Jonathan Witt

The latest Wichita Eagle story on the upcoming Kansas science hearings does a solid job of explaining that the 23 scientists are coming to testify about the weaknesses in Neo-Darwinism, not to push for public school teaching of intelligent design. The story is mostly balanced, giving the Darwinists against balanced classroom coverage of their theory plenty of rope to hang their argument. As one reads the story, their reasoning becomes all to clear. Boiled down it works something like this:

An AP story on the upcoming hearings on Kansas science standards contains a crucial error. According to the lead, the hearings “will have as many as 23 witnesses speaking in support of teaching public school children intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution.” In fact, few if any of the featured scientists are pushing for design theory in the curriculum. That’s not even on the table in the science standards. Indeed, some of those speaking, like Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, aren’t even design theorists. They’re simply calling for students to learn the strengths and weaknesses in Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather than the air-brushed presentation of evolutionary theory they currently get. Why are some Darwinists so keen to obscure this Read More ›

Phil Magers’ recent UPI story about evolution in the classroom (“Teachers feel pressure”) conveys a growing problem for biology teachers: more and more students refuse to uncritically accept Darwinism.

How horrible!

Magers’ pro-Darwin analysis is simplistic, even misleading. This is fitting, for so too is the presentation of evolution in the typical classroom. When students aren’t being fed bogus evidence for Darwin’s theory (like Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings), they’re being led to believe the theory is without important weaknesses.

In a recent news story, Alexandra Witze writes, “Although intelligent design is not scientific …” That’s highly misleading. In a supposedly fair and accurate news story about this growing controversy, Witze presents as fact a key point of contention in the debate.

Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski has a delicious response to UC Berkeley Dean Holub’s frantic worrying about the demise of Darwinism amongst his colleagues. Appearing in today’s Berkeley student newspaper, the essay begins, “Wearing pink tasseled slippers and conical hats covered in polka dots, Darwinian biologists are persuaded that a plot is afoot to make them look silly. At Internet web sites such as The Panda’s Thumb or Talk Reason, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack critics of Darwin’s theory such as William Dembski by misspelling his name as William Dumbski.” Read on.

In a recent LA Times op-ed, Michael Shermer distorts the facts of a recent video-taped debate between him and design theorist Stephen Meyer. Dr. Meyer offers a different view of their conversation here.

Somebody forgot to get the word to Paul McHugh: Respectable intellectuals don’t doubt Darwin — ever! McHugh is a university distinguished service professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the new issue of The Weekly Standard, he provides detailed evidence that Darwin’s narrative of the origin of species is in crisis, and that civilized discourse about the growing controversy surrounding his theory is all to the good:

Those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method.

“Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts to close off the conversation by excessive claims for any privileged access to truth. Scientists should tell what they actually know and how they know it, as distinct from what they believe and are trying to advance. If all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, accepted that guiding principle, the 80-year history of attempts to use law to stifle the teaching of science — stretching as it does from the courtrooms of Dayton, Tennessee, to those of Cobb County, Georgia — could perhaps finally be brought to a close.

McHugh essay is not pithy. He actually takes the time to wrestle with some specific problem’s with Darwin’s theory. One example I hope will encourage your reading of the full article:

The Kansas Board of Education is thinking about implementing science curricula that would teach the controversy over neo-Darwinism. The ultra-Darwinists insist that there is no scientific controversy, that opponents of Darwin’s theory of common descent by natural selection are Christian fundamentalists conspiring to establish a global theocracy. Piercing this smokescreen of ad hominem rhetoric comes the wry voice of Jewish agnostic David Berlinski. In today’s Wichita Eagle he writes: The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences — quantum electrodynamics, say — is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all. Perhaps Berlinski, a philospher and mathematician with a Ph.D. from Princeton, is Read More ›

An AFP news agency article about the growing controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design was almost balanced. Darwinist Barbara Forrest was allowed to peddle her conspiracy theory, the gist of which is that many scholars exploring the scientific evidence for intelligent design are theists! And they want to renew our culture!

Then design theorists like biologists Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells were allowed to briefly explain the scientific evidence for intelligent design. So far so good.

But then, near the end, so close to the finish line, the article stumbles badly:

Amid growing animosity, both sides agree that proving intelligent design in traditional scientific terms is next to impossible.

“Can science show you whether God exists? No,” said Dr Wells.

“It is difficult to reconcile science with Christian philosophical questions,” said Vittorio Maestro of Natural History magazine.

This is extraordinarily misleading. The central tenet of design theory is that design is scientifically detectable in nature. By studying a bacterial flagellum we can see that the bacterial flagellum was designed but not who designed it. This latter point is what the design theorist means when he says science cannot tell us “whether God exists.”

Perhaps the reporter simply misunderstood this point. But if so, why was the news agency clear-headed enough to produce the following portion halfway through the article?

In response to Michael Behe’s case for intelligent design in a recent edition of The New York Times, two letters to the paper’s editor charged design theory with being untestable. Design theory has failed to produce “statements that are susceptible to testing,” wrote Karen Rosenberg. Similarly, Donald Terndrup asserted , “Design will be a real science” when and only when “we have testable answers for these questions.”

But as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer has explained, the methodology used for intelligent design is strikingly similar to that used by Darwinists to argue for common descent. An argument against intelligent design “that appears frequently both in conversation and in print finds expression as follows: ‘Miracles are unscientific because they can not be studied empirically. Design invokes miraculous events; therefore design is unscientific. Moreover, since miraculous events can’t be studied empirically, they can’t be tested. Since scientific theories must be testable, design is, again, not scientific.’

Meyer continues: