Robert Crowther

We like Bruce Ramsey, editorial writer for the Seattle Times, and we often agree with his columns. And we are grateful that the Times sponsored the recent and definitive debate on intelligent design between philosopher of science and geologist Steve Meyer and astrobiologist Peter G. Ward. Ramsey, who attended The Talk of the Times debate at Townhall and is a fan of Ward — he cites Ward’s books in this morning’s column — was wrong, however, in suggesting that Meyer’s formulations are merely “clever”.

But don’t take our word for it. WATCH the debate yourself on Thursday at 8 p.m on TVW in the Seattle area and check schedules for other times elsewhere. We hope it will be made available for a downlink later, too.

You can now listen to Steve Meyer’s winning debate with Darwinist Peter Ward. And, if you’re in the Northwest you can watch the debate on TVW Thursday, May 4 at 8pm. Reporters and columnists especially should listen to this as a real debate by scientists on the science of Darwinian evolution is almost as rare as life in the universe.

With the rise in public desire for information about intelligent design and the overall debate over how to teach evolution it is no surprise that we’re seeing more classes on intelligent design at colleges, albeit usually in philosophy as opposed to science. Much attention has been given to the future course on ID recently announced at Cornell. But, Knox College is just now finishing a course on the subject. From the media report it’s a little hard to tell what the actual content of the course was. But according to the professor Martin Roth students seemed to appreciate the chance to learn about ID. “All of the students are now very much aware that the issue is far more complicated Read More ›

Human Events Online has published a wonderful little essay by Greg Frankey explaining how liberal organizations like the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are working to keep any mention of intelligent design out of public school classes of any stripe, let alone science classes. In arguing so he shows how the teaching of evolution itself is nothing more than dogma, and points to some of the more pressing problems with the whole theory. As counterintuitive as it seems that a species could develop new physical traits simply because such a mutation might be advantageous (can we all learn to fly or to breathe underwater if we just wish to long enough?), it simply defies credulity Read More ›

Last night, the Seattle Times Talk of the Times at Town Hall Seattle featured a debate over evolution and intelligent design between CSC Director Stephen Meyer and US paleontologist Peter Ward. The event was sold out with 800+ in attendance for what turned out to be a really good debate.

David Postman of the Seattle Times did a fine job as the moderator of the debate. If you saw my post yesterday about Postman’s front page article in yesterday’s Times you know that I had some misgivings about his being the moderator. However, I have to congratulate him for his objectivity and balance, and his overall good job in keeping the debate both substantive and enlightening.

Tonight, Seattle Times reporter David Postman will moderate a debate over intelligent design and evolution between CSC Director Stephen Meyer and UW Paleontologist Peter Ward. If Postman’s article in the Times today is any guide, Meyer has his work cut out for him trying to correct and educate the moderator, as well as having to refute the typical mischaracterizations and misplaced attacks he’ll likely hear from Ward.

The fact is that Postman came in to our offices and spent a fair amount of time interviewing Bruce Chapman, and separately going over the science of intelligent design (which is virtually ignored in Postman’s piece — funny for a discussion about a science issue) with Meyer.
Yet his piece is full of errors of fact.

“Intelligent design argues that life is so biologically complex, there must be some kind of supernatural designer involved. The concept, however, leaves the designer unnamed.”

This one sentence is doubly wrong. No, ID is not an argument from ignorance. And, no, ID doesn’t claim that the intelligent cause has to be supernatural. (Postman apparently so strongly believes this fallacy that he repeats it later in the story, a second time: “gaps that can only be explained by the presence of a supernatural designer.”)

Darwinists claim that their theory is the foundation of all science. Indeed, we are often told that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of it.

In a news article last November, a Stanford biologist claimed he had been guided in his research by Darwinian evolution:

“Researchers at the School of Medicine uncovered obestatin [an appetite-suppressing hormone] by using the principles of evolution to pick clues from data held in the Human Genome Project, as well as the genome sequencing projects for many other organisms, among them yeast, fruit flies and mice. ‘Darwin led us to this new hormone,’ said senior author Aaron Hsueh, an endocrinologist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology.”

The Stanford press release continued:

Stephen Heller has an article at the Design Forum looking at semantics and asking who it is that owns the term intelligent design. It’s an issue that has a lot of relevance for Heller’s audience since they are all graphic designers. Design Forum is a part of the website of the AIGA, — American Institute of Graphic Arts. In Heller’s world “intelligent design” has a much different meaning than in my world. His concern seems to be that the phrase has different meaning for some people than it does for him and his colleagues.

When I hear a graphic designer comment on intelligent design I know that most likely he’s talking about a graphic image of some sort. Or, these days, making a bad play on words. Of course, this is why we have context.

“This latest fossil find poses no threat to intelligent design.” So says Discovery Institute senior fellow and leading intelligent design theorist Dr. William Dembski, adding:

“Intelligent design does not so much challenge whether evolution occurred but how it occurred. In particular, it questions whether purposeless material processes–as opposed to intelligence–can create biological complexity and diversity.”

The journal Nature is making news by publishing a report today that a group of researchers claim to have uncovered the skeleton of a 375-million-year-old fish in the Canadian Arctic that they believe is a missing link in the evolution of some fishes to becoming land walking vertebrates. The fish has been named Tiktaalik roseae, meaning “large shallow water fish.”

Even though this find does not challenge intelligent design, there may be good reasons to be skeptical about it.

After several years of claiming that there is no debate about the theory of intelligent design (ID) researchers have published an article bringing the debate to the pages of the latest issue of Science. Three researchers, Jamie Bridgham, Sean Carroll and Joe Thornton claim to have shown how an irreducibly complex system, such as that described by Discovery senior fellow Michael Behe, might have arisen as the result of gene duplication and a few point mutational changes. “This continues the venerable Darwinian tradition of making grandiose claims based on piddling results,” said biochemist Michael Behe, who developed the theory of irreducible complexity in his best-selling book Darwin’s Black Box. “There is nothing in the paper that an ID proponent would Read More ›