Science and Culture Today | Page 1418 | Discovering Design in Nature

Last week, The Daily of the University of Washington ran two pieces concerning ID. The first was a surprisingly straightforward and neutral news article about UW scientists who had signed the Dissent from Darwin list, while the second was a knee-jerk reaction more typical of an alternative weekly than an award-winning college paper.

In the objective article, news reporter Zack Barnett-Howell did a decent job of presenting different sides of an argument, including differing levels of support for ID from the signatory scientists to the dissent list. (The Dissent from Darwin list is for those skeptical of Darwin’s theory and is not about ID.) This is the most refreshing aspect of Barnett-Howell’s piece, that any reporter in Seattle, student or not, would have the objectivity to allow ID proponents to speak for themselves.

Saturday, August 26th at 7pm EST C-SPAN’s BookTV will air “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision”, featuring two of the book’s authors, John West and Casey Luskin. The program will air again Sunday, August 27th at 6:30am EST and Monday, August 28 at 12:00am EST. The featured event was held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington D.C. for Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, the first book-length critique of Judge John E. Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case, the first court case to assess the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The event, held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington, D.C., was full, (as was a similar one in Seattle at Read More ›

Last December I addressed the point that “Darwinists” are wrong to allege that ID-proponents invented terms such as “Darwinist” or “Darwinism.” (See Busting Another Darwinist Myth: We’d love to take credit for “Darwinism,” but we can’t.) This post was prompted after E.O. Wilson said in Newsweek that “[s]cientists … don’t call it Darwinism,” implying that if you use the term “Darwinism” then you aren’t a scientist. But on Sunday, Denyse O’Leary posted an excellent article documenting multiple usages of the term “Darwinist” or “Darwinism” by, well, leading Darwinist scientists like Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayr, and H. Allen Orr. See Darwinism/Darwinist: Now a term of reproach? at Post-Darwinist blog for the full article! http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2006/08/darwinismdarwinist-now-term-of.html

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George Coyne, as director the Vatican Observatory, according to Zenit News. A Jesuit with a doctorate in astronomy, Dr. Coyne in recent years made himself the public scourge of Darwin critics and scientific proponents of intelligent design. Increasingly his theology resembled that of “process theologians” who believe that God is still learning and could not have known what his world was becoming.

While media tended to avoid the pro-design statements of the pope over the past year (see “Is the Pope Catholic?“), they frequently sited the hostile remarks of Dr. Coyne, sitting at his office at the University of Arizona, as supposedly representing those of “the Vatican.” That could not have been well-received at the Vatican in Rome. Rumors that Coyne might be replaced have circulated for months.

In the past year since he criticized the pro-design essay of Austrian Cardinal Schoenborn in the NY Times, Dr. Coyne has been feted at a number of unlikely gatherings where his job was to express Church support for Darwinism. At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Coyne pronounced in favor of a “fertile universe” where “chance and destiny embrace.” The notes handed out for a talk given by Coyne by that title state:

Discovery Institute has been producing the ID The Future Podcast for a few months, and already iTunes listeners are giving it rave reviews. What follows is a brief highlight of the reviews and some brief commentary to thank the reviewers: Comment by SeanG: “A timely and well needed podcast that will foster dialogue and knowledge of what a large portion of the American public believe. I have many political, philosophical and scientific “blurbs” on my I-Pod, and this new addition to the scientific/philosophical debate by the many fine doctorate holding professors and research scientists at the Discovery Institute will do nothing but add clarity to an issue that demands such. Many of the issues found herein are merely current ruminations Read More ›

Maybe the most fascinating part of Derbyshire’s article is the candor with which he evaluates the strength of Gilder’s arguments. Derbyshire states clearly that “[Gilder’s metaphysic] refutes evolution, which has high-information-bearing substrates arising out of low-information-bearing ones… [and] As metaphysics go, [Gilder’s is] a pretty good schema… a good metaphysic for our age…” Thus it seems that Derbyshire affirms one of Gilder’s central points! In an attempt to not sell the entire farm, Derbyshire assures his fellow naturalists that we are “getting along just fine… discovering new things about the world, pushing the wheel of knowledge forward a few inches every year.” But Darwinist biologist Franklin M. Harold wrote that while “[w]e should reject, as a matter of principle, the Read More ›

By Joe Manzari and Casey Luskin John Derbyshire claims that modern biology is built on evolution. He says that “Creationists seem not to be aware of how central evolution is to modern biology. Without it, nothing makes sense… Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied.” However, in 2001, A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, made it clear that “evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.” Apparently Derbyshire sees things differently from Wilkins, claiming that evolution is vital for “such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops.” Yet Wilkins’ sentiment was re-affirmed in 2005 by Philip Skell, a member of Read More ›

LiveScience is one of the premier science news sites on the internet. Thus, I found it funny that its “Evolution” page is largely devoted to discussing (their perception of) intelligent design. The title of the page is “All About Evolution and Intelligent Design.” Since it is “All” about evolution and ID, let’s see how the articles break down.

Bruce Gordon and David Berlinski asked me to post this second brief response to James Downard. It is regarding James Downard’s response to Ann Coulter (Mr. Downard’s current 3 responses to Coulter can be found here, here, and here). Gordon and Berlinski’s response is posted here in full. It can also be read as a PDF. (PDF)