Science and Culture Today | Page 1356 | Discovering Design in Nature

The Des Moines Register is continuing the rewriting of history regarding Guillermo Gonzalez. Last week the Des Moines Register published an article by Lisa Rossi which misrepresented the accomplishments of Guillermo Gonzalez and vastly understated his grant funding. In response, I submitted the following letter-to-the-editor to the Des Moines Register, but they would not run the letter because it didn’t “add anything new to the dialogue.” It seems the Des Moines Register doesn’t regard positive information about Guillermo Gonzalez as adding anything new to the discussion. Regardless, as my letter concluded, “Rossi’s fuzzy math and selective presentation of ISU’s tenure policies obfuscate the obvious fact that Gonzalez’s tenure denial was due to intolerance of intelligent design.” I reprint the letter Read More ›

This week’s WORLD Magazine features an interview (available here to subscribers) with biochemist Michael Behe, “Darwin Slayer” and author of this year’s The Edge of Evolution, his first book since the groundbreaking Darwin’s Black Box back in 1996. As Marvin Olasky writes, “[A] book once every decade or so is about as much as Darwinians can take. Behe’s new work shows that Darwinism’s random mutation and natural selection explain little about how one species has led to another.”

My Darwinist interlocutor Orac, the surgical oncologist who blogs anonymously to hide his professional identity, but who takes umbrage at my observation that his posts are sometimes unprofessional, repeated his claim recently that Darwin’s theory is essential to medicine. That’s an odd assertion, even at first glance, given that Darwin’s theory isn’t taught in medical school and there are no specific requirements that pre-medical students have any grounding in the theory. There are lots of things that medical school admissions and curriculum committees recognize as indispensable to medical practice and research–calculus, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology and pathophysiology, to name a few–but Darwin’s fundamental assertion — that all natural functional biological complexity arose by non-teleological variation and natural selection — isn’t a part of the required curriculum. How can Darwin’s actual theory of the non-purposeful origin of all life be indispensable to medicine, but not taught as a part of medical education, nor even required as a part of pre-medical education?

Yet Darwinists have insisted that Darwin’s theory is indispensable to medicine in three ways:

In part 1, I explained that The Scientist‘s editor Richard Ghallager wrote a politically charged article to avoid acknowledging that ID proponents have long-predicted the death of junk-DNA. But have ID proponents made these predictions? In a previous post, I gave about 4 or 5 examples of predictions from pro-ID or ID-sympathetic scientists from 1994 to the near-present who were predicting the end of the junk-DNA mindset. But does ID logically predict that we should find more and more function for “junk”-DNA? In a post that Telic Thoughts called, “A Dubious “Opportunity” for IDers,” it was recounted that one evolutionary biologist challenged ID proponents to “Specify the basis” for predicting function for junk DNA. I’ve done this multiple times here, Read More ›

I recently predicted recently that Darwinists would try to erase the historical fact that Darwinism led to the long-standing presumption that non-coding DNA was largely genetic junk. In the latest issue of The Scientist, editor Richard Gallagher does no less, citing sources that wrongly imply that Neo-Darwinism did not hinder research into function for junk-DNA, and even stating that “[t]he latest iniquity to befall junk DNA is the attempted hijack by proponents of Intelligent Design.” Gallagher’s usage of a terrorism metaphor fits well with Gallagher’s own admission that his article’s purpose is more rhetorical than factual: While I did start this editorial off with a working title of “The Life and Death of Junk DNA,” a few hours of browsing Read More ›

According to an article in Scientific American: Homo sapiens is the only species that keeps detailed records. That is why biologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England started in 1998 to comb through Finnish church records from two centuries ago for clues about the influence of evolution on reproduction. The data and analysis may have historical and even sociological value. Perhaps there is even some anthropological points to be noted. But how is this evolutionary biology? The answer is a cliché, but still true: when all you’ve got is a theoretical hammer, every study is a nail. Once again, we have biologists desperately seeking relevance and self-worth.

Michael Behe has posted his response to Richard Dawkins’ review of The Edge of Evolution on his Amazon blog, and it’s worth noting for what it reveals about how Behe differs from many of his critics.

This week’s WORLD Magazine cover story is about teaching the controversy and focuses primarily on Explore Evolution, the new textbook which teaches both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory. The article features an interview with Discovery senior fellow Dr. John West, along with Doug Cowan, a high school biology teacher who plans on incorporating the textbook in his curriculum next year. According to the article: This fall, the 34-year teaching veteran will restructure his evenhanded presentation around a new textbook from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Neo-Darwinism (Hill House Publishers, 2007) does not address alternative theories of origins but succinctly lays out the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the most critical elements of Read More ›

It’s beyond dispute that the false “junk”-DNA mindset was born, bred, and sustained long beyond its reasonable lifetime by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. As one example in Scientific American explained back in 2003, “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes … ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” But once it was discovered that introns play vital cellular roles regulating gene production within the cell, John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, was quoted saying the failure to recognize function for introns might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” Now it’s turning out that this “mistake” of Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: This post was written by a Discovery Institute legal intern, Guillermo Dekat. Mr. Dekat is a law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Air Force Academy.]

A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
By: Cornelius G. Hunter (Brazos Press, 2007)

In law, one who sells a product in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user is held strictly liable for the physical harm to the injured party. One way for the injured party to win a case is to successfully argue that there is a design defect in the product. Put another way, the plaintiff is entitled to damages because there is something wrong with the blueprints for the product. At this point, expert witnesses are found to testify to the design’s integrity or its defectiveness.