Culture

Late yesterday we received notice that the Anthropology department at SMU will not take us up on our invitation for a public dialogue about intelligent design and Darwinian evolution.

Robert Kemper, chair of the Anthropology department writes:

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the Friday night session of your conference. We appreciate your recognition of the value of dialogue on issues that have such opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, previously scheduled events and prior commitments prevent our department from taking advantage of this opportunity. We nevertheless remain committed to public understanding of these issues, and to providing the public with information to make intelligent choices.

We’ve yet to hear from the other science departments at SMU that we invited.

It’s interesting that these professors are willing to air their complaints and objections in public forums where there is no way for them to be “heatedly debated and discussed.”

Logan Gage has an insightful article on the forgotten history of eugenics in World Net Daily today. He reminds us that: Eugenics was supposedly the “science” of human breeding. It was promoted by luminaries of biology at Harvard, Princeton and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was, in short, the consensus view of the cultural and academic elite. How did things get so twisted? Click here to read more.

In an over-the-top op-ed in today’s Dallas Morning News, journalist Lee Cullum attacks the upcoming “Darwin v. Design” conference at Southern Methodist University (SMU) as “intellectually confused,” complains that ID proponents “refuse to understand who and what they are,” and asserts that Southern Methodist University “needs to rethink its policy regarded future use of its facilities” in order to prevent intelligent design proponents from expressing their views on the SMU campus in the future.

However, if anyone is “intellectually confused,” it is poor Ms. Cullum, whose article displays her own breathtaking ignorance of both intelligent design and the principles of a free society.

Newsmedia are covering Discovery Institute’s invitation to SMU faculty to debate intelligent design. One Darwinist who urged against debating reportedly said: “ID and evolution are not two scientific theories to be weighed against one another, as if on a balance scale. One is a scientific theory, supported so massively and consistently by empirical evidence as to be virtually unassailable.” If that’s true, then the SMU faculty should have no trouble winning the debate, right? Since a recent Newsweek poll shows that at least half of Americans reject evolution, it would seem that Darwinists need to convince the public of the truth of their theory. Given that Darwinists (a) plainly have a need to convince people that evolution is true, and Read More ›

On March 19 I lectured at Boise State University (BSU) to about 50 mostly-friendly students and community members on “The Positive Case for Intelligent Design.” (The lecture was largely based upon a document I produced by the same title, available here.) BSU is the notorious home of their beloved undefeated-but-yet-#5-ranked Bronco football team, but my lecture was only sponsored by the IDEA Club at Boise State. The club’s leader reports that he’s recently received unfriendly e-mails from a hostile Darwinist. The club’s leader responded nicely, saying, “I hope that you would be willing to come [to Casey Luskin’s lecture],” and also defended himself saying “I am quite content for someone to disagree with my view, but I do not respect Read More ›

CSC senior fellow and Acton Institute Research Fellow Jay Richards was interviewed by The Christian Post about the current controversy over the Darwin vs. Design conference coming up at SMU next month. As if often the case, the question of how evolution should be taught is more pressing for reporters than the scientific evidence at the foundation of either Darwinism or intelligent design. So, how does Richard’s weigh in on the what should be taught question?

We recently reported on a major ID conference in Istanbul, which was organized in part by Mustafa Akyol. Now today, Post-Darwinist highlights an interview with Akyol about what it is that Easterners find discomfiting about Westerners.

A short time ago I posted a story on the celebration in London of the 150th birthday of Karl Pearson, one of the fathers of mathematical statistics and an ardent Darwinist and eugenicist. The celebration focused on Pearson’s contribution to mathematical statistics, which was substantial, but neglected his contribution to eugenics, which was substantial, too.

The only word that Darwinists use less frequently than ‘design’ is ‘eugenics’. It’s disappeared down the Darwin memory hole following the Second World War because the Nazi programs that applied Darwinism to medicine made the real nature of eugenics so apparent that it could no longer be denied. So it was forgotten.

The length some Darwinists have gone to in their efforts to deny that Haeckel’s embryo drawings were fraudulently used in modern biology textbooks has made for some interesting reading over the years. That these efforts were often used to paint intelligent design scientists such as Jonathan Wells as liars is even more outrageous. Where is the evidence for these claims? Or, as Casey Luskin puts it in a new article, “What Do Modern Textbooks Really Say about Haeckel’s Embryos?“

It isn’t just profs in SMU’s Ivory Tower that are afraid of students learning more about the failings of Darwinian evolution. In New Mexico recently an attempt to ensure academic freedom in line with the state’s educational standards has been opposed by local, dogmatic Darwin-only lobbyists. Joe Renick of ID Net New Mexico today has an opinion piece, Fear of Exposure, that shows the intolerance of the Darwinists in regard to any views but their own.