Science and Culture Today | Page 1347 | Discovering Design in Nature

The furor over Dr. James Watson’s comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people–resulting from evolution–caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist’s speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.

This week’s Human Events features a piece by Logan Gage which addresses, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s unsurprising take on evolution: Following liberal science writer Chris Mooney’s successful book “The Republican War on Science,” Clinton repeatedly lumps these issues together using the “war” metaphor. “Mrs. Clinton has used the phrase ‘war on science’ frequently on the campaign trail, and it has reliably drawn applause from Democratic audiences,” according to The New York Times. Her website declares she will “end the Bush Administration’s war on science.” But who is really politicizing science? In February 2008, comedian, economist, and actor Ben Stein will release a feature-length documentary film titled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It chronicles the many scientists who have been harassed Read More ›

So, along with their October issue, Wired has published a Geekipedia supplement, 149 People, Places, Ideas & Trends You Need To Know, and nestled between innovation and internet radio is intelligent design. An intricate organ like the eye relies on specialized parts, none of which work without the others. It’s hard to imagine, they say, such a system evolving by natural selection (although the work of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins provides some ideas on how it might happen). Their preferred explanation: an “intelligent designer” who drafted the blueprint for life. The Geek’s treatment is just a bit better than Wikipedia (not hard to accomplish), but needs some help. For instance, they claim: “And since it can’t Read More ›

Today (or yesterday depending on which side of the pond you’re on), evolutionary philosopher Jerry Fodor has stepped out and published an article that puts his entire career at risk, not to mention possibly kissing good-bye any chance he’ll ever get another research grant.

Michael Behe has just published another response to attacks on his book, The Edge of Evolution, this one addressing an exchange that he and Sean Carroll had in letters published in Science. Carroll had published a review in Science which Behe responded to here, as readers will recall. Science also published part of a letter Behe wrote, which Carroll then responded to. The back-and-forth between these two is well worth reading. For more on Behe’s responses to his critics, visit his Amazon blog.

Eminent evolutionist James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, is sparking controversy in Great Britain for suggesting that blacks are inferior to whites due to evolution. But there is nothing particularly extraordinary about Watson’s views. As I document in chapter 7 of my forthcoming book Darwin Day in America, there is a long history of evolutionists using Darwinism to justify racism — including Darwin himself.

Watson is past director and current Chancellor of the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Ironically, that lab has deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by. Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites. Back then the lab was directed by Harvard-trained geneticist Charles Davenport. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Davenport held views about blacks and evolution hauntingly similar to Watson’s.

For decades, Darwinists have been telling us that an alleged lack of function for the human appendix demonstrates that our species once walked on 4 legs and ate a vegetarian diet. As a result, many believe the Darwinian urban legend that the appendix is a “vestigial organ” that has no function, and that this demonstrates that humans evolved from quadrupedal mammals. But now CNN is reporting that the “Purpose of appendix believed found” in a story that reads: The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac Read More ›

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UPDATED: Today’s response is the fourth and final in this series of responses to critics. This reponse addresses Dutch biologist Gert Korthof and is available here. Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution, has hit a nerve with Darwinists by using mainstream scientific research to highlight the distinct limits of Darwinian evolution. Earlier this week he began another series of responses to critics attempting to refute the book’s conclusions. As I wrote in The Edge of Evolution, Darwinism is a multifaceted theory, and to properly evaluate the theory one has to be very careful not to confuse its different aspects. Unfortunately, stories in the news and on the internet regularly confuse the facets of Darwinism, ignore distinctions made in The Read More ›

Expelled may be the latest film, and certainly the most prominent, to look at the suppression of academic freedom in regards to criticism of Darwinian evolution, but it isn’t the first. In 2001 Coldwater Media produced Icons of Evolution, a film that highlighted the academic persecution of a high school teacher who challenged the dogmatic teaching of Darwinian evolution. The film wove two story lines together. The first played off of the name of Jonathan Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution, which showed that a number of the typical “proofs” of Darwinian evolution were false and really didn’t lend evidentiary support to Darwin’s theory at all. The second told the story of Roger DeHart and a particularly egregious example of Darwinian Read More ›