Science and Culture Today | Page 1309 | Discovering Design in Nature

What many people observing the debate over intelligent design and evolution don’t get is that intelligent design is not merely an American phenomenon. As the debate continues in every corner of the globe, design proves to be an interesting and legitimately explorable scientific concept. Take the latest from today’s Economic Times, out of India. Columnist Mukul Sharma notes writes in “Design argument and beyond“: One of the core arguments of Intelligent Design is that the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry are just right or fine-tuned to allow the universe and life as we know it to exist. They are precisely the values needed to have a universe capable of producing life. In other words, everything in the cosmos tends Read More ›

Academic freedom doesn’t protect a professor’s right to talk about the scientific evidence favoring intelligent design. But it does protect a professor’s right to belittle his students’ fundamentalist religious beliefs. That’s the hypocritical view being championed by Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu.

Unfortunately, her mindset reflects the views of a lot of pro-Darwin apologists in the media.

When astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was being harassed and discriminated against at Iowa State University (ISU) because of his support for intelligent design, Basu actually cheered on the inquisitors. When atheist religion professor Hector Avalos spearheaded a campus petition against intelligent design in 2005, for example, Basu wrote that “it would be would be a serious breach of academic integrity” for universities to hire intelligent design proponents.

Basu even demanded that ISU impose a gag order to prevent any professor from defending intelligent design as science in ISU classrooms:

Over the past couple years, Tiktaalik, a fossil allegedly documenting parts of the transition from fish to tetrapods, has become a new celebrated icon of evolution. PBS’s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary featured Tiktaalik as their premier transitional fossil, an anachronism since it wasn’t even reported until months AFTER the Dover trial concluded. The NAS’s recent “Science, Evolution, and Creationism” booklet also prominently pushes Tiktaalik, calling it “a notable transitional form.” Darwinists have a lot of rhetorical capital invested in this fossil, and it thus comes as no surprise that they are quick to defend it with the “zero-concession policy” vehemence we’ve come to expect from internet Darwinists. As William Dembski writes regarding this policy: Our critics have, Read More ›

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Charles Darwin set out to explain the origin of not just one or a few species, but all species after the first — in short, all the diversity of life on Earth. The correct word for this is not evolution, but Darwinism. …living things may look as though they were designed, but if Darwinism is true then this is only an illusion. fundamental problem of evolution, the origin of species, remains unsolved. Despite centuries of artificial breeding and decades of laboratory experiments, no one has ever observed speciation through variation and selection.To order The Politically Incorrect Guide to Read More ›

I recently received an e-mail asking about the most recent Mars lander (Phoenix) and the implications for intelligent design (ID) if amino acids, proteins, or life were found on Mars. The person asked, “would this not mean that Neo darwinism is correct and that life occurs if you ‘just add water’?” I’ve posted a modified version of my reply to this person’s question below: These are complex questions you ask, but a scientific “conclusion” is only as good as the starting assumptions that underlie the scientific reasoning involved in making that conclusion. Now I am all for searching out the universe to determine whether life exists outside of Earth. But at present, the research that searches for extra-terrestrial life — Read More ›

Joseph Bottum at First Things has an excellent essay on José Ortega y Gasset, the early 20th Century Spanish writer. In Ortega’s masterwork, The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega describes a new sociological phenomenon: the “mass man.” Bottum explains: Ortega’s accomplishment…was to identify a new sociological species: mass man. As The Revolt of the Masses explains, the mass man is not just an ordinary man, and he is not associated with any particular class. He is, rather, a product of European historical development, a kind of human being born for the first time in the nineteenth century…The description Ortega gives is not particularly enjoyable. The mass man lives without any discipline, and–as Ortega remembers from Goethe–“to live as one pleases Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 5 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” For the installments, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Many intelligent people use the “evolution is just a theory, not a fact” line–but they immediately get into trouble because, as I discussed in Part 1, the formal scientific definition of theory is typically understood to mean a “well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world.” In other words, when talking to a scientifically minded crowd, calling evolution “just a theory” is not a good way to express scientific doubts about neo-Darwinism. As Read More ›

It isn’t just the New York Times that ignores the facts when reporting about the debate over how to teach evolution. Not to be outdone by its competitor the Washington Post catches up today with an ill-informed opinion piece (Evolving Toward a Compromise) that yet again completely misreports what is going on in the upcoming review of Texas’ state science standards. A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution in the state’s science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. First, there is no such proposal. The Texas state science standards currently Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 4 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” For the installments, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Darwinists love to bash Darwin-skeptics who call evolution “just a theory, not a fact.” The truth is that I rarely, if ever, hear people who are closely involved with the ID movement using this line to oppose evolution. The “evolution is just a theory, not a fact” phrase tends to come from the vox populi–intelligent people who studied this issue in their biology class or perhaps have read books like Darwin’s Black Box, Icons of Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This is a Part 3 of a 5 part series on whether evolution should be called a “theory” or a “fact.” See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. The full article can be found here.] Darwinists claim that it is inappropriate to call “evolution a theory, not a fact” because a theory means “a well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world.” In Part 1 and in Part 2, I discussed the fact that the word “theory” can have multiple meanings, ranging from a conjecture or guess (the soft definition) to “a well-substantiated scientific explanation of some aspect of the natural world” (the hard definition). In this installment, I will address the Read More ›