Science and Culture Today | Page 1415 | Discovering Design in Nature

Mike Lemonick, Time Magazine’s senior science writer and credulous Darwinist, has a habit of writing things that make even his Darwinist friends cringe.

He recently posted an essay sympathetic with Darwinists who are trying to shut down the Southern Methodist University Darwin vrs. Design conference. He called Discovery Institute all kinds of names, including “propagandists” and purveyors of “half truths [that] will actually make people more ignorant.”

Mr. Lemonick made this remarkable statement:

If the DI had been around when people thought lightning was stuff the gods threw when angry, we might still not have electricity.

Let’s ask: what role did the inference to design play for scientists who gave us electricity? The 19th century physicists whose research formed the basis for our modern understanding of electromagnetism were Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.

I’ve mentioned this great site before, but Ciencia Alternativa has many ID resources in Spanish. Their latest addition is El Argumento Positivo de Diseño (The Positive Case for Design). Take a look at their Artículos page for a full listing of resources.

In recent years, a number of states have apologized for their role in promoting the Social Darwinist crusade known as “eugenics” through forced sterilization laws. In “It’s never too late to say you’re sorry,” writer Knute Berger of the internet newspaper Crosscut is calling on Washington state to apologize for its forced sterilization law, noting that Washington was the second state to adopt such a law. He’s right. Washington state—and other states—should apologize for their role in promoting eugenics. This is a sad and disturbing chapter in American history, and citizens need to know about it (although the new Kansas State Board of Education seems to think otherwise).

We’ve already pointed out how fiction passes for good science at SMU. Apparently, ridicule and disrespect pass for tolerance, as well.

The SMU physics department went to the trouble of housing this fun little site, where they’ve even compiled a list of news articles referring to the event and pithy responses to ID proponents (i.e., they’ve resorted to calling us “IDiots”).

A student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has provided more evidence for why there needs to be events like tonight’s Darwin v. Design conference on college campuses. In today’s campus newspaper, anthropology student Ben Wells offers a jeremiad against the purported evils of Discovery Institute and intelligent design. Unfortunately, his article is so incredibly off-base that all he ends up doing is displaying his complete ignorance of the topic. Not that he is alone. Last week, journalist Lee Cullum wrote a similarly ill-informed opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News. The problem for many critics of intelligent design is that they are so sure they are right, they don’t bother to read the people they are denouncing. As a result, they end up attacking a straw man rather than refuting the actual claims made by ID proponents.

Dr. Steven Novella doesn’t think much of people who disagree with him about Darwinism. Dr. Novella, a Yale neurologist, assistant professor and specialist in neuromuscular disorders, is also a ‘skeptic’ and co-founder and president of the New England Skeptical Society. He’s quite unskeptical about Darwinism:

As Rob Crowther noted earlier, Dr. Ronald K. Wetherington, anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, has penned an article in the SMU Daily Campus defending himself and other faculty who object to a conference on Darwin versus Design that will be held on the SMU campus this weekend. Wetherington wants to assure readers that he and other objecting faculty are all for debate, so long as it’s in the proper time and place. In fact, he notes that the university actually sponsored an evolution debate back in 1992.

In 1992, mind you! Wow, how could we have forgotten that? Congratulations! It’s just too bad that that the SMU students of today were not even in grade school back then.

There have been a couple of stories out in recent days about the pope’s views on science and religion as revealed in a new book. Given their bias and preoccupation, it probably was inevitable that some in the media would try to discern more than is present in a 2006 paper of the Holy Father’s that runs in a new German language book. Largely missing is the context. In case you forgot, last September, as he does each fall, Pope Benedict XVI met with his former theology students and discussed a topic of mutual interest. Two years ago the topic was Islam and the West; this year it was science and religion. The meeting, held at Castel Gondolfo, was well-covered in the media and the papers that were delivered were later turned into the present German language volume. (Almost all the meeting participants, understandably, were German speakers, having studied under the pope when he was Fr. Dr. Ratzinger.)

The media, of course, wanted to know what the pontiff and others had said about intelligent design, but ID was not the topic of the meeting. Philosophy, rather, was the focus. Hence, the breathless report by Reuters now that the paper by the pope fails to back ID is, well, silly.

Noted novelist Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday at age 84. Although Vonnegut described himself as a secular humanist, last year on NPR he voiced his skepticism of Darwinism. Calling our human bodies “miracles of design,” he faulted scientists for “pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.” When asked whether this meant he “would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom,” he replied: If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it’d be on my mind all the time as to how the hell we really got this way. It’s a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can’t Read More ›

The Physics Department at SMU criticizes intelligent design as bad science and has a number of invidious things to say about the supposed motivations of ID proponents. In a campus bulletin it then suggests that, in contrast, there will be a “good science” program on Friday–a showing of the film Inherit the Wind! Apparently, they are not joking. The film (and the play that preceded it) is a 1950s-era attack on McCarthyism. The Scopes Trial is roughly a metaphor for anti-communist hysteria. The film as a whole is not history at all, since (for example) it seriously scrambles and exaggerates actual events. A few years ago Ed Larson’s award-winning book Summer for the Gods explained the real and very different Read More ›