Science and Culture Today | Page 1353 | Discovering Design in Nature

A few days ago I sat in one of the rooms where the producers of a new film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” were screening a trailer and passing the word to interested individuals and groups. It’s the same pre-release publicity approach used recently for other Hollywood offerings, including documentaries. My emotion was almost as much one of relief as excitement. It is going to be a terrific film treatment of the whole controversy, and far fairer than any we have encountered.

This week Behe’s Edge of Evolution received a glowing review in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Cameron Wybrow, who writes: Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, provides some hard numbers, coupled with an ingenious argument. The key to determining the exact powers of Darwinian evolution, says Behe, lies with fast-reproducing microbes. Some, such as malaria, HIV, and E. coli, reproduce so quickly that within a few decades, or at most a few millennia, they generate as many mutations as a larger, slower-breeding animal would in millions of years. By observing how far these creatures have evolved in recent times, we can estimate the creative limits of random mutation. It’s worth noting that, unlike certain critics who used their reviews to Read More ›

Materialists predict they will create “artificial life” in a test tube in the next 3 to 10 years. I have a counter-prediction: They will succeed only by re-defining “artificial” and “life.” For example, “artificial” will cover any human manipulation of an existing organism — so replacing a few genes or enzymes in an already-living cell will count as creating “artificial life.” And “life” will be anything that can undergo “Darwinian evolution” — such as an artificially engineered system of molecules — even though it can be sustained only in a carefully controlled laboratory environment. But a free-living cell? I don’t think so. We are still many years and many discoveries away from understanding the nature of life even in prokaryotes. Read More ›

You cannot critique a theory for inappropriately concluding “X” when indeed the theory does not conclude “X.” Jewish Action Magazine has an article entitled “Revisiting Intelligent Design” that repeats this common flawed argument for intelligent design. First, the article misrepresents Michael Behe’s arguments as saying that ID proposes “the existence of a supernatural being, whom he calls the ‘intelligent designer,’ meaning, of course, God.” Of course Behe does believe that the designer is God, but Behe has made it clear that as a science, intelligent design does not try to address religious questions about the nature of the designer. So while the designer may be God, the empirical data cited by Behe–information in DNA and complex machines in the cell–do Read More ›

Recently the Boston Globe ran a letter to the editor by Stephen Meyer, responding to Sally Lehrman’s ridiculous claim that the Explore Evolution textbook “uses pseudoscience to attack Darwin’s theories.”Meyer’s response? There’s nothing “pseudo” about saying what the evolutionists themselves admit, even citing the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps Lehrman judges our book pseudoscience because we also describe current scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory. Perhaps she is unaware that skepticism about the creative power of natural selection and random mutation is common in peer-reviewed scientific literature and in the scientific community. No less an authority than the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published a recent paper stating: “Natural selection based solely Read More ›

Over at Pandas Thumb Nick Matzke has announced his departure from the NCSE (the leading Darwin-only lobby group) to focus on getting an advanced degree in evolutionary biology. Perhaps he should consider taking some history courses as well. Matzke reiterates the old canard that the phrase “intelligent design” was concocted after the Edwards v. Aguillard supreme court case in which creationism/creation science was ruled out of bounds for public high school science classes. This is simply a Darwinian urban legend. In 2005 we published a paper by Dr. Jonanthan Witt, titled, The Origin of Intelligent Design:A brief history of the scientific theory of intelligent design. Witt explains the origins of the term in part here: Its roots stretch back to Read More ›

If only Darwinists could come up with a body of convincing scientific evidence to support Darwin’s theory: after 150 years of assuring us, such evidence surely must exist. As recently as May of this year, the best that a Darwinist as prominent as Professor Francisco Ayala of UC Irvine could come up with as examples of evolution in action was: (1) bacterial resistance to antibiotics; (2) insect resistance to pesticides; and (3) the evolution of fur coloring of desert rodents. (Ayala, “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without designer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 2007).) These examples of “evolution” appear to be microevolution in action; none of them even approach the level of one species “evolving” into another species. On the other hand, there are aspects of the fossil record, such as the Cambrian Explosion, that appear to contradict Darwin’s theory of small gradual changes over time, and for which neo-Darwinism still offers no plausible explanation. (Ayala wisely avoids the subject in his article, by starting his history of modern life after the Cambrian Explosion.) Stasis and “living fossils” are another paradox of Darwinian evolution. Yet according to Ayala, the bacteria that are the oldest organisms on Earth have not changed at all in the billions of years of their existence! This observation does not help Darwinian evolution explain the origin of new types of living organisms.

Why is a Fly Not a Horse?
By Giuseppe Sermonti
Discovery Institute Press, 2005, 166 pages
ISBN-10: 0-9638654-7-1

Editor of the Italian biology journal “Revista de Biologia,” (one of the world’s oldest biology journals) Giuseppe Sermonti explains why evolution resembles a “paradigm” more than it does an explanation. Scientists assume that the theory and its implications (such as universal common descent) are true, but no one can ever explain the details of precisely why it is. According to Sermonti, naturalistic theories of biological origins are science-stoppers.

So, the benighted brites at the New York Times are suddenly all agog over the deep ponderings of Oxford’s Nick Bostrom (never mind that it isn’t really a new idea at all — it’s been bubbling up for a few years now). What exactly has them so excited, you ask? Well, Bostrom thinks we all might just be an eleborate Sims game for some sort of advanced video game addict. Seriously.

He has “thoughtfully” proposed the idea that this world, your reality, is nothing more than a very advanced simulation, an illusion, if you will. In fact, he thinks that this simulation might just be running inside another simulation, inside another simulation, inside another simulation on and on back, forever and ever amen.

You cannot fairly pit the educated views of Darwinian scientists against the opinions of students. To be honest, you need to hear from scientists who doubt Darwinian evolution and have the evidence to defend themselves. To merely stigmatize skeptics of Darwinism as “fundamentalist Christians” and “creationists” is to serve the cause of propaganda, not objective discourse.