Science and Culture Today | Page 1226 | Discovering Design in Nature

Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) published an error-filled article attacking Michael Behe and intelligent design (ID) as penance for publishing Behe’s article. So much for the claim from critics that Behe’s QRB paper had nothing to do with ID. In any case, the critical article by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, and Johan Braeckman uses fallacious logic to attempt to connect Michael Behe’s arguments from irreducible complexity to young earth creationism. There argument seems to be that if anyone anywhere who is a creationist has ever talked about an idea that sounds like irreducible complexity, then that was necessarily one of Behe’s sources for his ideas. Behe’s critics thus quote Henry Morris and other creationists talking about how some biological features Read More ›

As science has progressed, scientists have realized the cell is more complex they they’d ever imagined. What is behind the origins of the cell’s complexity? What naturalistic theories have been proposed? What is the possibility of the precise genetic information in DNA evolving by chance? Watch as Stephen Meyer answers these and other questions.

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In a documentary from the Discovery Channel on the search for extraterrestrial life, Stephen Hawking provides an extraordinarily candid example of the fallacious materialist logic for why extraterrestrial life “must” be possible. Around 1:15 of the clip below, Hawking states: The life we have on earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe. The gaping hole in Hawking’s logic should be immediately apparent to anyone willing to think critically and skeptically: If we haven’t yet explained how life could have spontaneously generated on earth, how do we know that it can be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe? What makes Hawking’s position even worse is that in Read More ›

One of the most powerful education organizations in the country is the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), which stands alongside the rest of the Darwin lobby in holding that neo-Darwinian evolution should be taught in a one-sided, pro-evolution-only fashion. This is an extreme position, as it seeks to ban scientific criticisms of evolution. Due to its exclusive and dogmatic nature, the NSTA’s position is analogous to the extreme position advocated by some religious fundamentalists who would seek to ban teaching about evolution in public schools. But the Darwin lobby is smart. While it is trying to ban and censor the views of its opponents, the Darwin lobby has a particular narrative which tries to paint its opponents as the censors Read More ›

Why do we need academic freedom legislation like Tennessee’s HB 368? In case biology lecturer Alison Campbell decides to relocate to the United States. Sadly, even if she remains in New Zealand, there are already people here who don’t allow for the free flow of ideas, especially when it comes to discussion of evolution. Biology lecturer Alison Campbell at the University of Waikato in Hillcrest, New Zealand, exemplifies a mindset that is tragically common in academia. She openly boasts that if a student were to use standard ID arguments such as the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, that student would be “marked down”: If, for example, a student were to use examples such as the bacterial flagellum to advance Read More ›