Science and Culture Today | Page 1357 | Discovering Design in Nature

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.

Science writer Denyse O’Leary is the latest to weigh in on The Edge of Evolution over at her popular blog, Post-Darwinist. She actually has three insightful posts related to Behe, and of course Behe’s constributions to the overall debate over Darwinism.

She sums up The Edge of Evolution this way:

Behe calculates that, based on the available evidence of observed Darwinian mutations, events less likely than ten to the twentieth power are generally beyond the edge of (Darwinian) evolution (145).

There is the main argument in a nutshell, minus the supporting material. Many people, of course, will feel the need to argue for or against the thesis of The Edge of Evolution without bothering to read it. Despite the fact that it is very clearly written – a masterpiece of simple explanation, accessible to anyone who can read National Geographic or Scientific American.

Over the past year or so I’ve corresponded with a pro-Darwin graduate student in biology at a major public research university on the east coast. Unfortunately, I had to end the correspondence because, despite my repeated pleas for civility and personal forgiveness towards him, he simply could not restrain himself from personal attacks against me. Though I ended any personal correspondence with this Darwinist, he recently asked me a question worth answering here on Evolution News & Views. To give some background, his question asks how I calculated that a mouse “pseudogene,” if it were truly a non-functional pseudogene, would tend to be rewritten by neutral mutations in about 125 million years: I had a question about a figure you Read More ›

The Darwinists devoutly desire to avoid the true history of their creed, and usually the media assist in the cover up–unknowingly, I would like to think. The “Inherit the Wind” trope that is monotonously employed by journalists–not to mention Judge Jones of Dover, PA fame–derives from the play and movie of that name. But this cliché, which is the source of what many journalists think about the subject, was fiction and not even aimed at the evolution issue so much as the danger of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The real Scopes trial in 1925 was rather different. And so was the biology textbook that was at the heart of the Scopes trial.

Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, continues to garner attention. Not surprisingly, Darwinists are not making the same mistake they made with Darwin’s Black Box, only now they are working overtime to ensure EoE suffers crib death. They simply can’t afford for another Behe book to get any traction. So, Behe is having to work overtime as well, responding to his critics. Today he has the first of two responses to a recent review in Nature magazine by Ken Miller. His Amazon blog has all of his responses thus far to Jerry Coyne, Sean Carroll, and Michael Ruse, as well as answers to some common questions about the book.

Pro-intelligent design astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is appealing his denial of tenure at Iowa State University to the Iowa State Board of Regents. Dr. Gonzalez’s first appeal was rejected by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy on May 31. On June 19, Gonzalez filed notice with the ISU President’s office that he would make a further appeal to the Board of Regents. Gonzalez’s current appeal will play out over the next couple of months as the record in the case is forwarded by the university to the Board of Regents and both Gonzalez and the university file their written arguments in the case. If Gonzalez’s denial of tenure is not overturned, he will be out of a job at the end of the 2007-08 academic year.