Casey Luskin

We received this e-mail recently from a friendly engineer. He gave us permission to post his letter but only if we put his name in bold.

[Editor’s Note: A single article combining all ten installments of this response to Barbara Forrest can be found here, at “Response to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account.” The individual installments may be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10.] When assessing whether a person is promoting a scientific theory, the simple answer to the question posed in the title is “no.” Yet in her Kitzmiller testimony, as recounted in the Kitzmiller account Barbara Forrest recently posted at CSICOP, she seems to think the answer is “yes.” Dr. Forrest recounts some of the religious beliefs of intelligent design-proponents, as if this implies that intelligent design (ID) is Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: A single article combining all ten installments of this response to Barbara Forrest can be found here, at “Response to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account.” The individual installments may be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10.] In this part of my response to Barbara Forrest, I will assess Dr. Forrest’s usage of quotations from ID proponents supposedly talking about intelligent design in religious terms. Dr. Forrest’s Kitzmiller account discusses what she argued during the Kitzmiller trial about intelligent design: I included the words of two leading ID proponents, Phillip E. Johnson and William Dembski. Under direct examination by Eric Rothschild, I related Johnson’s Read More ›

In a recent book review in Nature, Jerry Coyne had unkind words for a questioner who raised his hand after Coyne gave a talk against intelligent design at the Alaska Bar Association. Coyne wrote: After lecturing this spring to the Alaska Bar Association on the debate over intelligent design and evolution, I was approached at the podium by a young lawyer. The tight-lipped smile, close-cropped hair and maniacal gleam in his eyes told me that he was probably a creationist out for blood. I was not wrong. (Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?,” reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, Vol 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006), emphasis Read More ›

David Berlinski submitted the following letter to Science regarding “Public Acceptance of Evolution” (by Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto, in Science, Vol 313: 765-766, 08-11-06). It appears Science chose not to publish it: Alarmed by the fact that “one in three American adults firmly rejects the concept of evolution,” Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott and Shinji Okamoto have suggested that the source of their disbelief may be found in their religious convictions. But when the authors pass from the concept of evolution to a specific evolutionary claim, those religiously-based objections seem to reflect nothing more than skeptical good sense. “Human beings, as we know them,” Miller, Scott and Okamoto write, “developed from earlier species of Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: A single article combining all ten installments of this response to Barbara Forrest can be found here, at “Response to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account.” The individual installments may be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10.] Barbara Forrest is a philosopher and was an expert witness against intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. Since she has recently posted her take on the Kitzmiller trial here, I have had the pleasure of responding by constructing a ten-part response. The pleasure is mine because of the interesting comments from Forrest, including affirmatively calling ID-proponents labels such as “creationists,” “legal mincemeat,” “jaw-droppingly stupid,” “evangelical Read More ›

If you want to watch John West and I speaking about the Kitzmiller decision on C-SPAN-2’s Book-TV, it is now online in Real Player format, here. Unfortunately, the video is pretty low-resolution, but the audio comes through very well. John West makes an interesting point that since the Kitzmiller decision, Judge Jones has engaged in a number of speaking engagements, including one where he stated that as a judge, he is guided by the belief that “true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible.” Here’s the whole statement as recorded in the transcript of the commencement address: The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained Read More ›

Seth Cooper and Leonard Brown have published an article entitled, “A Textbook Case of Judicial Activism: How a Pro-ID Publisher Was Denied its Day in Court,” which describes how the publisher of the textbook Of Pandas and People, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), was denied the right to become a party to the Kitzmiller trial despite the fact that its intellectual property rights were implicated in the lawsuit. As background, the right of a party to “intervene” in a lawsuit is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24 (a): (a) Intervention of Right. Upon timely application anyone shall be permitted to intervene in an action: (1) when a statute of the United States confers an unconditional right to Read More ›

Saturday, August 26th at 7pm EST C-SPAN’s BookTV will air “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision”, featuring two of the book’s authors, John West and Casey Luskin. The program will air again Sunday, August 27th at 6:30am EST and Monday, August 28 at 12:00am EST. The featured event was held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington D.C. for Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, the first book-length critique of Judge John E. Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case, the first court case to assess the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The event, held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington, D.C., was full, (as was a similar one in Seattle at Read More ›

Last December I addressed the point that “Darwinists” are wrong to allege that ID-proponents invented terms such as “Darwinist” or “Darwinism.” (See Busting Another Darwinist Myth: We’d love to take credit for “Darwinism,” but we can’t.) This post was prompted after E.O. Wilson said in Newsweek that “[s]cientists … don’t call it Darwinism,” implying that if you use the term “Darwinism” then you aren’t a scientist. But on Sunday, Denyse O’Leary posted an excellent article documenting multiple usages of the term “Darwinist” or “Darwinism” by, well, leading Darwinist scientists like Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayr, and H. Allen Orr. See Darwinism/Darwinist: Now a term of reproach? at Post-Darwinist blog for the full article! http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2006/08/darwinismdarwinist-now-term-of.html