Intelligent Design

What many people observing the debate over intelligent design and evolution don’t get is that intelligent design is not merely an American phenomenon. As the debate continues in every corner of the globe, design proves to be an interesting and legitimately explorable scientific concept. Take the latest from today’s Economic Times, out of India. Columnist Mukul Sharma notes writes in “Design argument and beyond“: One of the core arguments of Intelligent Design is that the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry are just right or fine-tuned to allow the universe and life as we know it to exist. They are precisely the values needed to have a universe capable of producing life. In other words, everything in the cosmos tends Read More ›

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Charles Darwin set out to explain the origin of not just one or a few species, but all species after the first — in short, all the diversity of life on Earth. The correct word for this is not evolution, but Darwinism. …living things may look as though they were designed, but if Darwinism is true then this is only an illusion. fundamental problem of evolution, the origin of species, remains unsolved. Despite centuries of artificial breeding and decades of laboratory experiments, no one has ever observed speciation through variation and selection.To order The Politically Incorrect Guide to Read More ›

The blog site Little Green Footballs has slandered Discovery Institute, whether intentionally or not, by implying that we are in league with Islamic radicals in Turkey. They base this fantasy, apparently, on a CBC radio report of a year ago that was so poorly researched that it called Discovery Senior Fellow David Berlinski “Paul Berlinski” and referred to us as the “Christian Discovery organization.” Then they interview a host of people of varying views in Turkey who are critical of Darwinism and imply that they are all connected. They seemingly imply Discovery’s involvement in this situation based on the fact that Berlinski was invited to speak at a conference held by the municipal government of Istanbul last year. Big deal. (Berlinski, by the way, is a secular Jew, so work with that fact for a while, boys.)

If people at LGF think they can make the case that Discovery Institute is somehow soft on Islamic radicalism and terrorists, perhaps they should pick up a copy of our Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter’s new book, The Long War Ahead: And the Short War Upon Us. It is published by Discovery Institute Press and I challenge the LGF folks to read it–or any of my own writings on the Iraq War and the war on terrorism generally–and continue contending that this institute would ever have any truck with people–Muslim or otherwise–who doubt the danger of Islamic fascism.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, “If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted,” Frankl continued, “with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers Read More ›

Click here to listen to an IDTF podcast featuring part of Stephen Meyer’s opening remarks from this event.

What do intelligent design, evolution, information and purple people eaters all have in common? Well, they all took front stage at Freedomfest in Las Vegas last week when ID proponents Stephen Meyer and George Gilder squared off against Darwinists Michael Shermer and Ronald Bailey in debating whether there is scientific evidence for intelligent design in nature.

The debate was civil, and the audience appreciated the back and forth between the speakers and enjoyed being able to ask questions at the end of the formal debate–and even beyond that. For the rest of the evening following the debate itself Meyer and Gilder patiently answered questions and discussed the debate over evolution with conference attendees. At the end of the formal debate a poll of the audience showed them to be split pretty evenly for and against ID being science.

Stephen Meyer laid out a compelling case for intelligent design being a scientific theory. He briefly explained some of the things that design proponents point to as evidence for intelligent causation–the fine tuning of the laws of physics, the complex machinery at work in the cell, and information-rich digital code in DNA. Finally he explained

So was Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) secretly a fundamentalist Christian, a mad man, or just plain ignorant? The great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) was, in his own telling, a “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. He based the judgment not on religion, to which biographer Brian Boyd writes that he was “profoundly indifferent,” but on decades of his scientific study of butterflies, including at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History. Of course, this was all before the culture-wide sclerosis of Darwinian orthodoxy set in.

Note: This is part of a series of posts excerpted from my book, Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can’t Explain. The upright posture of plants is a striking design that falls short of a clear explanation. The pat answer is that prehistoric flat plants decided to go vertical to compete for more sun. But where did this need to compete arise? And how could a limp ground hugger accidentally develop systems to support excessive weight — maybe tons of wood — root systems to support the weight, transport systems to move the water and nutrients up, and defense mechanisms against weather and pests? Much of it had to be there at the same time. Read More ›

New Scientist is up in arms over the successful passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act (“New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US“). NS Reporter Amanda Gefter devotes the article to the narrative of Barbara Forrest, portrayed as a weary warrior against the powers of darkness (that would be us, in case you’re wondering). While this makes for an interesting, Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass foray into utter nonsense, the falsehoods and misinformation presented as historical fact need correcting.

The most obvious untruth is Gefter’s regurgitation of the old myth that intelligent design came after Edwards v. Aguillard, the 1987 case where the Supreme Court ruled creation science unconstitutional. As a matter of historical record, intelligent design can be traced back to ancient Greece, and the modern theory of ID was born by the early 1980s, as Jonathan Witt recounts in “The Origin of Intelligent Design.”

In the past, I have observed that the newsmedia and scientific establishment commonly promote the Darwinist bias against intelligent design (ID), where the media “carefully selects the sources of information it will broadcast to the public on this issue.” (To see how various groups in the establishment serve as checkpoints to prevent scientific information that challenges neo-Darwinism from reaching the public, observe the diagram at left.) National Geographic (NG) is doing its job as a media checkpoint, promoting biased information to the public on ID. In an article yesterday about a new fish fossil-find, the NG news headline states, “Odd Fish Find Contradicts Intelligent-Design Argument.” According to the story, “Intelligent design advocates have seized on the idea of instant flatfish Read More ›

There are literally dozens and dozens of pro-ID websites and blogs on the internet. Every once in a while, I like to highlight the ones that I visit either on a regular or occasional basis. I’m sure there are other good ones, so if you have any suggestions please send them to me at cluskin@discovery.org. In no particular order, here’s the list: Non-English Pro-ID Websites: