Science and Culture Today | Page 1274 | Discovering Design in Nature

Discovery Institute’s third annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are still accepting applications, and the deadline has been extended to April 30. The seminars have been a great experience for all involved (click here to listen to a report about the program from some former participants), and we expect this year to be no different. The program is an incredible opportunity for students to spend 9 days learning about intelligent design from top ID thinkers such as Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Richard Sternberg, Jay Richards, Doug Axe, John West, and many others. The program’s website, including the online application, can be found here: discovery.org/summerseminar To briefly give some details, the program runs from July 10-18 and it is free for Read More ›

Atheist constitutional commentator and attorney Timothy Sandefur and I have exchanged blog ripostes about his bizarre assertion that teaching public school students that the theory of evolution has weaknesses as well as strengths is a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Mr. Sandefur asserted:

…to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan–and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract–or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true…To teach a religious viewpoint–such as that God created life–in government classrooms, taught by government employees, is to put the government’s imprimatur on that religious viewpoint and in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Mr. Sandefur believes that the weaknesses of evolutionary theory are non-existent, and to teach the weaknesses (as well as the strengths) of evolutionary theory is to teach a religious viewpoint.

!

I replied that evolutionary theory obviously has weaknesses, as all scientific theories do, and that is not a religious viewpoint. It’s a scientific viewpoint. All theories in science have strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses of scientific theories are the basis for scientific research. The weaknesses of evolutionary theory are the basis for evolutionary research. It’s just as constitutional to use public funds to teach students about those scientific weaknesses as it is to use public funds to conduct scientific research on those scientific weaknesses. It’s just good science.

Though he’s fairly prominent character, I admit James Le Fanu was not till recently on my radar screen or that of anyone else around here that I know of. A British medical doctor who publishes in peer-reviewed medical journals like the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, a columnist for the London Telegraph, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (2001), Dr. Le Fanu turns out to be a flaming Darwin doubter, too. He comes out with a vengeance in his new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves,” which hammers scientific materialism to bits. It really is a book you shouldn’t miss buying and reading.

What’s so notable? First of all, the man writes like an angel. Second, his book appears under the imprint of Pantheon, a very mainstream venue that I’ve never associated with conservative, religious, unconventional, or other dangerous types of authors. Third, while in his Acknowledgements, Le Fanu thanks a bunch of fellow writers who will be well known to readers of ENV — Michael Behe, Jeffrey Schwartz, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, and others — again, as far as I know his acquaintance with them was not personal but through reading their books and then thinking his own thoughts.

Le Fanu doesn’t mention intelligent design or Discovery Institute, which is just as well. It probably explains how he flew under not only our radar but that of Pantheon Books.

NYT Book Review editor Gregory Cowles has attacked William Steig’s Yellow & Pink. It seems that not even children’s books are safe from Darwinian scrutiny at The New York Times.

Atheist legal commentator Timothy Sandefur believes that the discussion of the weaknesses (in addition to the strengths) of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools is an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause. Yet he sees no Establishment Clause problem with the public funding of research in evolutionary biology that asks the same questions that he believes are constitutionally proscribed in public schools.

For example, Mr. Sandefur apparently believes that teaching public school students that there are large inadequately explained gaps in the fossil record is a violation of the Establishment Clause. Yet, as it happens, there is substantial publicly funded ongoing research being conducted by evolutionary biologists on these large inadequately explained gaps. Mr. Sandefur has no Establishment Clause objections to the public funding of the research on this topic; he only objects to publicly funded teaching on this topic. Yet the teaching and the research both address the same premise — that there are large unexplained gaps in the fossil record.

Mr. Sandefur asserts:

Timothy Sandefur has been waiting anxiously for my reply to his most recent post. He and I disagree on this point: I believe that teaching the strengths and weakness of Darwin’s theory in public schools is constitutional and is good science. He believes that teaching the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory is unconstitutional, and that only the strengths of Darwinism may be taught to schoolchildren.

In his most recent post, he begins with three points.

First, Mr. Sandefur asserts:

Last week I did an interview with an NPR reporter, Bob Garfield, for his NPR show “On the Media” about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to require critical analysis of evolution. I am used to hostile and skeptical questions from the media–and in fact I generally welcome good, hard discussions from reporters. But this reporter was particularly hostile and seemed to have an agenda to paint Darwin-skeptics like crazy religious fanatics. The final story lived up to its expectations. The Interview: A string of False Accusations and “How Dare You?” Type Questions The interview started with benign questions about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to welcome scientific critique of evolution Read More ›

Recently, David Brooks published a column titled “The End of Philosophy” in The New York Times (April 7, 2009). Brooks, long one of the most thoughtful writers in public life, addresses an ages-old tension over whether reason controls our moral intuitions and passions, or whether moral intuition/feeling is king and reason is only rationalization.

In the latter view, Brooks says,

As a final installment in my “Texas Hold ‘Em” series calling the bluffs of Texas evolutionists, I’d like to highlight one section from Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Ronald Wetherington’s Testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils. … So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true.” But a close look at the evidence, as reported in Read More ›

Why is it that Darwinian rhetorical strategies often remind me of a Monty Python sketch? In this case, the one about the philosophy department at the University of Wollamaloo, where every faculty member is called Bruce and the departmental rules include “Rule two: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abbos [aboriginal Australians] in any way a’all — if there’s anyone watching.”

So Michael Behe amusingly notes in his Amazon blog how public Darwinian responses to the main argument of his book The Edge of Evolution differ from responses in more technical forums. Or as Bruce might put it, Rule one: No member of the Darwin Lobby may admit that evolution poses seemingly unsolvable enigmas — if there’s anyone watching.

When The Edge of Evolution came out, reviewers such as Sean Carroll at the U. of Wisconsin and Jerry Coyne at the U. of Chicago were full of reassuring noises for their readers in Science and The New Republic respectively. Behe had shown the insuperable difficulties evolution faces in explaining how multiple mutations can add up to results even as basic as the most elementary protein features, notably binding sites.