Science and Culture Today | Page 1355 | Discovering Design in Nature

Orac over at Scienceblogs is starting to develop a reputation as someone more interested in calling his opponents names than in accurately representing their positions. His latest misrepresentation involves ENV contributor Casey Luskin and his post on junk-DNA, which Orac called “breathtakingly idiotic” (perhaps like Judge Jones calling ID “breathtakingly inane,” as anything which poses a challenge to the status quo must be to a Darwinist?). Orac explained to his readers that Luskin’s argument was that “‘junk DNA’ somehow disproves evolution.”
This is a blatant mischaracterization of Luskin’s argument. According to Luskin,

Mathematician and intelligent design supporter Granville Sewell has posted an article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” where he makes some interesting predictions about the future state of teaching science. He asks whether intelligent design will be taught and says, “probably not in my lifetime.” In Sewell’s view, “in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious ‘natural’ process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day.” Sewell continues to explain that this result would not be opposed by the Discovery Institute, which is not trying to push ID into schools: But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current Read More ›

Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)? Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it. MSNBC recently published two articles promoting Darwinian just-so stories to the public. The first article about the evolution of Waterfowl genitalia contends, “Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females.” That makes sense, I suppose. But the article makes one admission that strikingly contradicts that little just-so hypothesis: “Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus…” If long phalluses are so advantageous for Read More ›

Materialist neuroscientist and blogger P.Z. Myers gave a talk Sunday to the Minnesota Atheists entitled: “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. I wish I could have been there! Hopefully P.Z. will post a transcript, or put up the Powerpoint file. The program looks like it was a treat. Quoting Myers:

Our recent podcast interview with Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University, discusses his new Evolutionary Informatics lab at Baylor University. Additionally, Mario Lopez recently has posted an interview with William Dembski at the IDEA Center’s website discussing Dembski’s research with Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics lab at Baylor University. Dembski thinks the lab’s research puts ID “in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information.” Dembski’s work has long-been a lightning rod for ID-critics who take a science-stopping approach to ID by alleging that areas of Dembski’s continued ID-research actually represent unsolvable problems for the science of ID. In essence, some of Dembski’s critics have Read More ›

The best way to rewrite history is to delete the views of those who remember it personally. The Scientist‘s editor Richard Gallgaher’s recent article on “junk”-DNA mentions that Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz suggested that The Scientist publish an “obituary” for “junk”-DNA. Gallagher wrote: Andras J. Pellionisz, to whom I am grateful for bringing this notable 35th anniversary to my attention, suggested that The Scientist publish an obituary to “formally abandon this misnomer.” Pellionisz’s objection is that scientific progress is being inhibited, and declaring junk DNA dead would align us with his own organization, the International PostGenetics Society (postgenetics.org), which disavowed the term on the 12th of October last year. Pellionisz is not alone. (Richard Gallagher, “Junk Worth Keeping,” The Scientist, Read More ›

A recent ID the Future podcast interviews Mario Lopez, founder of Ciencia Alternativa, discussing how intolerance against intelligent design and threats of persecution for ID-proponents are alive and well, sadly, not just in the English-speaking countries but also in Spanish-speaking nations. While searching the net recently, I stumbled across the blog of a Spanish-speaking Darwinist paleontologist who confirms this. His “Paleofreak blog” reports on a lecture by intelligent design proponents Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards in an uninviting post titled “Go home!” The post also includes an odd picture of some bizarre character with the title “Creacionismo Go Home”: It appears that intolerance of ID exists not only in English-speaking nations, but also among Spanish-speakers. Can you imagine the Read More ›

The ever observant Denyse O’Leary over at the Post-Dawrinist blog has an interesting little post about NCSE’s Eugenie Scott’s recent attempts to spin the “inside story about the Discovery Institute, the well-financed ‘think tank’ promoting intelligent design and other far-right causes.” (Well financed? What, compared to the average biology department at the average college? Our budget is a tiny fraction of just a tiny fraction of all the Darwin dominated budgets out there. And, far-right causes? What, like green hybrid vehicles or passenger ferry service? Among other things Scott apparently refers to us as “right wing libertarians” with a “road map to theocracy”. What in the world is a libertarian theocrat you might wonder? A former DI colleague (who asked Read More ›

I stated in my previous post that “ID has long-predicted that junk-DNA has function, and ID was right.” So what has Neo-Darwinism done with respect to “junk”-DNA? The Panda’s Thumb post cited by Richard Gallagher in his recent attack on ID in The Scientist cites an ID-proponent that found that some Darwinian biologists predicted that “junk”-DNA would have function, and the implication is that Neo-Darwinism has not forestalled research into “junk”-DNA. So what if some biologists did buck the trend and investigate function for non-coding DNA? Good for them for being observant, and good for them for not relying upon the neo-Darwinian consensus! The fact remains that the entire false “junk” DNA paradigm was born out of the neo-Darwinian mindset, Read More ›

The Scopes trial is often depicted as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of light (scientific Darwinists) and the forces of darkness (benighted citizens of Tennessee who didn’t want Darwinism taught to their children). Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1950s play “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized account of the Scopes trail, portrays the trial as a struggle between scientific enlightenment and ignorant fundamentalism and has become a staple of high school English classes. Yet the Scopes trial wasn’t, as a matter of law, just about teaching Darwinism in an abstract sense. Scopes violated the Tennessee law by teaching from a textbook — George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914).

In a recent essay in the weekly standard, A Book for No Seasons: the forgotten aspects of John Scopes’ famous biology textbook, Garin Hovannisian recounts the truth about the biology textbook that was at the center of the Scopes trial.
Hovannisian observes:

George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914) was the book that sparked the controversy. Condemned as heretical in 1925, today it would seem to be a manual for enlightenment’s battle against religion’s perceived mysticism. Yet if John Scopes were to teach the very same Civic Biology in a modern classroom, he would probably be put on trial again. Because buried under the dust of history is the fact that this progressive, pro-evolution text was also quite racist.

Hovannisian quotes from page 196 of Hunter’s textbook: