Culture

California Literary Review has a short and insightful interview with Michael Behe about his latest book and among other things asked him what evidence there is of a designer.Behe explains in part: Whenever we perceive a “purposeful arrangement of parts” we suspect design. The more parts there are, and the more clearly they fit the purpose, the more confident our conclusion of design becomes. In the past fifty years science has discovered a very purposeful arrangement of parts in the cell’s molecular machinery. That is the evidence for the involvement of a designer in life on earth. You can read the full interview here.

What a difference a month, and a couple likely internal memos, can make. Last month I discussed the fact that newly reported Homo erectus fossils predated fossils of “Homo” habilis, meaning that habilis could not possibly have been an evolutionary link between the Australopithecine apes and our genus Homo. When the press covered that story, Harvard biological anthropologist Daniel Lieberman was quoted in the New York Times stating that those fossils “show ‘just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.’” It’s a fascinating admission, and I wrote at the time, “Daniel Lieberma[n] apparently did not get the memo about refraining from making Read More ›

The Baylor student newspaper continues to report on the story of the shut down of distinguished professor Robert Marks’ evolutionary informatics website due to aonymous complaints that it was pro-intelligent design. Baylor president John Lilley refused to speak with Expelled filmmakers about the suppression of intelligent design scientists and scholars. Filmmakers had to settle speaking to a public relations reprsentative and the Dean of Marks’ school. “With both of them it was really limited because they have a certain line they are holding, which the issues are all about procedures and not about the content,” Mathis said, “and all the information we have seen says that that’s not true.”Mathis said the main indication to him about the issue being about Read More ›

Earlier this summer, Mike Gene posted on Telic Thoughts a YouTube video where a contestant on a French version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” was asked a question where he had to decide whether it was the Sun, or the Moon that revolved around the Earth. The contestant (see below) wasn’t sure, so he polled the audience for the right answer. After the poll, 56% of the French audience thought the Geocentric model of the Solar System was correct, i.e. they thought the sun revolved around the earth, rather than visa versa. After much deliberation, this French contestant went with the majority vote and decided that the Sun revolves around the earth. What does this say about scientific Read More ›

In July, I noted that Francisco Ayala wrote an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing evolution as “randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process” where “is no entity or person who is selecting adaptive combinations.” Clearly, some theists might find that such descriptions of evolution contravene their religious beliefs. Indeed, there are a number of recent examples of scientific papers promoting evolution alongside anti-religious sentiments: It seems that none of these scientists got Eugenie Scott’s memo to not promote evolution alongside materialistic philosophy. While I may not agree with what these Darwinists assert, and personally hope that more scientists would take Eugenie Scott’s advice to leave out materialistic philosophy when promoting evolution, it seems that Read More ›

This past spring, anti-ID faculty at Southern Methodist University (SMU) refused to engage in a debate over intelligent design. Now that Discovery Institute’s activities on the SMU campus are over, some of these faculty are sponsoring a course entitled “The Scientific Method – Critical and Creative Thinking (Debunking Pseudoscience).” The course has a clear bias against ID, as the course website has a page devoted to ID titled “(Un)Intelligent Design,” which states, “You don’t have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap.” They remain true to their promise to offer a one-sided and biased presentation: Their listing of course readings on ID lacks a single article that is friendly towards ID! The Read More ›

MSNBC loves to promote the view that humans evolved from anthropoid ancestors (see here or here for a couple examples). Now MSNBC has created an online exhibit (and accompanying article) entitled “Before and After Humans” that not only promotes standard views of humans evolution, but also supports transhumanism: the view that humans will evolve into a new, higher species. MSNBC’s “possible futur[e]” for the human species goes something like this: Within one million years, global gene mixing eliminates the races and the “Unihumans” develop a global “monoculture.” That sounds reasonable enough. Next some global catastrophe kills off large portions of humanity, and the “Survivalistians” must adapt to extreme conditions, evolving “night-vision” and “radiation-shielding skin.” If that sounds a little weird, Read More ›

According to CSC senior fellow and leading ID theorist William Dembski, what follows is: “[A] big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID. Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks’s work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design.” Read on if you care at all about academic freedom and protecting the right of scientists to freedom of scientific inquiry. What a difference a year or two makes. Or not. The ugly specter of academic suppression seems incapable of being dispelled at Read More ›

Regular visitors to ENV know well the recent trials and tribulations of astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure in spite of his stellar credentials. Now it seems the rest of the world will learn about Gonzalez’ persecution for being a proponent of intelligent design. Expelled, the forthcoming film that explores the academic persecution of pro-ID scientists, apparently will be featuring some of Gonzalez’s story. After his tenure was denied earlier this year, a faculty member at ISU on the tenure committee admitted he voted against Gonzalez because of his support for, and research into, intelligent design theory. While he didn’t teach about ID in his classes at Iowa State University, Gonzalez did co-author an important ID book, The Privileged Read More ›