Science

Last week I explained how Nick Matzke was wrong to argue that the Kansas Science Standards‘ (KSS) mention of irreducible complexity implies that it requires teaching intelligent design (ID). Most of the rest of Mr. Matzke’s post concentrates on the false claim that the Kansas Science Standards’ section on evolution makes claims that come only from ID literature. This argument is only furthering a conspiracy theory which believes that, when the standards read “do not include Intelligent Design,” they really mean, “do include intelligent design.” Under Mr. Matzke’s reasoning, every science teacher in the state of Kansas is supposed to be in on this conspiracy, which would be the only reason for them to know they are supposed to disregard Read More ›

Discovery Institute gets a lot of nasty e-mail from name-calling Darwinists. But since the launch of StandUpForScience.com, the amount of nasty e-mailage has gone up about five-fold–something I barely thought possible (this resembles the post-Dover barrage of Darwinist hate-mail). In the past couple weeks I’ve had e-mails from Kansas tell me things like “Patton knew how to handle you fascist bastards,” “Your agenda is clear — secular schools cannot be tolerated, just as your spiritual leader Adolf Hitler said,” and “Religously speaking — GO TO HELL!” (all direct quotes from e-mails I’ve recently received from Kansas). Very interesting! In any case, I have no ill-will whatsoever towards these people, but one recent less-inflammatory but nonetheless name-calling e-mail came from a Read More ›

Over at Post-Darwinist, journalist Denyse O’Leary points out another type of misinformation. In this instance it’s a complete misrepresentation of the views of Cardinal Schönborn about evolution, as well as that of the Catholic church.

Briefly, the Catholic Church has come out swinging in recent years AGAINST Darwinism, which is precisely the “evolution” that Rosengarten is talking about.

Here’s what the Pope now distributes on prayer cards hawked all over Rome:

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.

So all over the world, people will remind themselves of anti-Darwinism every day.

We’ve reported about Cardinal Schönborn’s views and previous misrepresentations several times.

In an e-mail O’Leary added:

I usually ignore Panda’s Thumb because it is a blog site where bloggers have near-unlimited license to namecall and say mean-spirited things which contribute nothing to the scientific debate over evolution. However, because Nick Matzke recently defended me there (sort of), I’ll dignify Nick’s latest post on Kansas with a response here. This is despite the fact that Nick’s Kansas post perpetuates the old conspiracy theory that the Kansas Science Standards (KSS) are all about teaching ID, and does so while making numerous snide and irrelevant ad hominem-type comments. This post will be the first in a two-part series. Nick opens by complaining about Discovery Institute’s current activities in Kansas. Talk about irony! Recently, his employer, the Oakland, California-based National Read More ›

Despite the Darwinist community’s long-standing campaign to help the public come to the “correct” view that “evolution and religion are compatible,” public skepticism of evolution remains high. (See this link for documentation.) This would logically lead one to the conclusion that there are other factors besides religion that drive skepticism of evolution. Perhaps, one might even suggest, for many people the issue has a lot to do with science! Recently I was told about a 1997 article in Scientific American which reported a study conducted by Brian Alters on students’ reasons for rejecting evolution (“What Are They Thinking?: Students’ reasons for rejecting evolution go beyond the Bible,” by Rebecca Zacks, Scientific American, October 1997, pg. 34). The study surveyed over Read More ›

A new website, ResearchID.org has just launched and this is the announcement we received. A new intelligent design website, ResearchID.org has been launched. that will provide high-quality online resources for scientists and scholars researching intelligent design. As a research website, ResearchID.org is an on-line knowledgebase for theoretically, empirically, and technologically exploring intelligent design. This site has no affiliation with Discovery Institute. Established by ID theorist and author Joseph C. Campana, the site assembles the many separate lines of information, reasoning, and evidence that support ID and melds them into a lucid, unified, and accessible corpus. ResearchID.org will help those who are doing intelligent design researcy by producing and cataloging many types of resources: research proposals, biographical entries, project descriptions, articles Read More ›

While the New England Journal of Medicine recently refused to publish a pro-ID letter-to-the-editor commenting on the Kitzmiller ruling, other medical journals are still clearly open to discussion on these matters. Michael R. Egnor, professor of Neurosurgery at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook has published a letter in the Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled Defending Science from Censorship. The letter responds to an anti-ID article published in Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” which had many co-authors, including the notable names Elliot Sober, Ronald Numbers, and Terese Berceau. The original article by Berceau, Sober, & Numbers et al. is surprising for something published in a scholarly journal: it uses uncommonly inflammatory rhetoric to Read More ›

On June 2, 2006, I submitted a short, 175-word letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), responding to the incomplete and one-sided discussion of the Kitzmiller ruling they published, “Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom,” by George J. Annas (NEJM, Volume 354 [21]:2277-2281 [May 25, 2006]). Today I learned that they have rejected my letter. I’ve had letters rejected or accepted in various venues before, so that’s fine. The rejection notice stated that “[t]he space available for correspondence is very limited, and we must use our judgment to present a representative selection of the material received.” NEJM devoted approximately 3,426 words to Mr. Annas’s article, which was completely one-sided and simply Read More ›

According to the recent Associated Press story on South Carolina’s new critical analysis of evolution standard, the South Carolina Department of Education does not think critical analysis means teaching alternative theories, like intelligent design (ID): “Education Department spokesman Jim Foster says scientific inquiry is taught at every grade level and in every subject. Foster says the wording does not require students to study alternatives to evolution that are out of the mainstream.” (Education panel approves wording on biology standards) We’ve been agreeing all along that critical analysis of evolution policies do not require teaching about alternative theories like ID! This just shows that the Darwinist claim that critical analysis = ID is just another tired conspiracy theory. So is the Read More ›