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

Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction. Where Does Your Information Come From?The second page of the first Read More ›

P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine “theories”:

‘Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins’ or ‘We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing’ or ‘X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.’

As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as “silly”:

No, none of those very silly talks were given.

And he’s right. What he fails to note, however, is that these theories differ little in substance from the ephemeral corpus of Darwinian just-so stories. These silly stories are merely the application of silly mainstream Darwinian reasoning to medical practice. Perhaps it’s the application of this nonsense to something as tangible as medicine that makes the banality so obvious. The straight-faced assertion “polar bears evolved into whales by the mechanism of random genetic variation and natural selection,” a sort of ursine-baleen “chance and necessity,” doesn’t have the same risible punch as the “evolution” of childhood aversion to broccoli.

Several Darwinist bloggers have taken exception to my observation that Darwinian stories about the origin of diseases contribute little of significance to medical education, research, or practice. Orac responds:

…that creationist neurosurgeon with a penchant for laying down hunks o’ hunks o’ burnin’ stupid on a regular basis, that Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, Dr. Michael Egnor has spouted off on evolution again in a way that got my attention. It came in response to a post by PZ about a conference he attended entitled Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin, which served as a launching pad for Dr. Egnor to go right down the rabbit hole…The stupid, it burns. It sears. My neurons are crying out in pain. Once again, Dr. Egnor trots out the tired old “Darwin inevitably leads to eugenics” coupled with his usual claims evolution has contributed nothing–or, as Dr. Egnor says it, nothing!–to medicine. Only Dr. Egnor could come up with something so utterly devoid of understanding, so scientifically ignorant, so full of the arrogance of ignorance…

Having gotten that off his chest, Orac, a surgical oncologist who doesn’t post under his real name, continues:

CSC fellow David Klinghoffer has a recent column in the Jerusalem Post which explains how intelligent design is different from creationism and examines the difficulty many religious believers have with Darwin’s theory:

When Jews and Christians alike aren’t being forced into false dilemmas, we are given alternatives to Darwinian theory that can be imagined as reconciling science and theology only if the whole subject is kept cloudy and confused.
Thus the two most recent popes have appeared to speak of the Church’s comfort with “evolution” but without defining the term. Does it mean an unguided process or a guided one? One that gives scientific evidence of a Designer’s purpose, or not?
The ambiguity and hedging probably comes from a fear of putting their Church on the losing side of a historic controversy, and an unfamiliarity with the scientific details.

Re: P.Z. Myers’ recent post:

I’ll be spending my day at this symposium, “Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin”, most of today. It’s about to start, so I’m not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you’re in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room G17 (which we have since learned is the famous old surgical demonstration auditorium), and listen in. I’ll report later on the contents of the talks.

I’m having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn’t I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is Darwin’s only legacy to medicine.

Looking for a simple way to stand up for academic freedom on Academic Freedom Day? Let people know you support academic freedom by wearing an Academic Freedom Day t-shirt on February 12th, 2009. T-shirts come in a variety of styles and sizes and are inexpensively priced. Click here to browse the shirts and order one for yourself. Don’t stand up alone. Get your friends and classmates to order t-shirts and organize an Academic Freedom Day event at your school, church, or organization. If you need ideas for what you can do to celebrate Academic Freedom Day, here’s a list of five things to do. Or, you can e-mail us at academicfreedom@discovery.org. And you can suit up your dorm or bedroom Read More ›

As part of our efforts to support academic freedom on evolution, we are teaming up with the IDEA Center (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) to help students in starting an IDEA chapter on their campus. Such campus clubs are a fun and educational way for students to examine all sides of the debate over evolution. IDEA Clubs are student-initiated clubs that foster academic freedom as students learn about scientific evidence that supports intelligent design and also learn about modern evolutionary theory. IDEA Clubs are a growing network of student-led clubs on university and high school campuses around the United States with thirty new chapters formed to date. Visit www.ideacenter.org or e-mail Brian Westad at brianw@ideacenter.org for information on how you Read More ›

In Texas, the far-left activist organization Texas Freedom Network is working overtime to try to gut the state’s science standards. This week the Texas State Board of Education holds their regularly scheduled meeting and it seems the TFN will try and whip up a mob to lobby the board when they discuss the proposed update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for science. TFN is parading a push-poll survey of scientists they did recently. They emailed over 1,000 scientists and science professors at Texas universities and less than half replied. Still, TFN is trumpeting that of the replies they did get, nearly all were in complete lock step with the Darwin-only lobby. As Casey Luskin pointed out in Read More ›

The Waco Tribune has an opinion piece today from one of the scientists selected as an expert reviewer of Texas’ science standards. Charles Garner, a chemist at Baylor, writes: As the Texas Education Agency reviews the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, a controversy has developed about language in the current TEKS, which states: “The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem-solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.” This language promotes critical thinking skills. It has been in the TEKS for years. The TEKS guidelines are working fine and Texas students receive some of the best science Read More ›