Houston, They Have a Problem.
The climate fraud spreads to NASA:
Read More ›Science and Culture Today | Page 1241 | Discovering Design in Nature
U.N. Population Fund: Genocide Helps Prevent Global Warming
Forget your Prius. Forget all that tedious recycling your kids bug you about. Forget solar panels on your house.
The UN Population Fund has a better way to fight the scourage of global warming:
Condoms.
Fight Climate Change With Free Condoms, U.N. Population Fund Says
London (AP) – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.
Who knew that thing you carried in your wallet throughout high school could save the planet.
The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: “Women with access to reproductive health services … have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions…As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth’s capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic,” the report said.
It’s great that the population control folks want the common man to share the burden of saving the planet. Do they have any particular populations in mind?
Read More ›I Told You So
From the introduction to The Deniable Darwin: My own view, repeated in virtually all of my essays, is that the sense of skepticism engendered by the sciences would be far more appropriately directed toward the sciences than toward anything else. It is not a view that has engendered wide-spread approval. The sciences require no criticism, many scientists say, because the sciences comprise a uniquely self-critical institution, with questionable theories and theoreticians passing constantly before stern appellate review. Judgment is unrelenting. And impartial. Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgments are collective. Critics are not only unwelcome, they are unneeded. The biologist Paul Gross has made himself the master of Read More ›
Todd’s Blog Bungles Wiker’s New Book, The Darwin Myth
The Enchantment of Life
Let’s talk about a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: enchantment. As often happens to me, and probably to you too, a number of things going on in my life have converged to get me contemplating a particular idea that I hadn’t thought much about before.
One is reading Richard Dawkins’s bestselling The Greatest Show on Earth. The famous evangelizing atheist seeks to make the case for Darwinian evolution, defending it against the critiques of naïve creationists and other amateurs whom Dawkins cites and argues with contemptuously — for example, a lawyer who runs a conservative website, a lady who’s an anti-abortion activist, and a guy with an Internet ministry. He meanwhile ignores intelligent design theorists with their far more challenging objections and weighty science backgrounds. Cowardly and bullying, the book is an embarrassment.
But what struck me more is Dawkins’s oddly persistent cheerleading. He’s got a twitchy way with certain adjectives. He is constantly assuring us that his demonstrations of evolution’s wonders are “beautiful,” that discoveries are “exciting,” results are “startling,” Darwinian scientists are “excellent,” plants and animals provide “lovely” or “amazing” illustrations of his thesis, experiments supposedly proving Dawkins right are “almost too wonderful to bear,” and so on. After a while, you wonder what he is trying to compensate for. The unusually lush and expensive full-color plate illustrations that adorn the book raise the same question.
It’s not as if he writes dull prose that needs sprucing up. In fact, very few science writers can match his lucidity. But you shouldn’t have to bludgeon the reader with promises that what he is reading is “exciting.” The excitement should come across from the material directly.
What Dawkins is compensating for, I think, is the dullness, the flatness, the aridity of the evolutionary picture of how the world works. It squashes everything in life flat as a lead pancake, explaining the wonder and mystery of it all in the infinitely monotonous terms of natural selection operating on random variation. This is so different from a writer like David Berlinski, who emphasizes that the more science discovers, the more we discover we don’t understand about the deepest, most interesting questions we can ask.
This brings me to enchantment. My family and I live in a Seattle suburb. We are Orthodox Jews and so on the Sabbath, instead of driving, we walk. To get to our synagogue, we take a shortcut through a densely wooded park. In the park, there’s a tree that when I walk past it with my children, I always feel a twinge of regret.
More than forty years ago — a year after I was born — someone carved a message on that tree where a thick branch had been cut off. You can still read the message, if faintly. It says, “The Enchanted Forest,” and then the date, 8/27/66. August 27, 1966. I think of it with regret because our increasingly secularized world is one where the sense of enchantment is diminishing very rapidly.
By enchantment I mean our intuitive sense that something else, something more, lies behind and somehow all around the façade of ordinary material reality. Darwinism is not just a scientific theory, with its Tree of Life and its proposed mechanism that explains how one form of life transforms unguided into another. It is that, but more importantly it is a picture of reality. It is a whole worldview that seeks to explain all the beauty and wonder of life by reference exclusively to blind, churning, purposeless, mindless, meaningless natural forces. It excludes all enchantment.
