Culture

Wednesday, Stephen Meyer will be a guest on The Dennis Miller Show. Listen in with Dennis’ other 1.75 million fans as they discuss the California Science Center’s recent banning of pro-ID film Darwin’s Dilemma and Meyer’s landmark book Signature in the Cell. The segment is scheduled live at 7:30am Pacific coast time, which is mid-way through the show’s first hour.

The knee-jerk response of Darwin’s defenders is to suppress any message that challenges Darwinian evolution’s orthodoxy. Case in point, this past week the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the California Science Center, a “department of the State of California,” banned the screening of the new intelligent design film, Darwin’s Dilemma, after the screening became public knowledge and there was intense pressure to cancel. And get this, from what we’ve heard the intense pressure came from the Smithsonian Institution with which they are affiliated. That’s right, the very same Smithsonian Institution that trampled evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg’s academic freedoms. The very same Smithsonian Institution that apologized for allowing another ID film, The Privileged Planet, to be shown at the Institution’s Read More ›

A new podcast out today at ID the Future features breaking news that could affect your freedom to present views that dissent from Darwin in a public place. CSC Associate Director John West explains in an interview here.

The Los Angeles Daily News this morning is reporting the California Science Center’s outrageous cancellation of a screening of the new intelligent design documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. The California Science Center is a “department of the State of California,” and its IMAX Theater had been rented by a private group, the American Freedom Alliance, to hold the Los Angeles premiere of the film as part of a series of activities commemorating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But after the screening became public knowledge, the pressure from Darwinist censors apparently became too intense. So this week the Science Center expelled the film, possibly after being intimidated by the Smithsonian Institution, Read More ›

Today on the Michael Medved show, arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, author of The Greatest Show on Earth, was asked point-blank by Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman why he wouldn’t debate Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell. His response? Weak sauce:

I have never come across any kind of creationism, whether you call it intelligent design or not, which has a serious scientific case to put.
The objection to having debates with people like that is that it gives them a kind of respectability. If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives them a respectability, which I do not think your people have earned.

Hm. Did Professor Dawkins have these same scruples when he went up against John Lennox in 2007?
No matter — Professor Dawkins made his position clear enough: address young earth creationism, then tell your audience that you’ve destroyed intelligent design… which of course, even Richard Dawkins admits, is not the same thing as young earth creationism.
Read the transcript of the entire exchange below — and note Bruce Chapman’s great line about Expelled:

I thought Richard Dawkins’ science was outdated, but I didn’t realize just how badly outdated until I watched this amazing You Tube clip from “The Genius of Charles Darwin,” a science documentary Dawkins hosted last year. If you watch until 7 minutes and 30 seconds into the clip, you will see Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams magically appear onscreen right before your very eyes: That’s right, Richard Dawkins circa 2008 was still peddling fraudulent “evidence” for evolution that no self-respecting embryologist would defend, and that most biology textbooks dropped years ago due in large part to biologist Jonathan Wells’ masterful book Icons of Evolution, which shamed Darwinists into cleaning up their act. Randy Olson, call home. Armed with retro science Read More ›

Nature has recently published an interesting paper which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled, “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework, but the results line up very well with arguments I made in The Edge of Evolution. This is the second of several posts discussing it.

Using clever synthetic and analytical techniques, Bridgham et al (2009) show that the more recent hormone receptor protein that they synthesized, a GR-like protein, can’t easily revert to the ancestral structure and activity of an MR-like protein because its structure has been adjusted by selection to its present evolutionary task, and multiple amino acid changes would be needed to switch it back. That is a very general, extremely important point that deserves much more emphasis. In all cases — not just this one — natural selection is expected to hone a protein to suit its current activity, not to suit some future, alternate function. And that is a very strong reason why we should not expect a protein performing one function in a cell to easily be able to evolve another, different function by Darwinian means. In fact, the great work of Bridgham et al (2009) shows that it may not be do-able for Darwinian processes even to produce a protein performing a function very similar to that of a homologous protein.

Before reading their paper, even I would have happily conceded for the sake of argument that random mutation plus selection could convert an MR-like protein to a GR-like protein and back again, as many times as necessary. Now, thanks to the work of Bridgham et al (2009), even such apparently minor switches in structure and function are shown to be quite problematic. It seems Darwinian processes can’t manage to do even as much as I had thought.

Barbara Forrest has issued a press release protesting good rules adopted in September, 2009 by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) for implementing Louisiana’s Science Education Act (LSEA). The LSEA is an academic freedom bill passed into law in Louisiana last year. Dr. Forrest seems to think that by frequently inserting the word “creationist” into her press release and falsely labeling people like Darwin-doubting biologist Dr. Don Ewert as “creationists,” she can logically argue that the rules are “pro-creationist.” The reality is that BESE’s new rules are fair and pro-academic freedom, not “pro-creationist.” But as will be seen, fairness and academic freedom are exactly what evolution lobbyists like Dr. Forrest fear the most. Blatant Misrepresentations of Read More ›

Norman, Oklahoma, that is.

Okay, so there aren’t any real beaches in Norman, Oklahoma. But when Steve Meyer and I went there recently, the Darwinists who have installed themselves as absolute dictators at the University of Oklahoma (OU) made our arrival feel like D-Day.

On September 28, Steve gave a talk on his best-selling book Signature in the Cell at the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the OU campus. The following evening, September 29, Steve and I answered questions after a showing of the new film Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, again on the OU campus.

Darwinists at OU are still gloating over the abuse to which they subjected Dr. William A. Dembski in 2007. On September 14, 2009, one of the organizers of that abuse, OU graduate student Abbie Smith, announced on her foul-mouthed blog that Steve and I were coming to OU and urged her readers to give us the same treatment.

Seeking relief from the demands of geschaeft, The Washington Times reported recently, senior officials at the National Science Foundation routinely spend a great deal of their time (and our money) visiting pornographic sites on the Internet.

Just possibly, I suspect, they spend all of their time on stress relief and none on the public’s business, stress relief so striking as to cancel its cause entirely.

“The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive,” the Times reported, “they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.”