Science and Culture Today | Page 1300 | Discovering Design in Nature

In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously wrote, ”A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” One might think that modern proponents of Darwin’s ideas would endorse his approach to scientific thinking within evolution education, but it’s not so. The Texas State Board of Education recently received reviews of the proposed Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) from six science reviewers. Three of those reviewers–who are scientific skeptics of Darwinian evolution–support TEKS that would give students a strong grounding in critical thinking skills by asking them to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence Read More ›

One Grand Prize Winner will take home $500 Discovery Institute is sponsoring a student video and essay contest to commemorate Academic Freedom Day, February 12, 2009, on Charles Darwin’s bicentennial. Darwin once wrote, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” That famous quote will be the touchstone for students to communicate support for academic freedom to explore the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. “The next generation values open dialogue in a way that is aptly expressed in their creativity and imagination,” Discovery Institute Director of Communications Robert Crowther said. “This is a fun way to honor that expression and encourage critical thinking on the Read More ›

This is the seventh installment of a series responding to John Timmer’s online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution (EE). The first part is here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here, the sixth here. 7. Timmer’s Mis-Aimed Critique of Inquiry Based LearningTimmer calls Explore Evolution‘s use of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) a “sham” because he asserts the textbook “abdicates the responsibility for reasoning entirely.” But his criticism is bogus. EE contains multiple sections that encourage students to weigh the evidence and consider open-ended questions about the evidence like, “Which picture best illustrates the history of life?,” “Do all living things, past and present, share a common ancestor?,” “Can natural selection produce Read More ›

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. As you can imagine, Darwinists have a full year of celebrations planned, and February 12th, Darwin’s birthday, is likely to be the high water mark for most of those celebrations. Every year Darwin Day celebrations get more and more elaborate and outrageous. Celebrants decorate evolution trees, sign Darwin carols and odes to natural selection, and eat from the tree of life.Naturally, we don’t want you to miss out on the fun. On Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), we want students everywhere to speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by Read More ›

MSNBC recently had an article titled “Fine-feathered dino sported bizarre bird tail,” reporting on the find of Epidexipteryx hui, a “pigeon-sized dinosaur that lived more than 100 million years ago [that] sported four ribbon-like tail feathers.” (See right for an artist’s imaginative interpretation of the fossil.) One of the original paper’s authors states, “Although this dinosaur cannot be the direct ancestor for birds, it is one of the dinosaurs that have the closest phylogenetic relationship to birds.” The article also contains other quotes with typical Darwinist rhetoric like, “[t]his find confirms the link between dinosaurs and birds.” But are other interpretations possible? Unreported in the media is the fact that the paper contains language directly hinting that Epidexipteryx hui could Read More ›

Discovery senior fellow Wesley J. Smith has returned to podcasting with What It Means to Be Human, a podcast about the many policies and proposals in bioethics, bioscience, and animal liberation that threaten the idea of human exceptionalism and undermine universal human rights: Click here to listen.On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at Discovery Institute, explains why human exceptionalism is so important for universal human rights.There is a war being waged against unique human worth on many fronts, from personhood theory and the animal liberation movement to radical environmentalism and philosophical materialism. Very powerful forces have dedicated themselves to convincing us that we really aren’t all Read More ›

CSC Fellow Forrest Mims has been honored by Discover Magazine, which has placed him on their list of “50 best brains in science.” Not bad company he’s keeping, with Steven Hawking, Bill Gates and others. Post-Darwinist has a nice write up congratulating Mims on the honor and recounting some of what he’s gone through to get this far as a scientist: Congratulations to Forrest Mims, a voice for real science in the midst of a mass of taxpayer-funded propaganda for unbelievable beliefs that happen to be held by scientists. Mims is an instrument designer, science writer and independent science consultant. He has made regular observations of the ozone layer, solar ultraviolet radiation, photosynthetic radiation, column water vapor and aerosol optical Read More ›

This is the sixth installment of a series responding to John Timmer’s online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution (EE). The first part is here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here. 6. Timmer’s Double Standard on Textbook Treatments of EvolutionTimmer repeatedly attacks EE for allegedly trying to “divide and conquer” evolution because it discusses the different lines of scientific evidence (i.e. fossil, anatomical, molecular) regarding common descent in separate sections. Timmer’s criticism reveals either his gross ignorance of how contemporary biology texts cover evolution, or that he’s using a blatant double standard. EE was written to complement the coverage of evolution in standard biology textbooks, and so it follows the approach Read More ›

The Biologic Institute has an excellent article discussing how biologists are copying the “brilliant designs” they see in nature for technological purposes. We’ve discussed this intriguing phenomenon of biomimetics many times before here on ENV. (For a couple examples, see here, here or here.) The presumption of evolutionary biologists, of course, is that these “brilliant designs” evolved by natural selection preserving random, but beneficial mutations. Engineers operating under such presumptions have thus tried to mimic not only the “brilliant designs,” but also the evolutionary processes that allegedly produced the designs. Biologic’s article notes that one success story of such methods was the case of NASA engineers who used evolutionary computing to produce a better antenna. Did they use truly Darwinian Read More ›