The phrase goes back to Max Weber who taught about it dispassionately: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.” That was in a lecture he gave, “Science as a Vocation,” in 1918. Since then, the sense that life is pervaded by secrets has retreated even further, with heartbreaking results.
As he recalls in his memoir, Carl Jung once treated a distraught young Jewish woman. Her family had lost faith in Judaism, starting with her father though her grandfather was a rabbi and a mystic whom Jung refers to as a “tzadik,” a wonderworking saint gifted with some sort of prophetic “second sight.” As Jung tells it, the girl was pretty, chic and flirtatious besides being neurotic, “a well-adapted, Westernized Jewess, enlightened down to her bones.” Her unhappiness brought her to seek help and Jung recalls that he saw the problem and cured her swiftly.
How to Make Eighteen Equal Twelve
Occidental College professor Donald Prothero, who along with Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg on November 30, complains that folks at the Discovery Institute are now attacking him with “everything they have.” Prothero writes on the NCSE’s blog Panda’s Thumb, “Normally, it is not worth dignifying their garbage with a response,” but in this case he wants people “to get the straight facts.”
According to Prothero:
When evo-devo came up in Monday’s debate, Meyer and Sternberg began arguing with each other about reconstructions of a 12-winged dragonfly that I had published in my book. They tried to get a laugh by claiming that such a bug has never been found. As usual, they completely missed the point of that illustration, and failed to read any of the explanation or discussion in the caption or text. The text clearly points out that the 12-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods, with their modular body plan of adjustable numbers of segments and interchangeable appendages on each, to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes. This is the aspect of evo/devo that should answer structuralist Sternberg’s objections to Neo-Darwinism, if he only bothered to comprehend it, and solves much of the question over how macroevolutionary changes take place.
Unfortunately, it’s Prothero who needs “to get the straight facts.” First, the dragonfly in his book did not have 12 wings, but 18. Second, there is no evidence that “such a bug” ever existed, so it was not “reconstructed,” but invented.
Read More ›World Magazine Announces “2009 Daniel of the Year”: Stephen C. Meyer
Stephen Meyer has already made year-end lists with Signature in the Cell, an Amazon bestselling science book and one of Times Literary Supplement’s books of the year for 2009, but the latest news goes far beyond that: Stephen Meyer has been named World Magazine’s “Daniel of the Year” for 2009: This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media Read More ›
After Getting Waxed In Debate After Debate Shermer Still Doesn’t Get It
Michael Shermer has now written about the debate he had with Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg earlier this week. He’s far classier than his debate partner, Donald Prothero, but alas not all that much smarter. His comment here is basically just the same as his rebuttal was at the debate. It didn’t fly then, and it doesn’t fly now. You’d think that with all the discussion going on since the debate that he would have tried to come up with something a little stronger.
Please, listen to the debate here. Shermer trotted out the same tired arguments, and Meyer corrected him. He continues to misrepresent the argument made by intelligent design proponents.
Read More ›every ID argument goes like this:
Avi Davis Responds to Donald Prothero on Beverly Hills Debate
After the Darwinists lost the debate in Beverly Hills, Donald Prothero — the man who cites imaginary eighteen-winged dragonflies as evidence for evolution — tried to salvage his reputation by attacking debate moderator Avi Davis for setting up an unfair encounter. As always, thoughtful readers might want to consider listening to the debate and judging themselves who won and just how fair the battle was. Courtesy of the American Freedom Alliance website, you can listen to the entire debate here. As the moderator of the debate, AFA’s Avi Davis responded to Dr. Prothero’s slurs in an email, which he gave us permission to post here at ENV:
Commenter Nails the Central Issue in ClimateGate: the Rigging of Peer-Review
The pro-global warming blog Climate Change Denial is spinning like a top. Devastated by the revelation of pervasive fraud in climate science, the warmists are clearly dazed and grasping at any tactics that might salvage their ideological hijacking of science, now laid bare. In their latest post, “Swiftboating the Climate Scientists”, they ignore the transparent scientific misconduct and fraud revealed in the highest eschalons of climate science, and accuse the skeptics of attacking climate science for base ideological motives. The term “swiftboating” alone is risible and actually revealing; warmists are nearly all leftists, still simmering over the implosion of the Kerry/Edwards candidacy. It’s ironic that these “objective” scientists and activists use a left-wing political slur to attack skeptics who demand honest science.
A commenter (Starchild, # 20) summed up the scope of scientific fraud revealed in ClimateGate quite nicely:
Read More ›