Evolution

I’m a faithful Catholic. I’ve often thought: what if Darwinism were true? I don’t mean all of the philosophical materialism that Darwinists drag along with the science. Materialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn’t exist (it’s neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn’t exist, then materialism can’t be true.

But what about Darwin’s central scientific assertion: that all biological complexity is the result of chance and necessity, at least as well as we humans can discern chance and design. What if experimental evidence demonstrated that we could account for biological information (or whatever we call the astonishing complexity of living things) without inferring design? Would I lose my faith?

This last weekend, I attended Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play “After Darwin” at D.C.’s Church Street Theater.

If you want a clear example of Darwinist sleight-of-hand, read the Panda’s Thumb tirade about my posts on the relevance of Darwinism to modern medicine (here). My interlocutors, between puns on my name, insults and obscenities, raise off-point topics that evade the central issue: is Darwinism, which is the assertion that all biological complexity has arisen by random heritable variation and natural selection, relevant to the practice of medicine? Several bloggers raised the standard Darwinist trope about bacterial antibiotic resistance. This issue is an important source of misunderstanding about the application of Darwin’s theory to medicine.

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.

First Darwinists at SMU demanded that the school keep the debate over Darwin off-campus, arguing for the Darwin vs. Design conference to be cancelled and denied use of campus facilities. Now their attempts at censorship have sparked more controversy than they intended, as evidenced by a response printed in the SMU Daily Campus:

I was amused to read that some of the science department faculty at SMU had protested the proposed Intelligent Design Conference.

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Today, ENV contributor Dr. Michael Egnor will be on Janet Parshall’s America to discuss the recent Newsweek article The Evolution Revolution. Dr. Egnor will be on for the second half of the first hour of the three hour program, which is carried nationwide. You can find a local station here. Members can stream the program directly from Parshall’s website.

Science Daily reports:

Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced the publication of several studies from the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS) in PLoS Biology detailing the discovery of millions of new genes, thousands of new protein families and specifically the characterization of thousands of new protein kinases from ocean microbes using whole environment shotgun sequencing and new computational tools.

This is extraordinary and exciting research, but what does any of this have to do with evolution news?

Last year I wrote about some memory lapses that Brown University biologist and textbook author Ken Miller apparently had while testifying during the Kitzmiller trial regarding his own textbooks. Ken Miller has authored many biology textbooks, and his first textbooks (from the early 1990’s) used Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings and blatantly promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. To his credit, Miller fixed later editions of his textbooks — he took out Haeckel’s drawings and replaced them with real embryo photographs, and he also stopped promoting recapitulation theory. Like many Darwinists, however, Miller then tried to rewrite history and pretend that these mistakes had not been promoted by biologists for many decades. First, read what Miller & Levine’s 1994 version Read More ›

Over at the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) archives, I’ve posted a review of Sean B. Carroll’s book entitled, “The Evolutionary Gospel According to Sean B. Carroll: A Review of Sean B. Carroll’s The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution” (W.W. Norton, 2006). Below are a few excerpts of the review: To ensure the reader adopts his own view of evolution, Carroll resorts to scare tactics. After a bleak discussion of the potentially disastrous consequences of global warming, Carroll explains that “acceptance of [evolutionary biology’s] facts” is not “a matter that should be open to political or philosophical debate.” Carroll, who interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature,” quotes Peter Medawar, saying Read More ›

Dave Thomas has published an op-ed in the Albuquerque Tribune entitled “Intelligent design supporters find new, creative ways to get their message out.” Predictably, Thomas uses invectives and misrepresentations to oppose a legitimate bill which would simply give teachers “the right and freedom, when a theory of biological origins is taught, to objectively inform students of scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses of that theory.” I predicted that Darwinists* would attack the bill by trying to claim that it brings creationism, intelligent design, or religion into the classroom. As I’ve noted before, Darwinists* have no legitimate reason to make such attacks because the bill would protect the teaching of science, and science only, in the science classroom, as Read More ›