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

CSC senior fellow Jay Richards used to joke that reporters covering evolution simply sit down at their keyboards and type ALT + CTRL + SCOPES, and out pops a complete story that simply reiterates the false storyline that the primary challenge to evolution is a religious one, just as was the case during the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in the early days of the 20th century. I laughed when he told me, because I was familiar with how often that bogus storyline was repeated by reporters, and the idea of a computer macro being used to deploy it was funny.

It’s not so funny now, though. It looks like the New York Times might indeed have some sort of macro in place for all stories concerning the ongoing debate over modern evolutionary theory. The Times has defaulted to this standard line: “There is no credible scientific challenge to evolution.” This current line has survived mainly intact and been selected out of a number of mutations over the last few years. It’s clearly been a guided and purposeful project, so it’s not really evolution at all.

This is one busy week for debates. Who says there’s no debate among scientists over Darwinian evolution?

The Waco Tribune reported that “Baylor vice president for marketing and communications John Barry … denied that the matter has been drawn out because the content is related to intelligent design.” Does Baylor University actually expect us to believe that this has nothing to do with ID? William Dembski reports that the initial e-mail sent from Baylor administrator, Dean Kelley, to Dr. Marks explicitly stated that people were complaining about Robert Marks’s website precisely because it dealt with ID! Here’s what Dean Kelley wrote: “I have received several concerned messages this week about an interview and web site dealing with evolutionary computing associated ID. Please disconnect this web site immediately and Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet Read More ›

There is a long record of conflict and persecution in the history of science, as in any area of endeavor. Scientists are given to the same failings as other human beings: greed, status anxiety, envy, and fear. To believe the pious statements by professional organizations about the enlightened way “science works” is comparable to accepting the civics textbook renderings of “how a law is made.” There is a way, all right, that science is supposed to work (and laws supposedly are made), and then there is reality. One can be grateful that there are so many cases where science does proceed along the ideal path, but there is no excuse for trying to fool the public into thinking that great Read More ›

As Rob Crowther noted earlier, NYT’s Cornelia Dean has been doing a shoddy job reporting on intelligent design and evolution. In fact, even her allies are beginning to take notice.

On Thursday the local (and vehemently anti-ID) weekly had a note on its blog to Cornelia Dean. While they agreed with her biased reporting, even they are getting tired of her knee-jerk parroting:

Cornelia Dean! It’s good to be emphatic, but you start to sound like a robot–one of those Darwin-believin’ automatons whom the Discovery Institute takes great pleasure in deriding.

Yesterday Rob Crowther recognized that Cornelia Dean and the New York Times are puffing Darwinism in an article about Expelled titled, “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.” This front page New York Times news-article blatantly editorializes that, “[t]here is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth.” But that isn’t the real story here. If Cornelia Dean and the New York Times were to report the real story, they would have instead reported: “There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth that goes unpunished.”

[Editor’s note: This was the second installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part I, I demonstrated that specified complexity is the appropriate measure of biological complexity. In this section, I will show why merely citing gene duplication does not help one understand how Darwinian evolution can produce new genetic information. Dawkins’ main point in his “The Information Challenge” article is that “[n]ew genes arise through various kinds of duplication.” So his answer to the creationist question that so upset him is gene duplication. Yet during the actual gene-duplication process, a pre-existing gene is merely copied, and nothing truly new is generated. As Michael Egnor said Read More ›

The New York Times periodically exhibits a questionable nose for news. What rises to the level of news for the science writers at the Times aren’t instances of scientific censorship or persecution of scientists. Today, complaints by Darwinists allegedly featured in a forthcoming (and as of yet unfinished, according to the filmmakers themselves) film, Expelled, that documents the persecution of scientists who question Darwin, is considered news by the Times’ science staff.

What about real news related to the debate over evolution and intelligent design? The Times has a snobbishly selective olfactory sense, it seems.

[Editor’s note: This was the first installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] Last week I posted a link to a YouTube video where Richard Dawkins was asked to explain the origin of genetic information, according to Darwinism. I also posted a link to Dawkins’ rebuttal to the video, where he purports to explain the origin of genetic information according to Darwinian evolution. The question posed to Dawkins was, “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” Dawkins famously commented that the question was “the kind of question only a creationist would Read More ›

Dr. Jeffrey Shallit has answered my question about the analogy between S.E.T.I. research and the inference to intelligent design in biology. His reply was thoughtful, made some good points, and was free of personal insults.
My question was:

“If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?”

Starting off, Dr. Shallit demurs: