Bruce Chapman

One has to be careful about accepting the accuracy of news articles that describe scientific papers, so bear that in mind in my mention of a new paper by “scientists” at UCLA and NYU. Their actual paper in Nature Neuroscience (unavailable online so far) is reported in a joint Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times article today . It claims that people’s political convictions derive from (you guessed it), differences in biology. “..(A) specific region of the brain’s cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives,” they advise us.Read the rest on Discovery Blog.

A few days ago I sat in one of the rooms where the producers of a new film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” were screening a trailer and passing the word to interested individuals and groups. It’s the same pre-release publicity approach used recently for other Hollywood offerings, including documentaries. My emotion was almost as much one of relief as excitement. It is going to be a terrific film treatment of the whole controversy, and far fairer than any we have encountered.

You cannot fairly pit the educated views of Darwinian scientists against the opinions of students. To be honest, you need to hear from scientists who doubt Darwinian evolution and have the evidence to defend themselves. To merely stigmatize skeptics of Darwinism as “fundamentalist Christians” and “creationists” is to serve the cause of propaganda, not objective discourse.

I just threw up my hands when I saw that the New York Times Review of Books had assigned Richard Dawkins to review Michael Behe’s excellent new book, The Edge of Evolution. A more temperate soul, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things, takes apart the Times’s decision with greater care.

According to an article in Scientific American: Homo sapiens is the only species that keeps detailed records. That is why biologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England started in 1998 to comb through Finnish church records from two centuries ago for clues about the influence of evolution on reproduction. The data and analysis may have historical and even sociological value. Perhaps there is even some anthropological points to be noted. But how is this evolutionary biology? The answer is a cliché, but still true: when all you’ve got is a theoretical hammer, every study is a nail. Once again, we have biologists desperately seeking relevance and self-worth.

The Darwinists devoutly desire to avoid the true history of their creed, and usually the media assist in the cover up–unknowingly, I would like to think. The “Inherit the Wind” trope that is monotonously employed by journalists–not to mention Judge Jones of Dover, PA fame–derives from the play and movie of that name. But this cliché, which is the source of what many journalists think about the subject, was fiction and not even aimed at the evolution issue so much as the danger of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The real Scopes trial in 1925 was rather different. And so was the biology textbook that was at the heart of the Scopes trial.

On June 26 the New York Times ran an article by Douglas H. Erwin, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in which he stated as demonstrated fact the power of natural selection to create the eye. We now can see (forgive the pun) that natural selection “is the primary agent in shaping new adaptations.”

His example? “Computer simulations,” he declares, “have shown how selection can produce a complex eye from a simple eyespot in just a few hundred thousand years.”

Really, Dr. Erwin? Where is your proof of this important fact? What computer simulations, published where and when and by whom? Just a citation or two will do.

Tom Bethell of The American Spectator was present at the recent debate on Darwin and conservatism held at AEI. I am delighted that he was there or we would not have his droll, apt description of the event in the July-August number of the Spectator.

We are watching the Darwinists launch bold and deceitful attacks on all critics of their man’s theory. And they go farther–as witness Cornelia Dean, queen of The New York Times Science Page, in her assault Tuesday on the Catholic Church and the Christian effort to reserve the soul, at least, as something more than material expression.

Fenton Communications, the left wing public relations firm that handles the Darwinist propaganda machine (along with groups like Moveon.org), undoubtedly has been anticipating the publication of Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, and helping to promote book reviews against it. Our friends at the Darwinist lobby, National Center for Science Education, are also on the case. They erroneously think that they can strangle this Hercules in his crib. In terms of the interests of real science, it is a shame, though no surprise, that the initial Darwinist reviews are defensive and tendentious.We have asked Dr. Behe, a senior fellow of Discovery Institute, to reply to some of them and he has agreed, starting with Jerry Coyne’s review from Read More ›

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.