Science and Culture Today | Page 1249 | Discovering Design in Nature

According to an international poll released by the British Council, the majority of Americans — 60% — support teaching alternatives to evolution in the science classroom. The percentage is the same for Britons, despite the fact that both countries have been inundated with pro-Darwin media coverage in this super-mega Darwin Year.

Of course, the British media reporting this are chagrined. Britain is the birthplace of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and the official-sounding British Council, the UK group behind the “Darwin Now” campaign that commissioned the Ipsos MORI poll, have spent precious resources educating the world about Darwin. Now some believe the poll shows that efforts by Darwinist organizations aren’t working.

Head of the British Council’s Darwin Now program Fern Elsdon-Baker said, “Overall these results may reflect the need for a more sophisticated approach to teaching and communicating how science works as a process.”
While Darwin’s apologists might try to explain the poll numbers as an example of ignorance influencing people’s beliefs, the numbers themselves suggest a different picture.

Across the board, most respondents from the ten countries polled thought that “other perspectives on the origins of species” “such as intelligent design and creationism” should be taught in science class*. When the poll is weighted to include only those respondents who have heard of Charles Darwin and know something about his theory of evolution, the percentage supporting alternate theories increases, from 60% to 66% in Britain and 60% to 64% in the U.S.

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the first of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post.

I must say, it never ceases to amaze me how otherwise-very-smart folks like Zimmer and Thornton fail to grasp pretty simple points when it comes to problems for Darwinian mechanisms. Let me start slowly with a petty complaint in Carl Zimmer’s intro to the post. Zimmer is annoyed that I think Thornton’s latest work is “great,” yet I thought his previous work published a few years ago was “piddling.” “Why the change of heart?” wonders Zimmer.

A few days ago we saw Ida fall from her overhyped status as an ancestor of humans. Now some scientists are claiming that Archaeopteryx should lose its status as an ancestor of modern birds. Calling Archaeopteryx an “icon of evolution,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) borrows a term from Jonathan Wells while reporting that “[t]he feathered creature called archaeopteryx, easily the world’s most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin’s day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution might not have been a bird at all.” According to the new research, inferences about growth rates made from studies of Archaeopteryx‘s ancient fossilized bones show Read More ›

A few months ago, “Ida” was sitting on top of the world. She’d been lauded as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth.” Falling, indeed. On October 21, Nature published an article announcing that “[a] 37-million-year-old fossil primate from Egypt, described today in Nature, moves a controversial German fossil known as Ida out of the human lineage.” Wired also published a story, noting that, “[f]ar from spawning the ancestors of humans, the 47 million-year-old Darwinius seems merely to have gone extinct, leaving no descendants,” further quoting a paleontologist calling Ida “a third cousin twice removed … only very distantly related to living and fossil anthropoids.” Read More ›

Originally, proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution lauded “junk” DNA as functionless genetic garbage that showed life is the result of blind and random mutational events. Then “junk” DNA was disproved by the discovery that the vast majority of DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Did the failure of this Darwinian assumption cause evolutionists to terminate their love affair with biological “junk”? Of course not. They just shifted their argument back, claiming that the cell is full of “junk RNA”–DNA that is being transcribed into RNA but still does nothing in the cell. Earlier this year we reported on a Nature paper suggesting function for “junk” RNA. Now a Science Daily NewsArticle is confirming that finding. Aptly titled “No Such Thing As Read More ›

What do Discover magazine, The London Gazette, The Wichita Eagle, Commentary, Forbes, The Weekly Standard and UC Berkeley’s student paper, The Daily Californian, all have in common? They are just some of the publications that have published an essay or opinion piece by David Berlinski in the past 15 years. And those pieces are among 32 of Berlinski’s finest finally collected together in one volume: The Deniable Darwin. Berlinski, there is little argument, is a skeptic’s skeptic — the last of a dying breed. Lately it seems that everywhere one looks there is someone with the answer to everything. There are precious few true skeptics left, and Berlinski is certainly in the top rank in regards to the sciences. When Read More ›

A new paper from Richard Lenski’s group has appeared in Nature and has garnered a fair amount of press attention. Some people asked me for my thoughts about it.

The new paper continues the grand experiment that Lenski has been publishing about lo these many years — allowing a culture of the bacterium E. coli to continuously grow and evolve under his close observation. The only really new thing reported is a technical improvement — these days one can have the entire genome of E. coli “re-sequenced” (that is, determine the sequence of the entire DNA of the particular E. coli you’re working with) done for an affordable cost. (There are companies which will do it for a fee.) So Lenski and collaborators had the whole genomes — each and every nucleotide — sequenced of the E. coli that they have been growing for the past twenty years. Since they froze away portions of their bacterial culture at different times along the way, they now have the exact sequences of the evolving culture at many time points, from inception to 2000 generations to 10,000 to 40,000. Thus they can know exactly which mutations appeared when — an almost-complete paper trail. Very very cool!

David Berlinski is currently stateside for his speaking tour of the U.S., and The Devil’s Delusion is selling briskly, already in its second printing in paperback. Now there’s a new discussion guide to complement Dr. Berlinski’s powerful book. Because Dr. Berlinski’s enjoyable style makes the book so eminently readable, not to mention its importance as a response to the new atheists, The Devil’s Delusion and its new discussion guide are a natural choice for book clubs, small groups, adult Sunday school classes, and anyone who wants to delve a little deeper. The guide reads as if a college professor highlighted the book’s most trenchant points and asked the class to chew on them, a style that proves fertile for book Read More ›

David Berlinski is embarking on a speaking tour around the United States. For the most part he will be presenting his book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions as a lecture at various universities, conferences and other appearances. Here are the basic details with links to get more information, and there will be continued updates at www.devilsdelusion.com.

Those who live in the Los Angeles area are invited to attend a gala premiere screening of Illustra Media’s new documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record next Sunday, October 25th at 7:00 pm at the University of Southern California. The event is sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance. This premiere was originally scheduled for the California Science Center, but the Center canceled the event just a few days ago, leaving the organizers virtually no time to find a new location. If you live in the Los Angeles area, you can show your support for free speech to debate the evidence for intelligent design by attending this important event! There is a free public reception starting at Read More ›