Science and Culture Today | Page 1207 | Discovering Design in Nature

[NOTE: Today we welcome a new contributing writer to Evolution News & Views, Guy Coe. Mr. Coe graduated from the University of California at Davis with a B.A. in Rhetoric and a minor in political science. As a lifelong student of argumentation and logical analysis, his career has taken him from Executive Salesman, to News Reporter, to U.S. Senate Communications Aide, to Tour Guide, to Retail Management, to father of a budding teenager, “where all communications logic begins to break down.” With a lifelong interest in the issues of intelligent design and origins theories, his status as “interested layperson” allows him to continue to follow the evidence where it leads, while showing proper respect for the lifelong dedication displayed by practitioners of the hard sciences. And, somehow, he still manages to communicate with his teenager…]

Much ink has been spilled, and heat generated, over the “intrusion” of the intelligent design hypothesis into the now seemingly exhausted “creation vs. evolution” debate.

Is intelligent design only reworked creationism, or is it something dynamically different? Now that intelligent design has “evolved” a little, and the theory of evolution has been a little more “intelligently designed,” the focus of our attention has been changed back to the very puzzling questions of the origins of the complexity within cellular organization, while the “old regime” merely argues over the vestiges of an assumed progression from this unexplained point.

For their parts, many creationists and evolutionists are at such an impasse in old paradigms that each of them are left shaking their heads in wonder at the apparently willful ignorance of their opponents — building their knowledge base on two supposedly vastly different approaches, and being at a loss to explain how the “convincing” evidence each position marshals can be so blithely dismissed by the “other side” — to the point that charges of irrationality, and even willful self-deception, are rife.

As an eager observer of this unfolding drama over the last several decades, I have to say that my honest impression is that both sides manage to play fast and loose with the facts, ignore the anomalies, and distort the evidence, by virtue of prior philosophical convictions. Or perhaps it is more charitable to say that, given the same set of facts, many come to vastly different interpretations by virtue of poorly-constructed logic, selective evidence, and poor methodology.

When it comes to teaching young children about Darwin, the NSF’s $2 million Evolution Readiness Project recommends resources that give him no end of praise. One of their recommended resources, the book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, calls “the theory of evolution … one of the great accomplishments of science.” One of the prime examples of evolution in the book is the classic Galápagos finch beak story. Darwin, we are told, visited the Galápagos islands and “found a [sic] unusual group of finches” which “gave Darwin important clues about the way evolution works.” Supposedly Darwin “noticed that on each islands the birds’ beaks were shaped differently” and “Darwin believed that small changes in the birds over many generations Read More ›

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press is reporting that astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet in the “goldilocks” zone of its star. That is, the planet appears to be in the circumstellar habitable zone where water can persist at liquid temperatures on its surface. The planet, named Gliese 581g, is a mere 20 light years away from Earth.

The article is referring to the circumstellar habitable zone, though presumably it is also in the galactic habitable zone since it’s so close to Earth. That means that Gliese 581g may have two of the major factors needed to make a planet hospitable to life.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen hundreds of reports like this, so I now read them with a bit of skepticism. For the last fifteen years, we’ve been hearing about supposedly Earth-like planets around other stars. The headline is so common that even Borenstein, in an otherwise breathless articles, admits: “Scientists have jumped the gun before on proclaiming that planets outside our solar system were habitable only to have them turn out to be not quite so conducive to life.”

Researchers have finally figured out why those of us in the public who are skeptics on scientific orthodoxies like Darwinism and human-induced global warming choose not to align our views with the scientific “consensus.” Science Daily reports: It is likely to depend on whether the position the scientist takes is consistent with the one believed by most people who share your cultural values. This was the finding of a recent study conducted by Yale University law professor Dan Kahan, University of Oklahoma political science professor Hank Jenkins-Smith and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman that sought to understand why members of the public are sharply and persistently divided on matters on which expert scientists largely agree. Isn’t that special?  So if you’re Read More ›

Biologic Institute’s Doug Axe has just responded to SMU lecturer John Wise’s attacks on the presentations at last week’s 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin event. As responses are published we will be archiving them at that page. I was among the speakers at an event held at Southern Methodist University last week [1]. The purpose was to give students and others a glimpse of the growing scientific case against Darwin’s theory, so the talks were tailored to a non-technical audience. Faculty members were welcome too, of course, and I’m told that a few were in attendance. Attesting to this, their denouncements began surfacing online shortly afterward [2]. It’s all very familiar. When you persist in challenging a cherished tradition like Read More ›

“Rabbits, cacti, bumblebees, jellyfish, penguins, sunflowers–all living things on the earth are the descendants of simple, single-celled organisms,” opens the book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution. This short 40-page book is one of the primary resources that the NSF’s new “Evolution Readiness Project” recommends reading to “young children” so they will “believe in” evolution. In my prior post, we saw that the project justifies teaching students that “evolution by natural selection is the fundamental model that explains the extraordinary complexity and interdependence of the living world” because allegedly there is “universal agreement among scientists” on that point. The evolution readiness project justifies excluding dissenting scientific views from students by pretending they don’t exist. The argument you’re likely to Read More ›

The UK-based Centre for Intelligent Design has just announced a fall lecture tour featuring Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Michael Behe. The tour will include lectures in Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, and London. Here is the group’s press release about the tour, which will take place in November: Controversial ID Scientist tours UK Professor Michael Behe, a key figure in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, will challenge his critics in a lecture tour of the UK in November. Prof. Behe is one of an increasing number of scientists who believe that modern biochemical evidence undermines the basis of Darwinian evolution. The author of two ground-breaking books on ID – ‘Darwin’s Black Box‘ (1996) and ‘The Edge of Evolution‘ (2007) – Behe’s theory Read More ›

It always amazes me how if you want to bash intelligent design, Discovery Institute, or Darwin doubters generally, you can pretty much say anything you want, however ridiculous, and everyone in the Darwin choir will sing hallelujah and never bother to fact check what you say. At the Huffington Post, science writer John Farrell debuts with an awkwardly written blog trying to pick a fight with John West on Darwinism’s sinister race-war theme (“Bad Faith (in Science): Darwin as All-Purpose Boogey Man?“). The post struck a nerve, garnering 1,266 comments as of this writing.

Says Farrell,

West wants his readers to realize that Darwin’s racism had murderous overtones and that therefore the science of evolution must be suspect.

Farrell means that West wants readers to “think” or “believe” not “realize,” which implies that he actually agrees with West. But never mind Farrell’s incompetence as a writer, the second half of his sentence is clearly false, an absurd straw man. I challenge Farrell to show me anything John West has written that implies such a thing — namely, that because Darwinain science is well suited to justify and inspire evil, that by itself makes the ideas “suspect” as science. What any reasonable person would say is that the racist element in classical Darwinism, along with the wicked uses it’s been put to historically, together form a good reason to take a second, fresh, and objective look at the science — evaluating it, however, strictly on its own scientific merits. That’s very different from the caricatured stance attributed to West by Farrell.

Farrell goes on to quote at length the famous passage from the Descent of Man that ranks human races in order of their being near or far from apes and that predicts that races closest to the apes — “negroes and Australians” — will be “exterminated,” leaving a more yawning gap than at present between “civilized” men and the lower apes.

As discussed in my previous post, it’s best to just lay all the cards on the table: The goal of the Evolution Readiness Project is to get “young children” to “believe in” evolution. According to the National Science Foundation’s website, they’ve spent $1,990,459 of taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) dollars to bankroll this project. Welcome back to school. The agenda of the project is further clarified in the NSF Grant Award Abstract which states that it aims “to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it.” That’s fine, but why only the evidence that supports evolution? Before I say anything else, let me state that I am a firm advocate Read More ›

I was treated to a –sadly– all too typical story in the aftermath of the great 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution conference the other night at SMU. An SMU staffer told me about what happened to a student that wanted to let his friends know about the event. Earlier this week the student asked his science professor if at the end of class he could make a quick announcement and the prof said no problem. At the end of the class the student stood up and very quickly announced the name of the event and that students could come and hear about some of the flaws in Darwin’s theory. At that point the professor put Read More ›