Science and Culture Today | Page 1296 | Discovering Design in Nature

[Editor’s Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes’ book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America’s Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, “Monkey Girl.] For someone who boasts a Pulitzer Prize (for a work other than Monkey Girl) and claims to be objective and neutral journalist, Edward Humes’ book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul is an incredibly partisan and inaccurate portrayal of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. At many points it simply parrots Darwinist talking points and retells many of their patently false urban legends about the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, leaving out Read More ›

Steven Novella has a recent post on SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Like many of us, Dr. Novella is fascinated by the prospect of finding evidence for intelligent alien life in outer space. Dr. Novella:

I am a strong supporter of SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To me this is a fascinating scientific endeavor with a potentially huge payoff…

Dr. Novella defends SETI against the claims by some that it is not real science:

In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments about the irreducibility of the blood-clotting cascade to Judge Jones during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, such that Judge Jones wrongly ruled that “scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.” To briefly recap, Miller told Judge Jones that Behe’s discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Darwin’s Black Box was “essentially identical” to the discussion of the blood-clotting cascade in Of Pandas and People, implying that any critiques of Pandas also applied to Behe. But unlike Pandas, Behe explicitly did not argue that all of the components of the blood-clotting cascade were required for it to function properly. Read More ›

Dr. Steven Novella is a Yale neurologist with whom I have been having a blog debate about the mind-brain question. Dr. Novella asserts that neuroscience has proven the strict materialistic understanding of the mind — that the mind is caused entirely by the brain, and reducible entirely to it — is true. I disagree. Although the mind and brain correlate to a high degree, the mind is ontologically irreducible to the brain. I believe that some form of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.

I have written several posts about qualia, which is the subjective nature of sensory experiences, such the experience of the color red, or the smell of coffee, or the ‘hurt’ of pain. The neurophysiological correlates of these phenomena, such as the physiology of retinal mediation of color vision, or the olfactory nerves in the nose that mediate the smell of coffee, or the neurochemistry of C-fibers that mediate pain, can be explained materialistically, but the experience of color, smell, and pain — qualia — elides material explanation.

Here is my description of the problem that qualia poses, from a previous post:

[Editor’s Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes’ book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America’s Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, “Monkey Girl.] Any book with an icon of evolution on its cover — in this case, the fanciful diagram of ape-like skeletons transitioning into a human skeleton — is bound to be unfriendly towards intelligent design (ID). When I received my copy of Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, Edward Humes’ book about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, I expected no less. Humes’ FAQ on evolution and ID on his website made Read More ›

Here is another hilarious example of a just-so story from Science Daily. (In fact, this one is more just so-so.) Substitute the words “made up” whenever you read characterized. Were they in court, a judge would surely say: “Show me the evidence.”

I’m in the midst of an online debate with neurologist Dr. Steven Novella about this question: can the mind be explained entirely by the brain, or is there an immaterial aspect of mental states that defies materialist reduction? Dr. Novella and I are both well-acquainted with neuroscience (I’m a neurosurgeon), and we have quite different views on the mind-brain problem. Dr. Novella is a materialist, and he believes that neuroscience has demonstrated beyond question that the mind is entirely caused by material processes in the brain. I believe that there are properties of mental states that don’t admit material explanations, and I favor dualism. Dr Novella asserts:

[Editor’s Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes’ book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America’s Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, “Monkey Girl.] In early 2007, I wrote a three-part series of blog posts where I discussed how Darwinist author Edward Humes misrepresented himself when trying to convince me to do an interview with him for his book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (Harper Collins, 2007). (That series of prequels can be found at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) When Humes first contacted me in 2006, he Read More ›

While the Christmas season brings out the best in most people, it seems to have the opposite effect on many Darwinists, who become even more sour and dismal than usual. Even Eugenie Scott, who perennially tries to be the happy face of Darwinists everywhere, can’t resist sounding like a Scrooge. In an article co-authored with Glenn Branch in this month’s Scientific American, Scott sounds the alarms against the “dangerous lie” that Darwinism is a theory in crisis, and implies that civilization itself will collapse if we allow teachers and students the freedom to discuss criticisms of Darwinian theory—because as every thinking person knows, all of our knowledge of everything depends on Darwin. Seriously. Anyone tempted to believe such predictions of Read More ›

At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated in its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism, that “Evolutionary biology has been and continues to be a cornerstone of modern science.” It seems that their assertion did not pan out very well for the rest of 2008. Two groups recently released lists of top science news stories and breakthroughs for 2008: The Access Research Network and the leading journal, Science. None of their top breakthroughs came as a result of evolutionary biology. Science‘s top breakthrough was a method where scientists discovered how to harvest stem cells from living patients, a find which has huge potential for treating diseases. This is an extremely important scientific breakthrough, to be sure, Read More ›