Anika Smith

As Rob Crowther noted earlier, NYT’s Cornelia Dean has been doing a shoddy job reporting on intelligent design and evolution. In fact, even her allies are beginning to take notice.

On Thursday the local (and vehemently anti-ID) weekly had a note on its blog to Cornelia Dean. While they agreed with her biased reporting, even they are getting tired of her knee-jerk parroting:

Cornelia Dean! It’s good to be emphatic, but you start to sound like a robot–one of those Darwin-believin’ automatons whom the Discovery Institute takes great pleasure in deriding.

“The fact is materialism is stalled. It neither has any useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences nor comes close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored.” (xiv)

Canadian neuroscientist Mario Beauregard notes at the beginning of his book The Spiritual Brain, co-authored with journalist Denyse O’Leary, that he belongs to a small minority of nonmaterialist neuroscientists. He is upfront about the fact that he “went into neuroscience in part because [he] knew experientially that such things [religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSME)] can indeed happen.” Driven by his curiosity about what is happening to the brain during RSME, Beauregard and his colleague studied the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns, coming to the conclusion that it is more likely that these mystics are directly experiencing a reality outside of themselves.

“Baylor University has proven yet again that academic freedom has been thrown off campus and academic persecution is now the norm,” said Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin in reaction to Baylor University’s deletion of a professor’s research website, which focused on evolutionary systems and informatics. “It is simply unconscionable that a major university would so trample a scientist’s right to freedom of scientific inquiry,”

Baylor University has taken offline the Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory website that had been administered by Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, because the administration claimed there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design.

Newsweek has a Global Literacy Quiz testing general knowledge, based, of course, on their reporting. The questions under the Science heading are bold, ranging from the age of the universe to stem cell research to Darwinian evolution:

This month saw two very different takes on intelligent design in the UK press. As we reported earlier, the Guardian ran a story which set up a false dichotomy of ID as a personal opinion and Darwinism as scientific fact. Standing in contrast to this view is Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who wrote a penetrating piece on how the rationality of science is threatened by the new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins:

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution – which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection – also accounts for the origin of life itself.

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question “Who created God?”, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question “What created the bang?”

This week Behe’s Edge of Evolution received a glowing review in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Cameron Wybrow, who writes: Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, provides some hard numbers, coupled with an ingenious argument. The key to determining the exact powers of Darwinian evolution, says Behe, lies with fast-reproducing microbes. Some, such as malaria, HIV, and E. coli, reproduce so quickly that within a few decades, or at most a few millennia, they generate as many mutations as a larger, slower-breeding animal would in millions of years. By observing how far these creatures have evolved in recent times, we can estimate the creative limits of random mutation. It’s worth noting that, unlike certain critics who used their reviews to Read More ›

Recently the Boston Globe ran a letter to the editor by Stephen Meyer, responding to Sally Lehrman’s ridiculous claim that the Explore Evolution textbook “uses pseudoscience to attack Darwin’s theories.”Meyer’s response? There’s nothing “pseudo” about saying what the evolutionists themselves admit, even citing the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps Lehrman judges our book pseudoscience because we also describe current scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory. Perhaps she is unaware that skepticism about the creative power of natural selection and random mutation is common in peer-reviewed scientific literature and in the scientific community. No less an authority than the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published a recent paper stating: “Natural selection based solely Read More ›

Over at ID the Future they’ve just completed a series of six interviews with Dr. Lyle Jensen, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Jensen, a biochemist and pioneer in the field of x-ray crystallography, shares his thoughts on the scope of his work (he was recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1943, recognized by the American Crystallographic Association in 1983 with the Fankuchen Memorial Award in X-Ray Crystallography, and again honored in 2000 with the Martin J. Buerger Award).

Dr. Jensen also explains why he dissents from Darwinism and thinks schools should present both the arguments for and against Darwinian evolution.

Links to the podcasts are below the fold

There’s a new resource for those wanting to learn more about the ID debate. Jason Rennie, an Australian podcaster, has a series of 25 podcasts, called “Darwin or Design?“

Rennie has compiled 25 interviews with prominent thinkers on both sides of the ID debate into a sort of “audiobook” which gives the listener a chance to hear each individual in their own words (and voice!). Interviews include Mike Behe on irreducible complexity, Guillermo Gonzalez on The Privileged Planet, Joey Campana on ID research, and Denyse O’Leary on ID and the media. On the critics’ side, evolutionists like Sean Carroll and PZ Myers gave their two cents.

This week’s WORLD Magazine features an interview (available here to subscribers) with biochemist Michael Behe, “Darwin Slayer” and author of this year’s The Edge of Evolution, his first book since the groundbreaking Darwin’s Black Box back in 1996. As Marvin Olasky writes, “[A] book once every decade or so is about as much as Darwinians can take. Behe’s new work shows that Darwinism’s random mutation and natural selection explain little about how one species has led to another.”