Science and Culture Today | Page 1413 | Discovering Design in Nature

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] The noted scholar Ronald Numbers is often cited as an objective authority on the history of the debate over evolution. But when he recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” I was surprised that Numbers used invective language and clearly incorrect claims to discredit the theory of intelligent design. My first two pieces on the article are here and here. Now I want Read More ›

Predictably, as soon as we announced that the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism list had topped 600 doctoral scientists, we were flooded with a wave of scientists wanting to add their names to the list. Well, okay, it was a small wave — 14 in the past four days to be exact — but a wave none the less.

Over at Post-Darwinist, Denyse O’Leary notes that she could probably heat her home with the energy generated by the Darwinist’s voiciferous denunciations of anyone who dares to doubt the veracity of the Darwinian mechanism.

Maybe, as the rage grows, I can offer energy from, like, enormous clusters of Darwinists denouncing specific scientists, in which case I can sign on to an alternative energy provider in Canada, offering “pro-Darwin noise” as an energy source. Goodness knows, given recent American Episcopal Church pronouncements, there is enough of that to turn my modest home – and homes for a six-block radius – into a northern Banana Republic. Hey, if all my neighbours agree to sign up with me for a few evening classes in tropical horticulture (instead of the temperate/near north horticulture we know and love), we could put all our extra bananas and pineapples into the local Food Bank. Cheap at the price, and good citizenship! And at least some use for the Darwinists’ rage, too.

Despite the Darwinist community’s long-standing campaign to help the public come to the “correct” view that “evolution and religion are compatible,” public skepticism of evolution remains high. (See this link for documentation.) This would logically lead one to the conclusion that there are other factors besides religion that drive skepticism of evolution. Perhaps, one might even suggest, for many people the issue has a lot to do with science! Recently I was told about a 1997 article in Scientific American which reported a study conducted by Brian Alters on students’ reasons for rejecting evolution (“What Are They Thinking?: Students’ reasons for rejecting evolution go beyond the Bible,” by Rebecca Zacks, Scientific American, October 1997, pg. 34). The study surveyed over Read More ›

The Times (London) Higher Education Supplement (THES) confuses intelligent design with young earth creationism in a slew of articles as part of a crusade against ID.
The main article of the four on the subject is stereotypical of the mainstream media’s insistence that this is about religion and not science, starting out reporting on a tent revival meeting and going on to focus on religion rather than on any of the serious scientific issues under debate.
In this article the reporters go after creationists, and at the end of the piece there is a short description of intelligent design and how it differs from creationism. However, this article is not available online, and it is the only place where the differences between ID and creationism are cited.

In the only article widely available online, “Intelligent design creeps on to courses”, the THES clearly equates ID with creationism. The headline implies the article is about ID, but the people quoted and the groups discussed are all creationists, and are referred to as such in the article. This is clearly misleading the reader to equate the two concepts.

The THES is reporting that courses on intelligent design and creationism now will be compulsory in zoology and genetics classes, as will criticism of the theories.

But there’s a twist: lecturers will present the controversial theories as being incompatible with scientific evidence. “It is essential they (students) understand the historical context and the flaws in the arguments these groups put forward,” says Michael McPherson, of Leeds University.

Some Darwinists are so against teaching of intelligent design that they are criticizing even mentioning the theory in order to attack it.

Despite the clear anti- creationist stance of these lecturers, the move has set warning bells ringing across the UK science community.

Even the critics realize that the issue there is about creationism, so why would the THES insist on including ID when their stories are actually about something else?

Science magazine has issued a correction for incorrectly calling Discovery Institute “creationism’s main think tank.” (see original post here) Corrections and ClarificationsNews of the Week: “Court revives Georgia sticker case” by C. Holden (2 June, p. 1292). The article incorrectly characterizes the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, as a think tank for the creationist movement. The institute is a public policy organization that operates many different programs, including the Center for Science & Culture, which supports the work of scholars who explore challenges to evolution and promote the concept of intelligent design. Wnen we originally called for Science to issue the correction it appeared we’d been rebuffed, but now we see that they have corrected the record. It is good Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: The three individual installments of this series can be seen here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The final complete article, What’s Up with Ronald Numbers? An Analysis of the Darwinist Metanarrative in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, can be found here.] Ronald Numbers is a well-known historian of science, but when he co-authored a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” I was surprised by the invective language the authors used in comparing peer-reviewed scientific monographs by ID proponents to religious “tracts. Unfortunately, the flaws of this article go far beyond merely employing inflammatory remarks. Given Numbers’ previously more objective scholarship, I was surprised to find Read More ›

A new website, ResearchID.org has just launched and this is the announcement we received. A new intelligent design website, ResearchID.org has been launched. that will provide high-quality online resources for scientists and scholars researching intelligent design. As a research website, ResearchID.org is an on-line knowledgebase for theoretically, empirically, and technologically exploring intelligent design. This site has no affiliation with Discovery Institute. Established by ID theorist and author Joseph C. Campana, the site assembles the many separate lines of information, reasoning, and evidence that support ID and melds them into a lucid, unified, and accessible corpus. ResearchID.org will help those who are doing intelligent design researcy by producing and cataloging many types of resources: research proposals, biographical entries, project descriptions, articles Read More ›

SEATTLE — Over 600 doctoral scientists from around the world have now signed a statement publicly expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution. The statement, located online at www.dissentfromdarwin.org, reads: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The fastest growing segment of the list is scientists from outside the United States. International scientists now represent just over 12% of all signers, and as a group has seen nearly 40% growth in the past four months.

While the New England Journal of Medicine recently refused to publish a pro-ID letter-to-the-editor commenting on the Kitzmiller ruling, other medical journals are still clearly open to discussion on these matters. Michael R. Egnor, professor of Neurosurgery at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook has published a letter in the Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled Defending Science from Censorship. The letter responds to an anti-ID article published in Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action,” which had many co-authors, including the notable names Elliot Sober, Ronald Numbers, and Terese Berceau. The original article by Berceau, Sober, & Numbers et al. is surprising for something published in a scholarly journal: it uses uncommonly inflammatory rhetoric to Read More ›