show above, when simple mistakes in the application of their model to malaria are corrected, it agrees closely with empirical results reported from the field that I cited. This is very strong support that the central contention of The Edge of Evolution is correct: that it is an extremely difficult evolutionary task for multiple required mutations to occur through Darwinian means, especially if one Read More ›

The debate that isn’t supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution.” In their effort to refute Behe’s claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal. What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his Read More ›

Roddy Bollock over at ARN’s ID Report has an excellent post illustrating the difficulty Darwinists have with explaining design: What if you were lied to all your life that a square was a circle? Oh yes, you were told, it’s natural to have contrary thoughts, but you must not be deceived by appearances; those things that look like squares are not. They are merely apparent squares. And in reality, you are politely informed, they not only are circles, they must be, because an all encompassing Theory of Circumfusion requires them to be, and you must believe the Theory of Circumfusion. And what if you did? Despite all that was in you; despite what you instinctively and empirically knew, what if Read More ›

Today NPR’s All Things Considered reported on the running debate between Evolution News & Views contributor Dr. Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and Darwinist neurologist Dr. Steven Novella from Yale. With “Doubting Darwin: Debate Over The Mind’s Evolution” NPR takes a look at the scientific debate over the mind-brain problem currently shaking up neuroscience. Listen to the report here because, as reporter Jon Hamilton notes, “The outcome of the mind-brain debate will have a profound impact on everything from what students learn in high school to how decisions are made at the end of life.” Here are a few of Dr. Egnor’s posts on the mind-brain problem and some background on the back-and-forth between Dr. Egnor Read More ›