Science and Culture Today | Page 1247 | Discovering Design in Nature

Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2 (This Article): Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? At the Dover trial, Ken Miller asserted under oath that intelligent design is merely Read More ›

Tomorrow, Tuesday November 10th, University of St. Thomas School of Law is hosting a legal symposium titled “Intelligent Design and the Constitution.” Participants include Peter M. J. Hess (NCSE), David DeWolf (Professor of Law, Gonzaga University; senior fellow, Discovery Institute), Josh Rosenau (NCSE), Thomas D. Sullivan (Aquinas Chair in Philosophy and Theology, University of St. Thomas), Patrick Gillen (Lead Defense Counsel, Kitzmiller v. Dover), Russell Pannier (Emeritus Professor of Law, William Mitchel College of the Law), and myself. The title of my talk will be “The Constitutionality and Pedagogical Benefits of Teaching Evolution Scientifically.” According to the website: The symposium, free and open to the public, will bring together scholars to debate and analyze various constitutional and philosophical issues surrounding Read More ›

ENV: In the past, you’ve remarked about mathematicians and their opinions of Darwin’s theory of evolution. They were skeptical, you said; very skeptical. John Von Neumann was an example. How do you know that about him and about other mathematicians?

DB: How do I know? Here’s how:

I have been close to a number of mathematicians, and friends with others: Daniel Gallin (who died before he could begin his career), M.P. Schutzenberger (my great friend), René Thom (a friend as well), Gian-Carlo Rota (another friend), Lipman Bers (who taught me complex analysis and with whom I briefly shared a hospital room, he leaving as I was coming), Paul Halmos (a colleagues in California), and Irving Segal (a friend by correspondence, embattled and distraught). Some of these men I admired very much, and all of them I liked.
I had many other friends in the international mathematical community. We exchanged views; I got around.

Among the mathematicians that I knew from very roughly 1970 to 1995, the general attitude toward Darwin’s theory was one of skepticism. These days, I do not get around all that much, and whatever the mathematician’s pulse, I do not have my finger on it. But the reactions of which I speak were hardly surprising. Until recently, mathematicians have been skeptical of any discipline beyond mathematics, and I say until recently because attitudes as well as times have changed.

In talking of the mathematician’s skepticism, I mentioned Von Neumann because his name was widely known. I might have mentioned Gian-Carlo Rota. He despised the enveloping air of worship associated with Darwin; he thought biology primitive and dishonest.

Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1 (This Article): Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Introduction Brown University biologist Dr. Kenneth Miller is the kind of person you naturally Read More ›

Q: Many of the most important and lengthiest essays in The Deniable Darwin were originally published in Commentary magazine. How did that fruitful partnership, or patronship, come about? Did you encounter any resistance from the Commentary readership?

DB: My association with Commentary was a stroke of good luck. I wanted a wider readership. Who doesn’t? So I wrote [editor] Neal Kozodoy a letter. It was 1994. Neal, for reasons of his own, thought it important to broaden Commentary‘s intellectual horizons. We had been struck by the fact that science as an institution lacks for critics. To a very surprising extent, it gets a free pass. So our association began. I’ve never known a better editor. “The Deniable Darwin” provoked a great deal of controversy when it was published. It still does. Bloggers still feel obliged to waddle into Blogginess with a counter-critique. Some readers found my Commentary essays difficult, especially those dealing with the origins of life and the evolution of the eye. They objected, perhaps rightly so. They are difficult. But Commentary, you must remember, is a Jewish magazine, and it was the thought that I might in some way be offering encouragement to Christian evangelicals that some of Commentary‘s readers found troubling. They were fearful that in the very next issue I might be found speaking in tongues or eagerly handling snakes.

There’s a narrative that should be familiar to most of us by now: a man is considered the great hero of the faith, a sign of hope for every true believer as he advances its claims, but secretly he struggles with his doubts about what he’s preaching.

This time, there’s a twist to the old story: the faith the man espoused publicly was Darwin’s theory, and the man was the brilliant Stephen Jay Gould.

In Suzan Mazur’s fascinating new book, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry, Richard Milner describes Gould as “a popular articulator of Darwinian evolution to a new generation, while privately, his creative and rebellious mind sought to move beyond it.” (emphasis added) A personal friend of Gould’s, as well as his editor at Natural History magazine, Milner goes on to explain that “Gould took issue with those who used natural selection carelessly as a mantra, as in the evidence-free ‘just-so stories’ concocted out of thin air by mentally lazy adaptationists.”

So here we have a picture of a man committed to his creed (“The universe is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be”) who was nonetheless unhappy with the easy answers of reductionists such as Richard Dawkins.

David Opderbeck, Professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, has in the past offered some insightful criticisms of the Dover ruling, including the facts that Judge Jones: Now over at the pro-Darwin BioLogos blog, Professor Opderbeck writes “In Defense of Dover.” Well, only sort of. Professor Opderbeck qualifies his post’s pro-Judge Jones title, stating: “I still think Judge Jones’ opinion in Kitzmiller missed the mark in some important ways, even though I think (and have always thought) the end result was correct.” Truthfully, I don’t disagree with a word of Professor Opderbeck’s praise of the Dover ruling when he writes: It seems clear from the trial record that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board officials who promoted the Read More ›

Thanks to various live-bloggers, you can read summaries of all of the University of Chicago Darwin 2009 conference presentations. The conference organizers have also promised to make video podcasts available of all the lectures shortly. By contrast, what follows below is — as they say in sports television — color commentary. This will be a longer post, because much was said that calls for comment.

Bottom line: this was an outstanding conference, where any ID theorist would have enjoyed himself, and learned a lot, if he didn’t mind a bit of mocking laughter along the way.

Evolutionists have long sought mechanisms for the origin of reproductive barriers between populations, mechanisms which are thought to be key to the formation of new species. A recent article in ScienceDaily finds that “Junk DNA” might be the “mechanism that prevents two species from reproducing.” Basically, so-called “junk”-DNA is involved in helping to package chromosomes in the cell. If two species have different “junk” DNA, then this prevents the proteins in the egg from properly packaging the chromosomes donated by the sperm. The organism does not develop properly. As the article, titled “Junk DNA Mechanism That Prevents Two Species From Reproducing Discovered,” explains: during early development, the proteins required for cell division come from the mother. The researchers speculate that Read More ›

NewsBusters has a great interview with David Berlinski by Kevin Mooney, who praises The Deniable Darwin as “a series of mind-bending essays.” Proving once again that he is a skeptic’s skeptic, Dr. Berlinski addresses the lack of criticism in science: “In the U.S. you have the separation of powers that keeps different branches in check, but this is not true for science, where there is now a lot of corruption,” he observed. “Science needs its own critics. The same skepticism that is used in research now needs to be turned back onto science itself.” Dr. Berlinski’s essays go a long way toward rectifying this situation, while his observations and insights quickly reveal how ridiculous the anti-ID crowd can be: But Read More ›