Anika Smith

In this new video, Dr. Stephen Meyer explains the historical scientific method and how it applies to the origin of the information that makes life possible. It’s the question facing origin of life researchers: where does the information come from? http://www.youtube.com/v/XexHxgxTbWY

While we often are correcting mistakes and misinformation in news reports about intelligent design and evolution, it’s encouraging to know that solid, thoughtful pieces are still being produced. This story from The New York Times is making the rounds, causing Denyse O’Leary to wonder, “Have the Times people actually started connecting with the public again?”
The surprising article by Virginia Heffernan examines the strange microcosm that is Science Blogs, where, as Bruce Chapman put it, she finds “not science, but self-referencial sophomoric pranks, vitriol and cavil.” Her acute analysis:

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

Yesterday’s contest awarded five winners a free copy of Signature in the Cell; today we’re announcing a contest (ending July 20th) to win a brand new iPod Nano loaded with intelligent design podcasts, interviews, debates, videos, and more! For your chance to win, just go here and sign up to one of our email lists (Nota Bene, Academic Freedom Update, or Faith and Science Update). Your subscription is free, and if you’re already a subscriber, you can enter the contest as well. For contest rules and details, visit here.

Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open video directly Would you read a book that was denigrated as nonsense, “a pile of slop,” and “a silly waste of time”? How about if a member of the National Academy of Sciences told you that same book was “breathtaking and cutting-edge science”? What if other scientists from around the world said the book was a “must read,” “intriguing,” “a fascinating and intellectually stimulating book, and elegantly written”? Then you might begin to suspect that something is up. Of course, that book is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, the most controversial and discussed book in the Read More ›

When Stephen Meyer faced Steve Matheson and Art Hunt at Biola University last month, one scientist’s research was key in their debate: Doug Axe, Director of Biologic Institute.

While there’s a good deal of back and forth on the subject, for the first time Dr. Axe has something of his own to say on the subject of his work. From Biologic Perspectives:

The specific work to which Meyer, Matheson and Hunt referred [4] has added to the scientific case for functional protein sequences being extraordinarily rare within the whole space of possibilities. Matheson started off by arguing not that this deduction of extraordinary rarity is incorrect, but rather that it is irrelevant to the debate between Darwinism and Design.

Axe goes on to explain the problems with Matheson’s reasoning:

Critics of intelligent design often try to dismiss the theory as not worth addressing, as a question already settled, even as being too boring to countenance. Then they spend an amazing amount of energy trying to refute it. The very evidence of the ongoing debate sparked by Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell should silence that tired trope that there is no controversy over evolution and intelligent design. That controversy has reached a fever-pitch in less than a year since the book’s first release, marking Meyer’s volume as a book serious Darwinists must deal with. And dealt with it, they haven’t — in their responses, some critics have misread it, while others have simply failed to read it at all. Read More ›

Even if you can’t make it to the free Signature in the Cell event in Southern California this Friday, you’re in luck. Biola University will be broadcasting the event with Stephen Meyer live for a fee. According to the website: The broadcast fee helps subsidize the cost of the event, and the cost of producing and hosting the video broadcast. It is intendend primarily for large groups and we hope you choose to view it in a group to foster discussion about this topic. Discussion groups, interested friends, churches, families and individuals are encouraged to participate in the broadcast on Friday at 7pm PDT. Go here for system requirements (a computer with high-speed internet) and ordering information.

The last time Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record was scheduled for a screening in the Los Angeles area, it sparked a couple (still ongoing) lawsuits. This time, the film is showing at Biola University, with scientific experts from the film speaking on a panel afterwards, including Paul Nelson, Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, and Stephen Meyer. This notable group will then discuss the details of what is “one of the most difficult and dynamic counterexamples to Darwinian evolution that the fossil record has ever revealed” — a show worth catching in its own right. According to the Biola website, the event runs from 9 am – 12 pm this Saturday at Mayers Auditorium, Biola University, and will Read More ›

Last week Stephen Meyer presented his groundbreaking Signature in the Cell at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, one of Brazil’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, as hundreds of students listened.

The Brazilian press was there, as well, giving intelligent design ample coverage. Unfortunately, instead of reporting intelligent design straight (you know, that radical idea of letting the proponents of an idea tell you what it is they actually support), ISTOÉ Independente is cribbing from the American mainstream media, repeating tropes they’ve read from their counterparts at TIME and Newsweek and inserting their bias into the article, mis-defining ID as “based on the idea that a higher entity would be responsible for the creation of all life forms,” calling Behe’s irreducible complexity a “pseudoscientific concept,” and generally painting the main thrust of ID as a program to get religion into American school (which it most emphatically is not — Discovery’s education policy has always been to teach more about Darwin, not mandating intelligent design).

However, when reporter Hélio Gomes lets his subjects speak for themselves, it’s not a bad at all:

The event held in Sao Paulo in the last days brought to Brazil two of the most well-know ID advocates in the United States. Stephen C. Meyer, Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science, is one of the movement founders, and one of its most vocal spokesmen. Author of three books, among which the recent “Signature in the Cell” (Assinatura na Célula, unpublished in Brazil), he affirms that his mission in Brazilian lands was simple: “We came to raise a discussion — our work is scientific, and not political or educational”, said Meyer, one of the most active Discovery Institute members, a non-profit research center connected to the conservative sectors of the American society. “As I believe in God, I believe he is the intelligent designer. But there are atheist scientists who accept the theory in other fashions”, concludes the researcher.

Readers in Southern California should take note: Dr. Stephen Meyer is going to present his groundbreaking work, Signature in the Cell, at a free event at Biola University in less than two weeks.This is the same book which garnered accolades (Times Literary Supplement and “Daniel of the Year“) and earned the ire of Meyer’s critics, some of whom will be on a panel responding to him at this event. Dr. Meyer has presented at Heritage Foundation, the Seattle Art Museum, at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and various other spots stateside — but this is his first time presenting SITC in SoCal. The details are below:May 14, 2010 Signature in the Cell Event hosted by Biola UniversityTime: 7 Read More ›