Science and Culture Today | Page 1306 | Discovering Design in Nature

In light of the recent focus on the presidential election, and speculation on Sara Palin’s views on teaching evolution, it is worth thinking about what a President’s role in this issue should be. Last year, Logan Gage laid out the case for a limited but important Presidential role regarding contentious scientific issues like evolution. I’m curious, is there anyone on the stage that does not believe in evolution?” came the question at the first Republican presidential debate. Much has been made of the fact that three candidates raised their hands. The candidates were not allowed to elaborate, but what should they have said had they more time?…But the question still arises, what does all this have to do with being Read More ›

If you missed “Flies In Danger Escape With Safety Dance,” a story by NPR’s Joe Palca, give it a listen. And don’t forget to check out the videos which show how flies take off from a stationary position. This kind of story puts a damper on the kind of rhetorical jabs commonly heard from Darwinists, such as, “Do we really want to make God responsible for flies and mosquitoes?” Every time someone takes the time to study one of these creatures — in this instance, scientist Michael Michael Dickinson — they come away awestruck, saying things like: “When you see a fly flitting around your hair, or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance,” he [Dickinson] says. “But in Read More ›

In his Autobiography, Charles Darwin stated, “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows.” It is thus quite odd that a ScienceDaily.com article earlier this year with the headline “New Findings Confirm Darwin’s Theory” should go on to say “Evolution Not Random.” This study may be confirming some theory, but it isn’t Darwin’s theory. This tactic to push evolution to the public as “non-random” appears to be part of an ongoing campaign on the part of Darwinists to make neo-Darwinism appear more appealing to the public (which tends to be religious). While there are non-random components to natural selection, evolutionary biology Read More ›

Recently I documented ten examples of textbooks refuting the NCSE-scripted misinformation printed in the New York Times claiming that Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings haven’t been used in textbooks since “20 years ago.” In fact, just last week while browsing through some science textbooks at a local thrift store, I discovered another textbook that includes Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo drawings. In 1998, Judith Goodenough, Robert A. Wallace, and Betty McGuire published Human Biology: Personal, Environmental, and Social Concerns with Harcourt College Publishers. Some Darwinists (like Randy Olson) have claimed that if Haeckel’s drawings are used, it’s only to provide historical background on the history of evolutionary thought. Not so with this textbook: Chapter 20, “Evolution: Basic Principles and Our Heritage” Read More ›

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 ›