Science and Culture Today | Page 1186 | Discovering Design in Nature

It’s springtime (almost), which means that Darwin lobbyists are starting to come out in full force to spread misinformation about academic freedom legislation. This is most unfortunate because their goal, plain and simple, is to prevent students from hearing about scientific critiques of neo-Darwinian evolution in the classroom. I’ve already covered some of these bad objections here. Let’s consider the false claims being promoted by critics of academic freedom legislation. Myth #1. Academic Freedom Laws Have Led to Litigation Some critics, especially those in Oklahoma, have felt the need to promote outright falsehoods by claiming that the Louisiana Science Education Act has been subject to lawsuits. The truth is that there has never been a legal challenge to an academic Read More ›

Philosopher Jay Richards has published an interesting piece about IBM’s Watson computer trouncing Jeopardy champs looking at the consternation this caused for some people.

Can Darwinian evolution explain the complex coloration patterns found in insects that led to biomimicry? According to an article published late last year in BioScience, Darwinian evolution faces “problems” that are “huge” when trying to account for the origin of biomimicry in butterflies: The balance of Dazzled and Deceived focuses on the genetics and development of mimetic patterns, as revealed mostly through work with butterflies. The problems here are huge for evolutionary biologists. How does natural selection build a complex organism with all its integrated parts through fixation of random mutations? Butterfly mimicry has been a classic arena in which to tackle this problem precisely because the gambit is so obvious: To be a good mimic of another species requires Read More ›

Discovery Institute senior fellow William Dembski is apparently living inside the heads of intelligent design critics. A recent opinion article by Massimo Pigliucci in EMBO Reports, published by the European Molecular Biology Organization, states, “In some quarters, ‘information’ seems to be a magical word: Intelligent Design proponent Bill Dembski, for example, keeps repeating that evolutionary theory cannot explain the production of new information…” Aside from the “magical” slur, Pigliucci’s description of Dembski’s view is reasonably accurate. Pigliucci, who apparently knows Dembski well-enough to call him “Bill” in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, attempts an explanation of the talk about the origin of information: As for the claims that Dembski and others make about information and evolutionary theory, Read More ›

World Magazine has an excellent report on the David Coppedge story with new insights into his background — and new reason to do something about the discrimination he’s suffered.

A new paper in the journal Nature, authored by paleoanthropologists Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison and titled “The evolutionary context of the first hominins,” is critical of the claim that Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) was a bipedal ancestor of modern humans. In 2009, the journal Science devoted an entire issue to introducing Ardi and promoting it as a likely human ancestor. It seems that Nature is in something of a rivalry with Science now that it has published this authoritative paper. When constructing phylogenetic trees, evolutionary biologists generally seek to minimize homoplasy, or instances of convergent evolution. Wood and Harrison observe that the problem for Ardi is that if she is on the human line, then there must be high levels Read More ›