Bioethics

In nine highly readable chapters The Darwin Myth takes its reader from Darwin’s boyhood of wealth and privilege, to his brief stint in theology school, his quest for adventure, and the development of his “one long argument” that would form the remainder of his life’s work. This bold and uncompromising biography exposes Darwin “warts and all,” the flaws of Darwinian evolution, and the dark and disturbing consequences of a theory that easily lent itself to social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and even Hitler’s völkisch racism.

Does science have a magisterium?

That’s the question Jay Richards puts to NRO’s John Derbyshire today at The American, where he aptly notes:

Derbyshire appeals to a scientific magisterium: “Science contains a core magisterium, which we can and do trust.” This should give anyone who has followed the climate change debate the creeps–a reaction Derbyshire anticipates in the column. But he seems blind to why talk of a scientific magisterium is creepy; so let me spell it out.

Other than listing the things Derbyshire thinks are settled and “without serious competitors,” he doesn’t really even identify what the magisterium is. This gives the impression that the magisterium is the subjectively determined list of things that people with power claim are settled. And that impression encourages the postmodern doubters of truth that Derbyshire hopes to keep back from the gates.

Ideas matter. That’s the lesson of history, and one brought into stark relief by Richard Weikart’s work as an historian. This week Dr. Weikart has an article that delves into what Darwinism really means for Darwinists and morality: The Darwin celebrations this year have reinforced my concern that Darwinism is not merely a scientific theory. For many Darwinists, it is much more than that. For some it is the basis for a secular worldview that not only rejects theism, but also promotes moral relativism. How clearly this is seen in Weikart’s example: A young man was performing rap songs on evolutionary themes that he had been commissioned to write and perform for the Darwin celebrations in Britain. He told us Read More ›

Forget your Prius. Forget all that tedious recycling your kids bug you about. Forget solar panels on your house.

The UN Population Fund has a better way to fight the scourage of global warming:
Condoms.

Fight Climate Change With Free Condoms, U.N. Population Fund Says
London (AP) – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

Who knew that thing you carried in your wallet throughout high school could save the planet.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: “Women with access to reproductive health services … have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions…As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth’s capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic,” the report said.

It’s great that the population control folks want the common man to share the burden of saving the planet. Do they have any particular populations in mind?

Although this year has been widely touted as the “Year of Darwin” because of its big Darwin-related anniversaries, the book reviewers at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London seem less than enthralled with the year’s crop of pro-Darwin retreads from the publishing industry. Indeed, the TLS’s “Books of the Year” issue just released last Friday fails to include any of the year’s big pro-Darwin tomes such as Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True or even Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth among its “Books of the Year.” Instead, the only book so honored that focuses on the Darwin-ID debate is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, which was selected by noted Read More ›

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman has written an insightful essay examining the broader significance of the ClimateGate scandal, including its implications for the Darwin-ID debate. Noting that certain major media outlets have tried to spike the ClimateGate story, Chapman observes that “the story is just too compelling to suppress in other outlets and on the Internet.” But he goes on to ask: what will it take for the media to take up the exactly parallel case of scientists who question the ability of Darwinian natural selection to explain the origin of life and the development of species? In several instances (the Richard Sternberg case, the Guillermo Gonzalez case), email trails have shown a similar attitude of entitlement and coercion. And Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith has an excellent post at his First Things blog on how the recent ClimateGate scandal is just a symptom of a much broader problem involving the ideological corruption of science: Global warming isn’t the only field in which we have witnessed this kind of brazen ideological corruption of science in recent years. I have seen the same approach taken repeatedly against heterodox views in the human cloning/ESCR controversy, to the point that people have been driven off of faculties or denied tenure. My colleagues at… Discovery Institute face a similar buzz saw in their pursuit of intelligent design hypothesis, and then are taunted by the censors for not being published in peer reviewed journals. Indeed, when Richard Read More ›

In his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, Democratic strategist James Carville badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as a wholly negative argument against evolution. What’s most incredible is that Carville makes this inaccurate characterization directly after quoting passages from ID proponents making wholly positive arguments for design. One such passage he quotes is from our Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators, as follows: Intelligent design “begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI)….One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When [intelligent design] researchers find irreducible complexity Read More ›