Science and Culture Today | Page 1297 | Discovering Design in Nature

Get your banned intelligent design books:Darwin’s Black Box: Darwin on Trial: This week is the American Library Association’s annual “Banned Books Week.” Given recent issues with the economy and the presidential election, Banned Books Week is probably not attracting as much media attention this year as usual. But we want to observe Banned Books Week by posting a 3-part series revisiting some recent instances of support for banning or censoring intelligent design (ID) books and ideas from libraries and student minds. In 2007, New York Law School professor Stephen A. Newman wrote a law review article in Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion praising the efforts of librarians who prevented pro-ID books from entering their school’s library collection. The article Read More ›

Earlier this year, the popular blog Little Green Footballs (LGF) made an outrageous attempt to link Discovery Institute to the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar). Their post claimed, “Discovery Institute is in league with Islamist creationists, a fact that is indisputably true,” specifically mentioning Yahya / Oktar (“just happens to be a former volunteer for Harun Yahya”). Discovery Institute’s president Bruce Chapman dignified their charges with a forceful refutation, but LGF’s reply to Mr. Chapman was basically a string of ad hominem attacks that relied on a tenuous chain of distorted and incomplete facts. If there was any doubt left that Discovery Institute and Islamic creationists are not “in league,” consider a recent interview with Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar Read More ›

Texas Darwinists are afraid of language in the Texas Science Standards that requires students to learn about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, justifying their fear by claiming that when it comes to neo-Darwinian evolution, “[t]here may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that’s to the level of a weakness.” Nothing that’s to the level of a weakness? That’s a pretty dogmatic and unscientific claim. If this Texas Darwinist is right, then I suppose that these comments by leading scientists must not show that there is anything that rises “to the level of a weakness” in neo-Darwinian evolution: Still think Darwinian evolution has “nothing that’s to the level of a weakness”? I strongly suspect we’ll Read More ›

The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that “Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.”

We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do.

Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That’s why she makes a point of giving credibility to the several Darwinists in the story before calling McLeroy a creationist, then discrediting the position she assigned him:

Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us:

the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do?

Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes

The media is abuzz about a suggestion made by a Church of England spokesman that it should apologize for initially opposing Darwinian evolution back in Darwin’s day. An Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune says that “[t]he church did not take an official stand against Darwin’s theories, but many senior Anglicans reacted with hostility to his ideas, arguing against them at public debates.” The example given is the account of Bishop Wilberforce: “At a University of Oxford debate in 1860, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, famously asked scientist Thomas Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed to be descended from a monkey.” According to the legend, Huxley reportedly replied that he Read More ›

Over the coming months, the Texas State Board of Education will be deciding whether to remove or bolster its requirement that students learn the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, “using scientific evidence and information.” The pro-Darwin lobby group National Center for Science Education (NCSE) does not want that standard to be applied specifically to evolution. In fact, Texas Darwinists want that language completely removed from the Texas Science Standards. To reasonable people, it is apparent that investigating the “strengths and weaknesses [of scientific theories] using scientific evidence and information” is exactly what scientists do all the time. Discovery Institute believes that if scientists can dispute the core claims of neo-Darwinism (as these scientists do), then students can learn about Read More ›

[Update 6/16/09: Quote in paragraph 4 clarified to make it clear that the quote did not come from Dr. Catherine A. Boisvert but was rather stated by the journal The Scientist. Any prior lack of clarity on the author of that quote was completely unintentional.] Over the past couple years, Tiktaalik, a fish-fossil touted as documenting key aspects of the transition from fish to 4-legged tetrapods, has become a new celebrated icon of evolution: Clearly, Darwin’s public relations team has invested much rhetorical capital into this fossil. If past experience is to be our guide, the only event that might cause Darwinists to criticize Tiktaalik would be the publishing of a fossil that was claimed to better document evolution. In Read More ›

Nature recently had this to say in an editorial regarding our upcoming election:

The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin. Sarah Palin, Alaska’s governor and McCain’s running mate, opposes all research into human embryonic stem cells. She is a creationist….

Contrast that with Obama’s statement on page 448, in which Nature asked him about the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. It is not easy to address students’ questions about evolution without falling prey to the false
notion of ‘teaching the controversy’, as the Royal Society’s director of education discovered last week in a public-relations meltdown (see ‘Creation and classrooms’). But Obama could not be more clear: “I do not believe it is
helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny,” he wrote.

Now those who have been following the issue know that Gov. Sarah Palin’s position is a bit more complicated than being “a creationist.” In fact she has explicitly said that she does not want to teach only creationism. So I guess if she is a creationist she is a creationist in a sense different than Darwinists at the NCSE are Darwinists, as they want to teach only Darwinism.
Other Brits have been more thoughtful,