Science and Culture Today | Page 1411 | Discovering Design in Nature

One of the more frequent questions people ask about intelligent design is whether any scientists actually support ID theory. There are many notable biologists, biochemists, physicists, and astronomers who support intelligent design, and their work continues to develop the young scientific theory. Here are just a few of them:

Darwinists lack two traits desirable for scientists: decorum and a developed sense of irony. University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Biology and star Darwinist science blogger P.Z. Myers provides evidence for this observation in a recent scatological tirade on Pharyngula, the popular Darwinist science blog that is read daily by thousands of young scientists and aspiring scientists.

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Tackles Giraffe Evolution Last year, German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig critiqued evolutionary accounts of the infamously complex long neck of the giraffe. He recounts how various Darwinists had claimed things like “the evolution of the long-necked giraffe can be reconstructed through fossils,” but Lönnig concluded that “the fossil evidence for the gradual evolution of the long-necked giraffe is — as expected — completely lacking.” Lönnig has now written part 2 of his refutation of this evolutionary tall tale, where he now shifts the focus away from paleontology and on to giraffe anatomy, diet, behavior, and zoology, tackling evolutionary hypotheses about giraffe origins. Part 2 can be read at “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe: What Do We Read More ›

“At Last, the Truth About Love” is the subtitle of Robert Wright’s recent essay “Why Darwinism isn’t Depressing” published on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Moral Animal, notes that neuroscience and evolution have left some people, well, downhearted.

He notes:

One commentator recently acknowledged the ascendance of the Darwinian paradigm with a sigh: “Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself.”

I recently discussed how Wikipedia has inaccurate information on intelligent design, or constantly rebuts (fallaciously) the claims of ID proponents. This post looks at merely two sentences out of the long Wikipedia entry on intelligent design and finds inaccuracy, misrepresentation, bias, and hypocrisy. These two sentences come from Wikipedia’s discussion of polls and intelligent design. Wikipedia presently states: According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as “so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them”.[17] Although some polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls have been criticized as suffering from considerable flaws, such as having a low response rate (248 Read More ›

Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a “creationist,” meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.

Transposons are a type of DNA which many Darwinists have written off as mere genetic junk. The pro-Darwin TalkOrigins archive tells us that transposons “can be thought of as intragenomic parasites.” But don’t feel bad for the poor transposons — it looks like they might be looking at a new career as “the DNA formerly known as junk”: biologists from Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are reporting that “‘Junk’ DNA Now Looks Like Powerful Regulator.” That type of “junk” is the transposon. As the press release about the study explains, “Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections.” The scientists report that in the past, they “had identified a handful of transposons Read More ›

“If conservatives want to address root causes rather than just symptoms they need to join the debate over Darwinism, not scorn it or ignore it,” said CSC’s John West at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) debate earlier this week about whether Darwinism can be aligned with conservatism. He’s exactly right, and conservatives are starting to agree–at least that the discussion needs to take place. Case and point, the AEI event itself. The New York Times took the event seriously enough to send Patricia Cohen to cover the event and pen this report on it, which appears on the front page of today’s paper.

At Townhall.com, David Limbaugh has a critique of the Left’s narrow-mindedness (“Leftist Thought Control”), especially concerning science issues. He reports that intolerance runs rampant where those who believe they hold the monopoly on the truth: “Consider the leftist refrain that red-state conservatives do not merely possess a different worldview, but are not part of the ‘reality-based community.’ Consider the near monolithic liberalism and secularism of our university faculties.”

If you’ve weren’t able to make it to Washington for AEI’s debate on Darwinism and Conservatism, you’re in luck: the video and audio recording are now available online here. The debate features thoughtful analysis from two of Darwin’s conservative champions, Larry Arnhart and John Derbyshire, as well as Darwin’s conservative critics, including Discovery’s own John West and George Gilder. The arguments are lucid and compelling, well worth a listen.