Robert Crowther

The debate over how to teach evolution has ignited a firestorm of controversy in Britain. And, as hard to believe as it is, the truth is that the reporting in the UK has been even worse than the reporting on the issue here in the US.

BBC News is reporting that 89 British secondary schools are using the materials sent to them by Truth in Science (TiS), which we reported on last month. The packets include the documentary “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and were sent to over 5000 schools in Britain, igniting a national debate over the teaching of evolution.

Science writer Denyse O’Leary has just published a four-part series about peer-review on her Post-Darwinist website. It is a thorough overview of what peer-review is and what some of the problems are with the current system. She has some interesting ideas on how this may be resolved in the future, but it is her identification of one major problem that is of most interest to the ID/evolution debate.

Discovery Institute senior fellow and nationally acclaimed bioethicist Wesley J Smith is having it out with NRO’s John Derbyshire over human exceptionalism.

In the wake of US elections, which largely focused on international issues such as terrorism and the war in Iraq, there have been some who think that this somehow means that scientists should ignore evidence for intelligent design, such as the fact that digital code in DNA and molecular machines in cells exist. Canadian science writer Denyse O’Leary (first of Post-Darwinist, now of Mindful Hack fame) commented on our tendency in the US to think that elections here set the pace for everything else in the world. I hope no one will mind me saying this but many American intelligentsias are very, very parochial. Do they think they have a patent on the ID controversy? Do they think everyone knows Read More ›

Cornell Professor Emeritus Richard A. Baer has an opinion piece in the Cornell Daily Sun that is right on target in several areas but completely lost when it comes to freedom of scientific inquiry and intelligent design. Baer rightly points out instances where staunch Darwinists such as Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins have clearly crossed out of the realm of science and into philosophy by making dogmatically materialistic statements such as Sagan’s famous line that “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Baer explains that in his experience:

A far more serious problem at Cornell and at most universities is the many illegal border crossings that go on in the opposite direction: claims made by scientists, speaking as scientists, that are really theological, philosophical or ethical claims, rather than scientific ones.

The Denver Post published a very good review of two important new books about the debate over Darwinism and intelligent design, earlier this week. Doug Groothuis reviews both CSC Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells’s new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, and the new book by professional skeptic Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.

Later this month Discovery Institute Press will publish a new book examining the misguided attempts of some conservatives to embrace Darwinism and champion it as compatible with conservative views. Most conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin’s theory, yet a number of thinkers on the right, such as George Will, James Q. Wilson, and Larry Arnhart, have mounted a vigorous defense of Darwinism. Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John West will explain in Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest that the attempts to reconcile conservatism and Darwinian biology ultimately misunderstand both.

The September/October issue of Books & Culture has a review by CSC senior fellow Jonathan Wells of The Plausibility of Life by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, two eminent biologists. The book has been acclaimed since its arrival earlier this year for providing answers for the last remaining “gap” in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Wells — an eminent biologist himself — is, not surprsingly, skeptical of the claim. (He knows a thing or two about the gaps in Darwin’s theory.)