Science and Culture Today | Page 1301 | Discovering Design in Nature

If you’re looking for a summary of Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help, I’ve tried to provide one below. The article was originally written for InsideCatholic.com. If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker’s new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists–a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book Read More ›

Dogmatists committed to a dying paradigm will argue with falsehoods to convince the public of their claims… especially when they’re targeting children.

As we’ve covered here this week, Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings are still used in science textbooks because, according to some Darwinists, “it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students.”

That’s right. According to Darwinist biology professor Bora Zivkovic, who blogs as Coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock and is Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE, sometimes you have to lie to students in order to get them to accept evolution. Why? Because:

Education is a subversive activity that is implicitly in place in order to counter the prevailing culture. And the prevailing culture in … many other schools in the country, is a deeply conservative religious culture.

We’ve covered Biologic Institute’s remarkable Stylus program before; now ID the Future has an exclusive interview with Brendan Dixon, who co-developed the computer program designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. From ID the Future: Click here to listen.In this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin is joined by Brendan Dixon, a programmer with the Biologic Institute who recently coauthored a paper on his co-developed program, Stylus. Dixon explains that Stylus is a computer program that is designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. It tests and applies the principles of evolution to determine what evolution can yield, what problems it can solve, and to determine what evolution can and cannot do. Using digital organisms, the program assesses Read More ›

The NCSE’s rebuttal to Jonathan Wells’ Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution, as re-published in this past Sunday’s New York Times, contains some small differences from their original response which Wells refuted in 2002. I will rebut some of the NCSE’s new false claims in a couple of posts this week. First, let’s look at the fourth question that Dr. Wells asks: “Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry — even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?” Dr. Wells is referring to the faked embryo drawings by the 19th century Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Jonathan Wells and published in 2002.]

According to the NCSE, many of the claims in my questions “are incorrect or misleading,” and they are “intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students’ minds about the validity of evolution as good science.” It is actually the NCSE’s answers, however, that are incorrect or misleading. My original questions (in italics) are posted below; each question is followed by the NCSE’s answer (in bold), a brief outline of my response, and then my detailed response. Numbers in parentheses refer to research notes at the end.

Please feel free to copy and distribute this document to teachers, students, parents, and other interested parties.

The New York Times seems to be afraid that students about to go back to school might have their heads filled with ideas that challenge Darwinian evolution. Thus today it uncritically republished a 6+ year-old error-filled response by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to Jonathan Wells’ Ten Questions to Ask your Biology Teacher About Evolution. Bruce Chapman already responded to the Times articles on DiscoveryBlog, here. Of course, the NCSE’s attempted response didn’t really answer the “Ten Questions” then, and it doesn’t now. In fact, in 2002 Jonathan Wells authored a forceful rebuttal to the NCSE, “Inherit The Spin: Darwinists Answer ‘Ten Questions’ with Evasions and Falsehoods,” which we have now reprinted below so that readers may judge Read More ›

Danio, guest blogger at Pharyngula, has a post advocating the denial of legal protection for health care workers who, because of religious beliefs or other moral objections, refuse to provide services such as abortions or contraception. It’s hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of respect for individual rights would support taking legal sanction against physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who, because of genuine deeply held religious belief or other moral principles, believe that such acts as abortion or contraception are immoral. From the standpoint of traditional medical ethics, healthcare professionals are only under legal compulsion to provide care in a life-saving emergency. The controversial “treatments” in dispute are not emergencies, and are certainly not life-saving. That abortion and contraception aren’t life-saving is actually the point of the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are acting on conscience.

Danio quotes HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who supports the conscience protections of the federal policy:

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will discuss the medical and ethical aspects of persistent vegetative state (PVS). As I noted in an earlier post, I believe that the emergence of PVS as an accepted medical diagnosis is in part a consequence of the emergence of strict materialistic theories of the mind in the late 20th century, especially the theory called “functionalism,” which is the theory that the mind is what the brain does, in the same way that running a program is what a computer does. If the mind is entirely caused by the brain, in a way analogous to the running of a software program on a computer’s hardware, it stands to reason that there would be situations in which damage to the brain would cause the “mind program” to irreversibly crash. This leads to rather obvious ethical implications. Ideas have consequences, and the materialist understanding of the mind has had direct and disturbing consequences for the medical treatment of people handicapped by severe brain injuries. I will explore this connection between philosophy of the mind and clinical medicine in a future post.

PVS came to wide public attention with the death in 2005 by dehydration and starvation of Terri Schiavo, a young woman with severe brain damage caused by a cardiac arrest (probably from an electrolyte imbalance) in 1990. She died because her feeding tube was removed by court order at the request of her husband, who claimed that she had told him that she would have wanted to be deprived of nourishment under these circumstances. The deprivation of water and nourishment to a handicapped person, even with the pretext of accommodating that person’s wishes, obviously raises ethical issues, and I’ll discuss them in future posts. I’ll address primarily the medical and neurological issues in this post.

Denyse O’Leary has taken fellow Canadian Bob Breakenridge to task in The Calgary Herald for writing a column which, as O’Leary says, “is an excellent illustration of why one should not write about big topics without basic research.”

The 2005 Judge Jones decision in Pennsylvania, to which Breakenridge devotes much of his column, has not crimped the worldwide growth of interest in intelligent design. That is no surprise. A judge is not a scientist, and Jones cannot plug gaping holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is–contrary to its (largely) publicly funded zealots– in deep trouble, for a number of reasons.

O’Leary goes on to rebut a number of false statements in Breakenridge’s piece, and she has an interesting analysis of a recent poll on evolution: