Science

Another new alleged missing link has been found, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago. Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly why: the bones were so brittle, “squished,” “chalky” and “erod[ed]” when cleaned such that many of the bone fragments had to be “reconstruct[ed]”–and that took a long time. Here’s the story Read More ›

The Los Angeles premiere of Illustra Media’s new science documentary Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record will be held on Sunday, October 25th in the IMAX theater of the prestigious California Science Center, which describes itself as “the West Coast’s largest hands-on science center.” Sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, the premiere starts at 7:00 pm and will also include a showing of the IMAX film Born of the Stars as well as a post-screening discussion of Darwin’s Dilemma featuring the film’s director Lad Allen; David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions; and biologist Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. For tickets or more information, Read More ›

ENV: How do the scientific issues you write about affect the way we live? Why should the Darwin question matter to people who don’t normally concern themselves with scientific theories?

DB: I think of the Darwinian debate in the way that Dickens thought of Jardynce v Jarndyce in Bleak House. It is awfully easy to be sucked into it, and once suckered, awfully difficult to get out. I have seen it so often. A man wakes and because has read a book or scanned an essay, he is persuaded that he can make a contribution. He is eager to make it. He offers his opinion on the Internet and is gratified by the prospect of the congratulations that he is shortly to receive. No one pays the slightest attention. He then discovers that to be heard, it is necessary that he amplifies his level of abuse. He does that, referring to the Discovery Institute as the Dishonesty Institute. Repeating the phrase as he moves his bowels affords him an unexpected pleasure. As his influence remains insignificant, his indignation mounts. In the morning, he scuttles to his computer to check his own postings; satisfied when he finds them, and beside himself when he fails. His appetite for conflict sharpens. He becomes determined to exaggerate every issue; and to magnify trivialities. Sooner or later, his Internet presence seems real, and his real life unreal. He ends in the state achieved by almost every Internet blogger: He commences to gibber repetitively. Glen Davidson, who posts to David Klinghoffer’s blog, has recently entered the gibbering state.

It is all very sad. I have warned about the phenomenon many times.

Somehow, over the past few years the University of Oklahoma has become a sort of ground zero for debating evolution and intelligent design. Appearances by William Dembski, Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse and John West have all drawn large crowds, and not a little controversy. Tonight Dr. Stephen Meyer will deliver a lecture based on his book Signature in the Cell in Meachem Auditorium at the University of Oklahoma at 7pm. Darwinists are planning to attend with the hopes of confounding Meyer during the question and answer time. Since biologists like Dawkins and Francis Collins have avoided debating Meyer I don’t think there will be much to confound him there tonight.Tomorrow night, the new ID documentary Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened Read More ›

There are a lot of false urban legends promoted in academia about intelligent design (ID). They often start with myths promoted by misinformed critiques in scientific journals, court rulings, or even talks by activists at scientific conferences. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for this misinformation to then be passed down to college students, who may know very little about ID and lack the resources to correct their professors’ misinformed and misplaced attacks on ID. Not anymore. If you’re a college student, recently gone back to school and expecting to hear a lot of anti-ID views from your professors, we’re pleased to present this “Back to School Guide” for students as follows: The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent DesignThe Read More ›

David Berlinski has been accused of being many things, but speechless is not one of them. Here is is a short interview clip from ID The Future where he addresses a range of scientific and philosophical issues that he expanded on his book The Devil’s Delusion, which has just this week been released in paperback from Basic Books. Display content from www.discovery.org Click here to display content from www.discovery.org. Always display content from www.discovery.org Open content directly

In my view, the most important question in the ID-Darwinism debate is this: what do we mean by design? All participants in the debate agree that living things manifest design of some sort; Darwinists assert that the design is unintelligent, the product of ateleological genetic variation and natural selection. ID proponents assert that design implies an intelligent source. Philosophers of an Aristotelian and Thomist stripe assert that teleology pervades nature, but insist that a proper understanding of teleology entails a metaphysical understanding of nature (hylomorphism) that differs from the metaphysical presuppositions of most ID advocates, who generally accept (implicitly if not explicitly) the mechanical view of nature shared by materialists.

In my view, we need to integrate our understanding of the obvious design that is manifest in biology with the teleology that is evident in all of nature. We need a “unified theory” of teleology in nature that intrinsically explains the obvious design in living things as well as the obvious teleology in scientific “laws” and in all natural change. That integration necessarily will come from the “teleology” camp; Darwinist “ateleology” is an impoverished philosophical mistake that persists only when it not made explicit. The ID-Darwinism debate is rapidly eroding materialist credibility, not only because of the strength of the ID arguments, but because ID proponents have forced materialists to state clearly what they believe. Candor is incompatible with materialist ideology; Darwinists are angry in large part because they’ve been forced to explain themselves.

Can a teleological understanding of nature of an Aristotelian sort bring together the seemingly disparate strands of modern science? Philosopher Ed Feser suggests that a hylomorphic understanding of quantum mechanics, which intrinsically depends on a teleological view of nature, provides a coherent framework on which to understand some counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. His source for this insight is Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in the development of quantum theory.

The New Scientist may sound like a scholarly science publication, but in covering news it often revels in uninformed and unprofessional attacks on critics of Darwinian evolution. So it is somewhat of a surprise to see the publication produce a not-so-veiled pan of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins’ new book. If the evident disappointment expressed by science filmmaker Randy Olson is at all valid, Dawkins’ resemblance to the creator of the original “Greatest Show on Earth,” 19th Century circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, is confirmed. Dawkins doesn’t address his real adversaries. He simply ignores Stephen Meyer, whose Signature in the Cell is now leading the science book parade in several Amazon categories. He just dubs opponents creationist reactionaries and Read More ›

This latest installment of my ongoing responses to Ken Miller regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade will critically analyze Professor Miller’s citation of a 2008 paper co-authored by blood clotting expert Russell Doolittle. Citing to Doolittle, Miller claims that the lamprey lacks blood clotting components that Michael Behe, in Darwin’s Black Box, actually did describe as being part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade. The problem for Miller is that Doolittle’s conclusion was based on there allegedly being only one gene in the lamprey homologous to blood clotting factors V or VIII, but Doolittle’s reported data belies that conclusion: it shows there were multiple potential homologues for those factors — including at least Read More ›

A few weeks ago I discussed how the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A devoted its April, 2009 issue to the topic of biomimicry. The issue was introduced with a review by Bharat Bhushan, trying to deflect any possibility of intelligent design overtones from biomimicry by repeatedly referring to the power of “nature” to “evolve” these technologically useful structures. I concluded that “Dr. Bhushan’s chosen blindness to the intelligent design implications of his field does not negate the many dozens of instances of biomimicry discussed in his article and other articles in this recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A.” What follows is a list of some of the fascinating examples Read More ›