Science and Culture Today | Page 1236 | Discovering Design in Nature

Links to our 8-Part Series, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information”: • Part 1: Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information• Part 2: The Evolution-Lobby’s Useless Definition of Biological Information• Part 3 (This Article): The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”• Part 4: Finding Darwin in All the Wrong Places• Part 5: How to Play the Gene Evolution Game• Part 6: Asking the Right Questions about the Evolutionary Origin of New Biological Information• Part 7: Assessing the NCSE’s Citation Bluffs on the Evolution of New Genetic Information• Part 8: The NCSE’s Citation Bluffs Reveal Little About the Evolutionary Origin of Information Read the Full Article: Read More ›

Links to our 8-Part Series, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information”: • Part 1: Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information• Part 2 (This Article): The Evolution-Lobby’s Useless Definition of Biological Information• Part 3: The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”• Part 4: Finding Darwin in All the Wrong Places• Part 5: How to Play the Gene Evolution Game• Part 6: Asking the Right Questions about the Evolutionary Origin of New Biological Information• Part 7: Assessing the NCSE’s Citation Bluffs on the Evolution of New Genetic Information• Part 8: The NCSE’s Citation Bluffs Reveal Little About the Evolutionary Origin of Information Read the Full Article: Read More ›

Last Thursday night I spoke at the University of Arkansas for an Academic Freedom Day Event. The crowd was civil with a good mix of both ID-friendly folks and ID-skeptics. The Q & A was generally harmless but the most amusing question of all came from a very nice gentleman with a local “Free Thinkers” group who asked me a ‘how dare you’ type question, arguing that because the “consensus” or “thousands” of scientists oppose ID, so should I. Here’s a little snippet of what I said in reply: “ID is a minority scientific view. But you owe it to yourself to examine the issue for yourself and come up with your own viewpoint. And if the consensus is right, Read More ›

The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology recently published several papers from a workshop sponsored by the International Society of Protistologists titled “Horizontal Gene Transfer and Phylogenetic Evolution Debunk Intelligent Design.” So here we have a respected scientific society, presumably planning a workshop months in advance, and finally laying out their considered case for why intelligent design fails. As you might imagine, I was most anxious to read about it. Unfortunately, rather than scholarly papers, the manuscripts read like press releases from the National Center for (Darwinian) Science Education. So the introductory essay¹ by Avelina Espinosa tells us that ID has “creationist beginnings,” claims that I say “evolution” is “impossible,” and places in my mouth the phrase “design creationism” (I have never uttered that phrase except to disparage it). Blah, blah, blah. About as much scholarship as you’d get from a typical politician.

Darwin was wrong. Missing links still missing. There is no such thing as junk DNA. Birds did not descend from Dinosaurs. Irreducible complexity is still irreducibly complex. Tiktaalik has been invalidated by an earlier ancestor. Haeckel’s embryo drawings are still fake (and still in textbooks). et, evolution is a fact?

There’s a disturbing trend for the role of media in a democracy: journalists who don’t trust their profession, the public, or themselves. These days more reporters, editors, and journalism advocates are urging their colleagues to jettison objectivity in reporting and replace it with something they can trust: their blind allegiance to authority.
Perhaps no one serves as a better example of this than New York Times science writer Cornelia Dean. Her new book, Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public, has a gem of a chapter titled “The Problem of Objectivity.”

You read that correctly. Here’s a journalist who sees objectivity as a problem. To wit:

In striving to be “objective” journalists try to tell all sides of the story. But it is not always easy for us to tell when a science story really has more than one side — or to know who must be heeded and who can safely be ignored. When we cast too wide a net in search of balance, we can end up painting situations as more complicated or confusing than they really are. (pp. 47-48, emphasis added)

And here I thought that journalists were supposed to investigate the story and search for nuance, layers, complexity… the things that make for a compelling narrative. I guess that Dean gave that up a while ago when she decided to simplify things. And what better way to simplify than to edit out dissenting voices?

Links to our 8-Part Series, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information”: • Part 1 (This Article): Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information• Part 2: The Evolution-Lobby’s Useless Definition of Biological Information• Part 3: The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”• Part 4: Finding Darwin in All the Wrong Places• Part 5: How to Play the Gene Evolution Game• Part 6: Asking the Right Questions about the Evolutionary Origin of New Biological Information• Part 7: Assessing the NCSE’s Citation Bluffs on the Evolution of New Genetic Information• Part 8: The NCSE’s Citation Bluffs Reveal Little About the Evolutionary Origin of Information Read the Full Article: Read More ›

Academic freedom week is about more than quoting Darwin and maybe watching an appropriate film for the occasion. (No, not that one. That one’s boring. This one.) It’s about the scientists, scholars, journalists, teachers and students who are affected when fear of inquiry rears its ugly head in the debate over evolution. When you hear the stories of ordinary men and women who have been targeted in this battle over an idea, the importance and impact of the debate becomes clear.
So you’re informed about the issues — you read the blog, listen to the podcast, get the newsletter, and stay involved in the debate as it continues. What else can you do?

If you’re a college or graduate student, you can learn even more about intelligent design. In fact, you can get equipped and be inspired to join the movement.

Just in time for Academic Freedom Day, Feb. 12 (aka Darwin Day), graduate student Michael Barton at Montana State University boasts of regularly going into his local bookstore and purging books critical of Darwin from the science section of the store and reshelving them in the religion section. This past Sunday Barton posted a report about his most recent act of vandalism: Today I moved [Michael Behe’s] The Edge of Evolution and [Benjamin Wiker’s] The Darwin Myth away from the shelve directly under where copies of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth were, and placed them next to—I just had to—the Adventure Bible and the Princess Bible in the religion section. Whatever Barton claims, his actions constitute censorship, pure and Read More ›