Science and Culture Today | Page 1346 | Discovering Design in Nature

Dr. Massimo Pigliucci is a colleague of mine here at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He’s a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy. I don’t know him personally, but by all reports he is a fine scientist and teacher. He’s written an essay in the McGill Journal of Education about improving science education in light of the controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design. It’s a fascinating essay. Dr. Pigliucci writes well, and he reveals much about Darwinists’ approach to the scientific and educational conflict between intelligent design and Darwinism.

His abstract sums it up:

In Part 1, I recounted how Darwinists are deeply invested in the rhetorical value of the emotional argument that humans and chimps have a 98% – 99% genetic similarity. Anthropologist John Marks reports that sometimes Darwinists even use this statistic to contend that our lives are “meaningless”! To explore this debate, I recently blogged about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%” that reported that the 1% human/chimp genetic difference statistic was a “myth,” because “studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe.” The Science news article reported that improved genome comparison modeling methods indicate that humans and chimps are “6.4%” genetically distinct from one another. Apparently my Read More ›

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway. Nonetheless, on a rhetorical level, the claim that humans and chimps are 99% the same is a powerful emotional argument aiding those seeking to evangelize for Darwinism. For example, last year a cover story of Time magazine proclaimed: “chimps Read More ›

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O’Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O’Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so. (see here, here and here to start) Compare O’Reilly’s misunderstanding with this letter from a guy who clearly gets it. It was unfortunate too Read More ›

By Pete Chadwell

The mainstream media in the United States–and some of the conservative press, for that matter–are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists.

So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin.

One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms whose rational life is completely dependent on physical causes. Those causes include everything from raw meat to heredity.

In what has to be one of the more interesting passages in culinary analysis, La Mettrie opined:

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of good.

In a recent ID the Future podcast interview, Dr. Scott Chambers discusses the fact that the expansion rate of the universe implies an incredibly high degree of cosmic fine-tuning to allow for the existence of life. Just a few weeks ago, Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley also discussed the universe’s expansion rate. This issue has huge implications for the debate over cosmic design, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Begley’s article. Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis–a pet philosophical favorite of materialists–while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if Read More ›

This month the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a resolution regarding “The dangers of creationism in education,” which calls intelligent design (ID) “a threat to human rights.” The CoE is a non-governmental body in Europe that aims to protect human rights, but its resolutions carry no force of law. Even if the CoE’s edicts did carry the force of law, it’s difficult to take this resolution seriously due to its assertion that questioning Darwin somehow threatens human rights. David Berlinski, a mathematician and Discovery Institute senior fellow who lives in Paris and has made many scientific critiques of Darwinian evolution, has given us an insightful analysis of the resolution, here. As Dr. Berlinski puts it, “if this is what a Read More ›

Last July, David Tyler wrote an insightful post at ARN stating, For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. ‘Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.’ However, this ‘given’ is about to be discarded. Tyler was quoting a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%,” which reported that “human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%.” The statistic of an alleged 1% difference between human and chimp DNA is Read More ›