Authors
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 ›
Update 8/7/13: Since this response to Ken Miller was posted, even stronger evidence of function for the beta-globin pseudogene has been reported in the scientific literature, further refuting Miller’s argument. See Dover Revisited: With Beta-Globin Pseudogene Now Found to Be Functional, an Icon of the “Junk DNA” Argument Bites the Dust. In his book Only a Theory, one of Dr. Kenneth Miller’s main response to Michael Behe’s arguments for the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade is that sequence similarities between various blood clotting factors demonstrates that they share a common ancestry. Indeed, in his response to me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade, Miller again conflates evidence for common ancestry with evidence for Darwinian evolution. Read More ›
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from an editor at a Jewish publication soliciting from me an article “related to creationism.” He asked that it be pegged to the coming Sabbath when Jews across the spectrum of Judaism begin a new cycle of Torah readings. That cycle begins with the account of creation in Genesis.
The editor seemingly wasn’t aware that I’m not a creationist (i.e., a naïve Biblical literalist), or he didn’t know what the word means, or who knows what. Anyway, I wrote and sent off to him the piece he seemed to urgently want, suspecting even as I did so that it would never run in this particular publication. The Jewish religious world — from Haredi to Reform and just about everything in between — is in general so scandalously indifferent and ignorant on scientific issues relating to life’s origins and evolution that I felt there was a strong possibility whatever I wrote would never get past editorial scrutiny. Sure enough, a week and a half went by without a response from my correspondent. Finally, asked for a status update, the editor told me it likely wouldn’t be appearing in their pages.
So with the relevant Sabbath approaching tonight at sundown, I offer to you the piece I wrote:
Orthodox Jews have almost a sixth sense for feeling out of place. Many of us know this experience: On a visit to an unfamiliar city, you head into a restaurant that you have been assured is strictly kosher. On entering, you look around at the crowd of diners, expecting to see identifiably religious Jews — men wearing kippot — but there are none. Uneasy, you ask to see the establishment’s kosher certification. Maybe the place is no longer under rabbinic supervision? Maybe you’re in the wrong restaurant altogether. The manager produces a piece of paper with a rabbi’s name on it, which looks legitimate. And yet…something doesn’t sit right.
If there are no frum Jews there, could it really be kosher? That is a question I’m often asked by other Jews of all stripes, if not in exactly those words, about what I do in my professional life. And what is that? Do I work as a pork butcher? As the door attendant at a radical Muslim mosque? No, I’m a senior fellow at a think tank, the Discovery Institute, well known for supporting research in intelligent design — the scientific critique of and alternative to Darwinian evolution.
At first glance, you might think nothing could be more Jewish. Very shortly Jews around the world will be celebrating a new yearly cycle of Torah readings, beginning with Genesis, the parsha of Bereishit, narrating God’s creation of the world. Like Shabbat, which similarly recalls the primordial sequence of divine creativity, studying Bereishit again is a time to re-center ourselves as Jews on a truth that today is widely forgotten or denied.
That truth is that we live in a world bearing testimony to purposeful design. The very idea is under widespread, influential attack from Darwinists who insist overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that life originated and developed as the product of blind, churning, purposeless natural forces. Answering the challenge is a scientific pursuit, but it has spiritual implications as well, just as Darwinism has its own implications that rule out purpose, meaning or design in life’s history.
Many Jews, however, including many on the more liberal end of the Orthodox spectrum, see intelligent design as a purely Christian undertaking, with no support from Jewish tradition. The Wall Street Journal has promoted as a representative Jewish view that of Yeshiva University biologist Carl Feit “who is an ordained rabbi and Talmudic scholar…. Prof. Feit says that in nearly a quarter-century of teaching introductory biology, he has always taught evolution — supported by traditional Jewish source material — and that ‘there has never been a blip on the radar here.’ His assessment echoes the official line of the Modern Orthodox rabbinical association, which states that evolution is entirely consistent with Judaism.”
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Introduction Scopes v. State is probably the most famous court case in the history of the evolution controversy. It’s most well known because a play, Inherit the Wind, was turned into a movie based loosely upon the trial, and has been shown in countless college and high school classrooms promoting a stereotype that Darwin-skeptics are ignorant, close-minded, intolerant ignoramuses. Ironically, today it’s the evolutionists who behave like the fundamentalists in the Scopes trial, holding all the power and banning viewpoints they don’t like. 1. Summary In 1925, teacher John T. Scopes was convicted under the recently adopted Tennessee “Monkey Law” that had criminalized the teaching of evolution.10 In Scopes’s defense, attorneys working with the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) argued Read More ›
Over at CNSNews.com, Casey Luskin has an opinion piece about the controversy surrounding the California Science Center’s caving in to pressure from the Smithsonian and cancelling a scheduled screening of Darwin’s Dilemma. There are two ways that modern evolutionists approach the Cambrian explosion, or what has been called “Darwin’s dilemma”: A. Some freely acknowledge that the Cambrian fossil evidence essentially shows the opposite of what was expected under neo-Darwinian evolution. B. Others deal with the Cambrian explosion by sweeping its problems under the rug and trying to change the subject. Succumbing to pressure from Darwinian elites, the California Science Center chose option B. Read the rest here.
When intelligent design (ID) proponents press neo-Darwinian evolutionists on the inability of Darwinian evolution to produce new functional genetic information, a common response from evolutionists is that they get angry and engage in name calling. That’s what happened when Michael Egnor asked How does evolution produce new functional genetic information?, and it again seems to be the case now after Jonathan Wells bravely observed that “duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.” Mathematician and ID-critic Jeffrey Shallit responded by calling Wells a “buffoon.” Dr. Shallit then proceeded to offer an irrelevant definition of information which supposedly showed that Wells was wrong. William Dembski has responded to Shallit here, but Shallit’s Read More ›
Wednesday, Stephen Meyer will be a guest on The Dennis Miller Show. Listen in with Dennis’ other 1.75 million fans as they discuss the California Science Center’s recent banning of pro-ID film Darwin’s Dilemma and Meyer’s landmark book Signature in the Cell. The segment is scheduled live at 7:30am Pacific coast time, which is mid-way through the show’s first hour.
For those interested in the history and philosophy of origins and in the present controversy over the “establishment” understanding, this is a helpful book. For those wishing to have a better understanding of DNA and a “simple cell,” this is an astonishing book. For those who wish to honestly consider what is the best explanation for the origin of specified complex information found in living things, this is an invaluable book. For those who have for whatever reason gravitated to the general proposition that design seems to make intuitive sense, this is an essential book so you can appreciate there is a scientific foundation for your belief. For those who disagree with intelligent design this is the crucial book you Read More ›
Nature has recently published an interesting paper which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution”. The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework, but the results line up very well with arguments I made in The Edge of Evolution. This is the last of three posts discussing it. (see here and here)
Bridgham et al (2009) are interested in the reversibility of evolution, and discuss their results in terms of something called “Dollo’s law.” Louis Dollo, an early 20th century paleobiologist, was interested in discerning phylogenies. He maintained that one could always distinguish ancestral forms from descendant forms. Stephen Jay Gould (1970) commented that Dollo’s “law” was not an empirical observation, but rather a postulate which he felt was necessary to properly construct phylogenies. Over the years the meaning of “Dollo’s law” transmogrified. In modern usage, the phrase has come to mean that complex traits, once lost, do not re-evolve in the same lineage. For example, whales do not re-evolve gills, even though they are aquatic creatures who descended from fish, because gills are a lost, complex trait in that lineage.
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