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

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 ›

The Scripps Howard News Service is carrying this arresting story by Deroy Murdock:

Most ecologists want to make life easy for butterflies and waterfalls. Who can argue with that? Some environmental extremists, however, think what Earth really needs is fewer people. In some cases, billions fewer.

“We’re no better than bacteria!” University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka recently announced. “Things are gonna get better after the collapse because we won’t be able to decimate the Earth so much,” he added. “And, I actually think the world will be much better when there’s only 10 or 20 percent of us left.”

Pianka dreamed that disease “will control the scourge of humanity.” He celebrated the potential of Ebola Reston, an airborne strain of the killer virus, to make Earth nearly human-free. “We’ve got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”
Just five hours after Pianka’s March 3 speech to the Texas Academy of Science, which Forrest

Mims III covered March 31 in The Citizen Scientist, the Academy named Pianka its 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. Several hundred scientists gave Pianka a standing ovation, Mims reported.

Pianka is not alone.

On June 2, 2006, I submitted a short, 175-word letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), responding to the incomplete and one-sided discussion of the Kitzmiller ruling they published, “Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom,” by George J. Annas (NEJM, Volume 354 [21]:2277-2281 [May 25, 2006]). Today I learned that they have rejected my letter. I’ve had letters rejected or accepted in various venues before, so that’s fine. The rejection notice stated that “[t]he space available for correspondence is very limited, and we must use our judgment to present a representative selection of the material received.” NEJM devoted approximately 3,426 words to Mr. Annas’s article, which was completely one-sided and simply Read More ›