Science

[UPDATE: Application deadline for students to apply for summer seminar series is April 30, 2008, meaning there is only today and tomorrow left to apply.] Discovery Institute is pleased to announce two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture from July 11-20, 2008 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology). Both seminars are designed for highly-motivated college students who seek a deeper understanding of science and its implications for society. Faculty for the seminars will include mathematician William Dembski, author of The Design Revolution; biologist Jonathan Wells, author of the Politically Read More ›

Academic Freedom bills have now passed both the Florida House of Representatives and the Louisiana State Senate. The bills protect the rights of teachers to teach controversial scientific theories objectively, where scientific criticisms of scientific theories (including evolution) can be raised as well as the scientific strengths. The Darwinists in those states do not like this. First Florida Darwinists called academic freedom “smelly crap.” Then Louisiana Darwinists called academic freedom protections a “creationist attack” that is “Just Dumb.” Most recently Florida Darwinists used the “enlightened British will laugh at us argument” to oppose academic freedom. All I can say is, you heard it here first: “For the Darwinists who oppose the bill, this battle is about falsely appealing to people’s Read More ›

David Berlinski has a piece up at Pajamas Media today about the scientific pretensions of today’s leading atheist, who, it turns out, include many of today’s leading scientists. Why is that, wonders Berlinski? It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more. This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the chemistry Read More ›

What does the media do if you are Richard Dawkins and you make some embarrassing statements in a movie that basically gives away the store on intelligent design? Apparently, at the LA Times, they let you print 1000+ word op-eds. In his recent op-ed against intelligent design (ID), Dawkins writes the following about the identity of the designer: “Intelligent design ‘theorists’ (a misnomer, for they have no theory) often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists: ‘For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space.’” He then claims that “All the leading intelligent design spokesmen are devout, and, when talking to the faithful, they drop the science-fiction fig leaf and expose themselves as Read More ›

Dr. Steven Novella, the dogmatic materialist neurologist at Yale who has insisted that “…every single prediction [of the strict materialist understanding of the brain] has been validated” by science, has found even more scientific evidence for his personal ideology. Dr. Novella recently noted a report in Nature Neuroscience about fMRI correlates of decision-making in the brain.

In the report, “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain” authors Chun Siong Soon and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany show that brain activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortex may precede conscious decision-making by as much as ten seconds before a decision is consciously made. Each subject was asked to push a button with either the right hand or the left hand. Seven to ten seconds before the conscious decision, brain activity appeared that appeared to correlate with unconscious decision making. Sixty percent of the time, the brain activity correlated with the hand used (no correlation would be fifty percent).

The study is an interesting demonstration that brain activity as measured by fMRI (which measures local blood flow and metabolic activity) correlates to some degree with unconscious processing, as well as the well-known but weak correlation between fMRI and conscious thought. Dr. Novella notes:

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

In the week since Expelled came out in theaters, I’ve been startled not so much by the juvenile name-calling directed at me for defending the movie (“self-hating Jew,” “Hitler sympathizer,” “Jewish Uncle Tom,” “hired hit-pen and journalistic hatchet job expert,” etc.). That’s something that publicly admitted Darwin-doubters quickly get accustomed to.

Much more surprising is the sheer flat-out lying done by critics bent on denouncing the movie’s controversial linking of Darwinism and Hitlerism.

Now, I happen to think that the Darwin-Hitler link is pretty darn well established, as I’ve argued on National Review Online, Jewcy, and in this space. The major Hitler biographers agree with me that Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution.

I don’t care if somebody insists on disagreeing with my interpretation of the relevant texts — though frankly that would be hard to do if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level. Just please don’t lie in your representation of what I’ve written.

Those like Arthur Caplan who claim that Nazi ideology did not draw on Darwinism should watch this clip from a 1930s Nazi propaganda film justifying forced sterilization. Near the beginning of the clip the narrator warns that modern society is transgressing against a fundamental law in preserving the unfit. Just what law is he talking about? (Hint: You find it mentioned repeatedly in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.) Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open video directly

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEApril 23, 2008 Executive Producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed Statement on Lawsuit by Yoko Ono The fair use doctrine is a well established copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. We are disappointed therefore that Yoko Ono and others have decided to challenge our free speech right to comment on the song Imagine in our documentary film. Based on the fair use doctrine, news commentators and film documentarians regularly use material in the same way we do in EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed . Premise Media acknowledges that Ms. Yoko Ono did not license the song for use in the Film. Read More ›

The Center for Science and Culture supports Biologic Institute, a research lab opening new frontiers for scientific discovery. Biologic Institute demonstrates the value of intelligent design for the practice of biological science and tests specific empirical claims of neo-Darwinism, intelligent design, and other theories of biological origin.

Building off of the theoretical work of the scientists and researchers before them, scientists at Biologic Institute have been quietly and patiently working in the laboratory to test the predictions of intelligent design.

For those of you lucky enough to be National Review subscribers, you will be treated to an insightful review of David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion by our own George Gilder: The Devil’s Delusion is an incendiary and uproarious work of learned polemical writing, unique in its scientific sophistication and authority. Rather than criticizing science from the outside, Berlinski excoriates its atheist pretensions from within. Refusing to defer to scientistic credentialism, he makes the compelling argument that the anti-God fetish of modern science has driven many scientists into a mad nihilism that has crippled their scientific work as well. Gilder concludes: The Devil’s Delusion is a promethean work that clears away this debris of modern science and culture. It liberates conservatism Read More ›