Science Reporting

One has to wonder whether the Dallas Morning News reporter even attended today’s meeting of the Texas State Board of Education. It’s hard to tell from the garbled account the paper just published, which pretty much claims that the evolution dogmatists won everything. Of course, the truth is almost exactly the opposite. The article is a classic example of either sloppy or selective reporting. For example, the piece talks about the removal of the “strengths and weaknesses provision” from the Texas science standards, but neglects to mention the adoption of even stronger language that requires students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence”! The article likewise talks about the removal of Chairman Don McElroy’s extra provisions on common Read More ›

In a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution, Texas today moved to the head of the class by requiring students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence” and specifically requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations. “Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can’t be questioned,” said Dr. John West, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute. “Contrary to the claims of the evolution lobby, absolutely nothing the Board did promotes ‘creationism’ or religion in the classroom. Groups that assert otherwise Read More ›

Chances are you have heard the story of Phineas Gage at some point. Most of us get it in our General Psychology courses in high school and college, the story of a man who had a horrible accident and was never the same again — sort of like Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, but the other way around.

The idea this anecdote supposedly supports is that personality = the brain, as evidenced by changes to the brain (like a spike through the head) that cause changes in personality. Pretty straightforward stuff. There’s only one problem.

It’s not true. Denyse O’Leary explains at Uncommon Descent:

An article in the San Antonio Express misstates some facts in its coverage of this week’s upcoming Texas Board of Education vote on evolution. The article isn’t all bad: It allows Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin to offer an opposing view, and Luskin’s views are described accurately. But the article also states that the Texas Board of Education “voted with the science experts in January to remove the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ standard” from Texas science standards. The Board did indeed vote to do this (to its shame). But in repealing the strengths and weaknesses language, Board members did not vote “with the science experts.” The Board appointed six science experts to review the draft standards. Three of the experts opposed the “strengths and weaknesses” provision, but three of the experts supported the “strengths and weaknesses” language! So it would be much more accurate to say that the Board in January sided with some of their experts while ignoring others.

The article also erroneously claims that in 2005 the Kansas Board of Education “approved new science standards allowing the teaching of intelligent design, which posits that a supernatural creator is required to explain life’s complexity.”

The Associated Press has corrected an inaccurate article about the Iowa Academic Freedom bill which had stated that “The bill asserts that teaching religious theories of evolution falls under academic freedom. It would let teachers at all education levels teach religious theories as science and forbid them from discounting non-science based answers from students.” The bill, of course, says precisely the opposite, as it expressly states: “This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” Thankfully, after being shown the actual text of the bill, the AP realized that it was erroneous to claim that the bill allows Read More ›

In Part 3 of this series, I discussed a recent article published on MSNBC titled, “Fossils reveal truth about Darwin’s theory” that puffs the fossil evidence for evolution. In that installment, I discussed the fact that the article relied entirely upon evolutionary scientist Donald Prothero touting various examples of alleged transitional forms — but that Prothero’s arguments didn’t disclose the real history of the fossil record, and included much speculation and assumption-laden evolutionary interpretation. One of the showcase fossils in the article is the alleged “frogamander,” which is supposedly a transitional form between frogs and salamanders. Frogs and salamanders are of course both amphibians, and indeed the article admits that the fossil is simply “a toothed amphibian” (nothing extraordinary), and Read More ›

In Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed two of MSNBC’s recent puff-pieces promoting evolution that they’ve published to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday. The final article, which pushed evolution much harder than the others, was titled, “Fossils reveal truth about Darwin’s theory” (also posted on Foxnews) and gloated, “Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory. One frequently cited ‘hole’ in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, a.k.a. missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.” The initial glaring problem with the MNSBC puff-piece is that so-called “creationists” are by no means the only ones discussing a lack of transitional fossils Read More ›

As part of their celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday, MSNBC has been printing puff-pieces promoting evolution. In Part 1, I discussed their piece using weak and controversial evidence documenting the alleged dinosaur to bird transition. In this section, I’ll be discussing another little piece they published, “Seven signs of evolution in action.” This piece takes very little time to rebut, and those familiar with weak arguments used to buttress evolution in this debate will likely be able to guess the arguments used in the “Seven signs” piece simply by my rebuttal. In fact, the interesting part about this piece is not so much the rebuttal, but the quality of evidence that MSNBC is using to promote evolution: 7 Signs of Read More ›

With Darwin’s 200th birthday recently upon us, the media is pushing Darwinism harder than ever. MSNBC, in particular, has recently posted three puff-pieces about the evidence for evolution. My purpose here is not to exhaustively rebut everything these articles say, but to show that for a lot of the evidence they cite in favor of evolution, there’s another side to the story that isn’t being represented. It’s too bad the media is only telling the public one-side of the story. Fluffy Evidence for the Dino To Bird Transition The first piece, titled “9 links in the dinosaur-to-bird transition is intended to bolster the theory that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. The MSNBC piece cites as its primary piece of evidence Read More ›

In a recent post, Dr. Steven Novella took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Dr. Novella objects to my observation that there the fossil record does not accord with Darwinian predictions of gradual transitions between species. The fossil record shows sharp discontinuity between species, not the gradual transitions that Darwinism inherently predicts.

Dr. Novella writes:

Darwin himself thought that the fossil record would show gradual continual change among species. What we found, rather, was relative stability punctuated by speciation events – species would remain mostly stable for about 2 million years on average, then disappear from the fossil record. Meanwhile, new species would appear. Gould and Eldridge termed this pattern punctuated equilirium [sic], and creationists have dutifly [sic] ignored them ever since. Egnor is also wrong on many levels. First, while species are generally stable, they do drift over their time on earth. Sometimes they even show gradual directed change.

Next, Dr. Novella makes the astonishing gaffe: