Science Reporting

Penn State’s Center for Infectious Diseases is having a Darwin Day celebration with: THE WORLD’S LARGEST EDIBLE TREE OF LIFE Boy, it seems like Darwin Day comes earlier and earlier every year. It’s only two weeks away and I haven’t even finished my shopping or got my Darwin Day lights put up.

Forthekids, a blogger who writes regularly at Reasonable Kansans, has been keeping things interesting since August of last year, holding the Kansas media accountable and getting to the truth of the matter, especially in regards to the debate over intelligent design. She had a great post Sunday on the nature of science and how those involved in the debate often are mischaracterized and misunderstood. Forthekids’ response to Jeremy, a commenter who claimed she was “being deceived” by the *ahem* slick army of ID proponents, follows below:

NPR’s Morning Edition recently had a story on Northwestern High school in Baltimore. Students there have been struggling to pass the state science test. The interesting part of this story is the muddled but all-too-common way the featured biology teacher handles students’ perception of conflict between their religious beliefs and Darwinian theory.

Dr. Jonathan Wells today has a short opinion piece in his alma mater’s newspaper, the Yale Daily News, that encouarges churches not to honor Darwinism on Evolution Sunday because Darwinism as a theory is simply bad science. But experiments have consistently failed to support the hypothesis that variations (including those produced by genetic mutation) and selection (natural or artificial) can produce new species, organs and body plans. And what may have once looked like solid evidence for universal common ancestry (fossils, embryos and molecular comparisons) is now plagued by growing inconsistencies. It is actually the Darwinists who brush aside these awkward facts who “embrace scientific ignorance.” You can read the entire piece here.

In Part I of this short response, I explained some false information about intelligent design promoted by George Kampis at East Tennessee State University. This second and final post will discuss the false information about both intelligent design arguments and Phillip Johnson that Kampis spread. Dr. Kampis’s view was summarized as: “Dr. Phillip Johnson, ID founder and longtime critic of Charles Darwin, rejects the concept of natural selection” There are many problems here. “Intelligent design” was founded by scientists, and the term was coined in its modern form by chemist Charles Thaxton in the mid-1980s, before Johnson got involved with the subject. Jonathan Witt’s The Origin of Intelligent Design: A brief history of the scientific theory of intelligent design gives Read More ›

The County Press Online newspaper has an insightful editorial pointing out that the debate over evolution has hardly been laid to rest. The 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District decision in our fair state was thought to resolve the debate that Intelligent Design is a religious movement, just a new wrinkle on Creationism. That hasn’t happened largely because Intelligent Design, or I.D., is not.

Samuel Chen and William Dembski are discussing a talk given by Donald Wise at the Geological Society for America conference in October, 2005, where Wise recommended that Darwinists use dysteleological arguments against ID rather than discussing science. Wise stated in his talk abstract that Darwinists contending against ID should not go “off-message with debates on origins of life” but should “pound simple themes of obvious design failures.” Basically, Wise recommended that they avoid discussing relevant scientific questions and instead raise fallacious and irrelevant theological objections to ID, which have nothing to do with ID and to which religions have had answers for millennia. But then again, Wise was not interested in addressing the scientific issues, as his talk’s abstract suggested, Read More ›

In the New Scientist profile last month of the new intelligent design research lab, there was discussion of two technical articles published in the Journal of Molecular Biology by protein scientist Doug Axe (for abstracts, see here and here). As the New Scientist acknowledged, funding for the research underlying these peer-reviewed articles was provided by Discovery Institute’s research fellowship program—thus disproving the twin canards that Discovery Institute does not support scientific research, and that pro-ID scientists do not publish peer-reviewed research. Yet the New Scientist tried its best to downplay the relevance of the articles to the theory of intelligent design, contrasting the positive interpretations of Axe’s research offered by intelligent design theorists William Dembski and Stephen Meyer with the dismissive views of unnamed “scientists.” The implication seemed to be that Dembski and Meyer have misrepresented Axe’s research by claiming that it provides evidence against neo-Darwinism and corroboration for intelligent design.

The Guardian published an editorial by Richard Buggs today which corrects the error, so common in the British media, that intelligent design is not to be seriously evaluated as science but conveniently written off as “religion.”

Buggs, who holds a DPhil in plant ecology and evolution from the University of Oxford and sits on the scientific panel of Truth in Science, first addresses the claims made by Darwin’s defenders:

Darwin made a massive contribution to science, and his ideas still suggest hypotheses today. These provide the starting point for my own research, published in journals of evolution. But despite the brilliance of Darwin’s work, it is overoptimistic to claim that his theory explains the origin of all living things.

Casey Luskin recently highlighted the mocking, anti-religious attitude expressed by Darwinists promoting the so-called “Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” Now in an interview with the Toronto Star, Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has defended such mocking of traditional religion by Darwinists as “light hearted fun” that is “probably healthy.” Indeed, according to Branch, such mockery seems to be a perfectly legitimate activity for Darwinists “who need the chance to blow off steam” after engaging in the “tiring and often thankless chore” of battling “creationist activity.” Branch further suggests that criticism of anti-religious Darwinist propaganda by Luskin and others affiliated with Discovery Institute is illegitimate, asking: “Why would mocking traditional religion be of concern to a purely scientific organization?”

There is a perfectly obvious answer to Branch’s question, which I will get to in a moment. But first I have a question of my own: Why is mocking traditional religion in the name of science apparently OK for the NCSE?