Robert Crowther

Casey Luskin and John West were in Oklahoma yesterday at an Academic Freedom Day event hosted by the IDEA club at University of Oklahoma. Not surprisingly Darwinists were in attendance, and showed their complete and utter lack of civility. Casey sent me this e-mail recapping once such encounter during the Q&A following his presentation.

Pro-Evolution Blogger Abbie Smith Flipped Me Off on Friday Night, and Here’s the Story
University of Oklahoma (OU) graduate student and science-blogger Abbie Smith flipped me off during my talk about academic freedom at the University of Oklahoma on Friday night. But before I get to that part, I’d like to tell what actually happened.

Over at Uncommon Descent, Michael Flannery has an excellent post examining Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, in which the authors try to humanize Darwin by showing that he was driven by his passionate hatred of slavery. But is this accurate? Flannery points out that the main question really is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? Read it all at Uncommon Descent. Then check out Flannery’s own new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism.

This was the Darwin Day video podcast from ID The Future yesterday, but I thought it would be good to highlight it for regular ENV visitors as well. Display content from www.discovery.org Click here to display content from www.discovery.org. Always display content from www.discovery.org Open content directly This special video episode of ID the Future celebrates Darwin Day with a look back at the man and his theory by three scientists and scholars who join in the scientific dissent from evolution. Biologist Jonathan Wells, author and M.D. Geoffrey Simmons, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe shed light on the problems with Darwin’s theory as they share what led each of them to their skepticism. Jonathan Wells first became skeptical of Darwin’s Read More ›

We’re happy to announce the winners of the 2009 Academic Freedom Day Video and Essay Contest. We had lots of great entries, but the judges have narrowed it down and finally selected a Grand Prize overall winner ($500 award), and a 1st place winner ($250 award) in each category. Grand Prize Overall Winner: Joshua Owens, Forth Worth, TX (read the essay here).1st Place Essay Winner: Jaron Daniel Schoone, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (read the essay here).1st Place Video Winner: David Daudelin, Hackettstown, NJ (watch the video here).Essay honorable mention: Sarah Horton, Grove City, PA (read the essay here).Video honorable mention: Brian Miller, Amy Ingermanson, Michael Curtain and Aubrey Burd, Battleground, WA (watch the video here).

The number of fawning pieces about Charles Darwin of late have been overwhelming, to say the least. Likewise the celebrations at biology departments across the country are in full swing today with cake eating contests, Darwin carols, game shows, honorary operas, and even the minting of new money with his likeness in the UK. But there are some over takes on Darwin and his legacy, including a number of articles we’re happy to highlight for your Darwin Day reading pleasure. Enjoy.

Over at Forbes.com they’ve just posted over 20 articles related to Darwin and evolution in advance of next week’s hoopla around the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Kudos to editor Hana Alberts for compiling such compelling reading. As she notes in her introduction to the special report:

More questions than we’d like were raised long ago, and remain unanswered. Two of the biggest: If humans are no different than animals, what is the status of free will, of morality borne from the brain, not the body? Can and should we apply ideas about the “survival of the fittest” to economics, to population control, to law, to love?

These gripping uncertainties spring from our common desire to eliminate uncertainty, or the unknowns of the surrounding universe, by subjecting them to knowledge, scrutiny and documentation. And as a result, we gamely hope that we’ll stumble into some unequivocal truths about our place in the world, and why we are where we are.

To their credit, Forbes solicited articles from a variety of viewpoints, and the authors include CSC Fellows John West and Jonathan Wells, as well as Darwin skeptics like Michael Egnor and Michael Flannery, along with Darwinists like Michael Ruse, Larry Arnhart, Lionel Tiger and more. Here are a few highlights.

[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to critics of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Alas, poor Richard. Out of a job, and still twitching from Ben Stein’s unveiling of his pro-intelligent design tendencies in Expelled last year, he apparently spends his time dogging Ben Stein’s heels. Here’s how a fawning university president gushed about getting an e-mail from Dawkins telling him to bounce Stein as a commencement speaker later this year.

Is the correspondence between you and Professor Richard Dawkins authentic?
Fogel: It is authentic; I admire his work greatly. I have read his work and I have been deeply instructed by it., as I said to him. I was really quite honored to have an e-mail from him directly.

What was the first e-mail from him about?

Fogel: It was to discuss his dismay and concern along the lines we have already discussed.

And also to give me some of his more person background that I had certainly been unaware of. I did not know that he was shown in the movie ‘Expelled’ and that he had been manipulated by the producers and that his words had been used out of context.

Discovery Institute today announced the launch of Academic Freedom Day in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12, 2009. “We’re celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday by supporting what he supported: academic freedom,” said Robert Crowther, Director of Communications at Discovery Institute. “Like Darwin, we recognize the importance of having an open and honest debate between evolution and intelligent design.” In his revolutionary On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” This quote is the cornerstone of the Institute’s Academic Freedom Day efforts. The Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is sponsoring Academic Freedom Day, assisting student groups, clubs, Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: Douglas Axe is actually a molecular biologist, not a microbiologist. And it’s been pointed out that the quote I used from Axe’s piece that describes the Darwinian story as requiring 400 million years had a context — the supposed evolution of a proto-insect into a wide variety of insect life forms. However, the way I presented it makes it sound like the whole of Darwinian evolution was only supposed to require 400 million years, which wasn’t what Axe was saying.] As the number of celebrations of Darwin and his theory mount ad nauseam, one evolution researcher suggests that the emperor has no clothes. Douglas Axe, a microbiologist and director of the Biologic Institute, has posted an article pointing Read More ›

Discovery Institute is pleased to announce two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture from July 10-18, 2009 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology). These seminars are designed for highly-motivated college students who seek a deeper understanding of science and its implications for society. The seminar focusing on ID in the natural sciences will explore the scientific issues in greater technical detail and the seminar on ID in the social sciences and humanities will give more in-depth attention to the social impact of science. Past seminars have included such speakers Read More ›