Robert Crowther

Darwin Day in America that is. The new book by CSC associate director John West is now available in bookstores and online. If you missed West at the Heritage Foundation yesterday you can now watch or listen online. Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of ScienceWatch | Streaming MP3 | Save MP3 | Details

The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski answers:

In 2001 an internal PBS memo titled The Evolution Controversy, Use It or Lose It: Evolution Project/WGBH Boston, revealed an improper political agenda behind PBS’s miniseries “Evolution.” The memo made very clear how “Evolution” would be used to influence government officials and marketed to the public in an effort to exercise control over how evolution is taught in public schools.

Here they go again. November 13th, PBS’s NOVA will air Judgment Day, which PBS describes as “recreations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as ‘What is evolution?’ and ‘Does intelligent design qualify as science?'” You can bet there won’t be any leaked memos about how they plan to spin the Dover trial. (We hardly need one having been inundated with misrepresentation after mistreprsentation of the trial’s impact for almost two years now.)

CSC senior fellow Benjamin Wiker has had an opportunity to interview Oxford philosopher Antony Flew. Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher, held a number of distinguished teaching posts at British universities and had been a prominent atheist throughout the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, he was sort of Richard Dawkins before Dawkins, his name synonymous with staunchly materialistic beliefs. Another CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Witt, first wrote on Flew abandoning his adherence to atheism back in 2004 in the Seattle Times. So this isn’t exactly new news. However, Flew has now published a book explaining in more details his change of mind titled, “There Is A God.” In it he explains his change as a journey into reason.Flew told Read More ›

Click here to view a PDF of the full cover. (file size is 3mb)

In a bold move, the little-known group Florida Citizens for Science are excommunicating all scientists who raise any concerns about neo-Darwinism from the “scientific community.”

In an Orlando Sentinel story about the adoption of new science standards, Joe Wolf, president of Florida Citizens for Science and newly anointed spokesperson for the worldwide “scientific community,” had this to say about the scientific problems with neo-Darwinism:

“It’s a PR issue,” he said. “And it’s a religious issue. In the scientific community, it’s not an issue.”(emphasis mine)

Here are members of the scientific community to whom it is an issue, and who I am sure will be surprised to be so unceremoniously booted from the “scientific community”:

Micheal Behe has a three-part post titled Kenneth R. Miller and the Problem of Evil (part 1, part 2, part 3)on his Amazon author’s page in which he makes a pretty bold assertion about one of his loudest critics: Kenneth Miller is an intelligent design proponent. Behe is serious, adding that “with respect to design, he and I differ only on degree, not on principle.”Behe’s posts come as a response to a second, needless to say negative, review of his new book The Edge of Evolution by Miller in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Despite Darwinist’s efforts to affect a sort of crib death by attacking the book relentlessly, The Edge of Evolution is doing well in terms of sales to Read More ›

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O’Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O’Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so. (see here, here and here to start) Compare O’Reilly’s misunderstanding with this letter from a guy who clearly gets it. It was unfortunate too Read More ›

So, along with their October issue, Wired has published a Geekipedia supplement, 149 People, Places, Ideas & Trends You Need To Know, and nestled between innovation and internet radio is intelligent design. An intricate organ like the eye relies on specialized parts, none of which work without the others. It’s hard to imagine, they say, such a system evolving by natural selection (although the work of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins provides some ideas on how it might happen). Their preferred explanation: an “intelligent designer” who drafted the blueprint for life. The Geek’s treatment is just a bit better than Wikipedia (not hard to accomplish), but needs some help. For instance, they claim: “And since it can’t Read More ›

Today (or yesterday depending on which side of the pond you’re on), evolutionary philosopher Jerry Fodor has stepped out and published an article that puts his entire career at risk, not to mention possibly kissing good-bye any chance he’ll ever get another research grant.