Science and Culture Today | Page 1320 | Discovering Design in Nature

The documentary Expelled keenly observes that scientific ideas begin in the academy, but if they’re to get out to the people, they must pass through a series of barriers and “checkpoints,” which means they can be hindered or stopped at any point along the way. In the film, the first checkpoint is the academy, which polices journals and controls research grants and funding. The second checkpoint is comprised of watchdog groups, like the NCSE, that work hard to organize and kindle opposition against Darwin-skeptics. The next checkpoint is the media, which carefully selects the sources of information it will broadcast to the public on this issue. When all those checkpoints fail, the final checkpoint is the courts. (This idea is Read More ›

Richard Dawkins just can’t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. He has spent the last several weeks trying to recover from his embarrassing interview in the film Expelled where he concedes that intelligent design is a scientific hypothesis after all — so long as you limit the intelligence being studied to space aliens. Now, after denouncing Expelled as “wicked, evil” and an “outrage” for pointing out that Darwinism was one of the intellectual influences on Nazism, Dawkins has compared a popular Rabbi who dares to criticize him to Hitler! And he did it no less on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. No, I’m not joking. As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They do it so well themselves.

Does the biology textbook Explore Evolution manufacture false controversies about evolution, while ignoring real ones?

That’s what biologist and science writer John Timmer claimed in a post earlier this week at Ars Technica. Timmer attended a two-day symposium on evolution at Rockefeller University and noted the many debates brewing there. “Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies,” he concluded . But those real controversies have “no overlap,” he claimed, with the “ostensible” (i.e., fake) controversies supposedly “manufactured” by Explore Evolution. Bottom line for Timmer: while students may, or may not, need to learn about controversies in evolution — he leans strongly towards “not” — Explore Evolution is misleading at best, and the academic freedom bills being introduced around the country aren’t needed.

Darwinists have long made an argument from ignorance, where our lack of present knowledge of the function for a given biological structure is taken as evidence that there is no function and the structure is merely a vestige of evolutionary history.  Darwinists have commonly made this mistake with many types of “junk” DNA, now known to have function.  In contrast, intelligent agents design objects for a purpose, and therefore intelligent design predicts that biological structures will have function. Here’s where it gets interesting: Functionless structures may have been originally designed but were later rendered functionless by natural processes. For example, if you leave a laptop computer on the top of a mountain for 1000 years where it is exposed to Read More ›

“Denialist” has become the slur du-jour of materialists. Dr. Stephen Novella, ardent acceptist, takes me to task for denying the truth of his personal materialist ideology of mind-brain causation. He believes that the brain causes the mind entirely, without remainder. I believe that the brain causes the mind partly, with remainder. He’s a materialist, I’m a dualist. That makes Dr. Novella angry:

Dr. Egnor must be tired of always being wrong – or at least he would be if he had the insight and intellectual honesty to see how persistently wrong he is. Alas, so far he has not demonstrated such insight. I have been engaged in an ongoing blog debate with Dr. Michael Egnor, who writes for the propaganda blog…Egnor has mangled most of his arguments, has misrepresented my opinions, has cruelly assaulted logic (as you can see he has a proper home at the Discovery Institute) – but now he demonstrates that he is incapable of reading a simple sentence and comprehending its meaning…His arguments are persistently wrong. He has not acknowledged his prior egregious errors – which is evidence for lack of insight and/or intellectual dishonesty. He completely misrepresented what I wrote -so either he did not understand it, or didn’t care. Egnor has mangled his arguments and abused logic. These are NOT personal attacks – these are legitimate criticisms of his behavior.

My “cruel assault on logic” and “incapability of reading a simple sentence” have seduced me into very bad behavior…denialism:

The mainstream media’s “framing” of the evolution-debate would have us believe that Darwin-skeptics are the ones who make religious arguments and try to push religion into the science classroom. But the evidence shows that the Darwinists are often the ones who push religion — and in an unashamed manner, at that. A recent UC Irvine news article reports on a lecture given by leading evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala where he suggested that religion should be discussed in science classes. Ayala said, “the fact that science is compatible with religion is an important thing to state in science classes.” He continued making religious arguments for evolution, contending, “The theory of evolution is better for religion than intelligent design.” But the most Read More ›

According to today’s ScienceDaily, “New Evidence Suggests a Symbiogenetic Origin for the Centrosome.”

But the evidence suggests no such thing. Instead, it points to the willingness of evolutionary biologists to believe just-so stories, and to the ideological corruption of the National Institutes of Health and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Biologic Institute director Douglas Axe has an intriguing and worthwhile essay posted online, “Leaping into Trouble,” where he points out that: Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience. Read more here.

Note: This is the first of a series of posts excerpted from my book, Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can’t Explain. Velvet worms are thought to be descended of insects, but the evidence for this is scanty; they look a lot like worms, and they have remained unchanged for millions of years. They live along fallen leaves in tropical forests and have two nozzles, one on each side of their head, which can fire off a very quickly drying glue at their prey. These two sprays crisscross back and forth, as if lassoing the victim. Once the victim is securely ensnared, the worm bites a hole in its body, injects digestive juices, and then Read More ›

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

I have always admired G. K. Chesterton’s dictum that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly, but I never appreciated the full scope of its application until reading John Derbyshire’s recent review of Ben Stein’s “Expelled” at National Review Online.

“What on earth has happened to Ben Stein?” asks Derbyshire. “He and I go a long way back.” Are the two close? Are they old pals who have been through a lot together? “No,” he says, “I’ve never met the guy.”

But wait. How can this be? How can Derbyshire have forged this bond of friendship with Stein without actually knowing him? “Though I’ve never met him,” he explains, “I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him.”
Got it.

In fact, Derbyshire displays an amazing ability, far beyond that of the rest of us, to engage with people and things even though he has had no direct contact with them. Take “Expelled” for example. “So what’s going on here with this stupid ‘Expelled’ movie?” he asks — a question which could have been answered by the simple expedient of actually watching it. A man with Derbyshire’s special talent, however, is not hampered by such constraints: