Science and Culture Today | Page 1280 | Discovering Design in Nature

A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin’s birthday, four of which were from ID proponents. As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.

No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution. Skell argues that …

As part of their celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday, MSNBC has been printing puff-pieces promoting evolution. In Part 1, I discussed their piece using weak and controversial evidence documenting the alleged dinosaur to bird transition. In this section, I’ll be discussing another little piece they published, “Seven signs of evolution in action.” This piece takes very little time to rebut, and those familiar with weak arguments used to buttress evolution in this debate will likely be able to guess the arguments used in the “Seven signs” piece simply by my rebuttal. In fact, the interesting part about this piece is not so much the rebuttal, but the quality of evidence that MSNBC is using to promote evolution: 7 Signs of Read More ›

Casey Luskin and John West were in Oklahoma yesterday at an Academic Freedom Day event hosted by the IDEA club at University of Oklahoma. Not surprisingly Darwinists were in attendance, and showed their complete and utter lack of civility. Casey sent me this e-mail recapping once such encounter during the Q&A following his presentation.

Pro-Evolution Blogger Abbie Smith Flipped Me Off on Friday Night, and Here’s the Story
University of Oklahoma (OU) graduate student and science-blogger Abbie Smith flipped me off during my talk about academic freedom at the University of Oklahoma on Friday night. But before I get to that part, I’d like to tell what actually happened.

Today NPR’s All Things Considered reported on the running debate between Evolution News & Views contributor Dr. Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and Darwinist neurologist Dr. Steven Novella from Yale. With “Doubting Darwin: Debate Over The Mind’s Evolution” NPR takes a look at the scientific debate over the mind-brain problem currently shaking up neuroscience. Listen to the report here because, as reporter Jon Hamilton notes, “The outcome of the mind-brain debate will have a profound impact on everything from what students learn in high school to how decisions are made at the end of life.” Here are a few of Dr. Egnor’s posts on the mind-brain problem and some background on the back-and-forth between Dr. Egnor Read More ›

You won’t find any well-known intelligent design advocates among the speakers at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held recently in Chicago. But that does not mean ID was not there — quite the contrary. Like the social outcast left uninvited to the garden party, who nevertheless becomes the main topic of conversation, ID was on the lips of most of the speakers at an overflow Sunday (2/15) afternoon session, Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. One could be forgiven for leaving the session thinking that evolutionary biology was defined largely by its opposition to ID.

A recent article in Science titled “Adaptive Radiation: Contrasting Theory with Data” admits that the evidence documenting the precise workings of a key macroevolutionary mechanism — “adaptive radiation” — is missing. The article concedes that “how exactly radiation occurs, and how it differs among taxa and in different settings, as well as why some lineages radiate and others do not, are still unclear.” When studying evolutionary biology in college, I learned that new types of organisms have commonly appeared abruptly in the history of life. Since Darwinian evolution is supposed to proceed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications,” this data made little sense in the light of evolution. Our professors always reassured us that rapid evolution or abrupt appearance of major Read More ›

I’ve been corresponding with Nicolas Gotelli, a University of Vermont biologist. When I received his response to my initial email, I thought it was so ridiculous and hypocritical that I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be amusing to publish this on ENV? Then I reflected disappointedly, No, it’s a private correspondence, that would be unethical! I can’t do it without his permission and, since he’d have to be pretty thoughtless to allow someone to reprint his hysterically bristling letter, it’s not worth asking.

Luckily, Professor Gotelli has solved my problem for me. He promptly and without seeking permission sent our emails off to PZ Myers, who immediately published them on Pharyngula. You can read the correspondence there. Thank you, gentlemen.

Gotelli is the fellow who wrote an op-ed in the Burlington Free Press expressing the view that it was only proper that UVM should cancel Ben Stein as graduation speaker because the popular entertainer is also a “notorious advocate of intelligent design” who maintains that Darwinian ideas had deadly consequences in the form of Nazi racist ideology (only too true). Gotelli asserted it was appropriate to invite “controversial” speakers to campus, since “one of the best ways to refute intellectually bankrupt ideas is to expose them to the light of day.” But a commencement speaker is someone special, Gotelli went on, someone chosen for his peer-reviewed scholarship.

Someone, it turns out, like the widely published scholar Howard Dean, to whom UVM turned next and who will deliver the commencement address. What, as one online reader of Gotelli’s op-ed plaintively asked, “Was Daffy Duck unavailable?”

With Darwin’s 200th birthday recently upon us, the media is pushing Darwinism harder than ever. MSNBC, in particular, has recently posted three puff-pieces about the evidence for evolution. My purpose here is not to exhaustively rebut everything these articles say, but to show that for a lot of the evidence they cite in favor of evolution, there’s another side to the story that isn’t being represented. It’s too bad the media is only telling the public one-side of the story. Fluffy Evidence for the Dino To Bird Transition The first piece, titled “9 links in the dinosaur-to-bird transition is intended to bolster the theory that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. The MSNBC piece cites as its primary piece of evidence Read More ›

Update: A single website, NCSEExposed.org, has now been created to host this response to “Expelled Exposed,” as well as some updates. Visit NCSE Exposed for your one-stop shop rebuttal to Expelled Exposed! In light of the DVD release a few months ago of the terrific Ben Stein documentary Expelled, we thought it would be a good time to provide a comprehensive listing of articles that correct the various misrepresentations and falsehoods spread by Darwinists about Expelled. Most of the falsehoods in circulation about the film can be traced to a website called “Expelled Exposed” set up by the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) as part of its PR effort to smear the documentary last year. “Expelled Exposed” alleges Read More ›

Over at Uncommon Descent, Michael Flannery has an excellent post examining Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, in which the authors try to humanize Darwin by showing that he was driven by his passionate hatred of slavery. But is this accurate? Flannery points out that the main question really is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? Read it all at Uncommon Descent. Then check out Flannery’s own new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism.