Science and Culture Today | Page 1437 | Discovering Design in Nature

Monroe, LA — The Ouachita Parish School Board in Louisiana drew praise this week for adopting a Resolution on Teacher Academic Freedom to Teach Scientific Evidence Regarding Controversial Scientific Subjects. The policy states in part that “teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.”

Over the years, many (though not all) Darwinists have stated that non-coding DNA is not worth exploring because it is thought to be mere evolutionary junk. In 2003, Scientific American explained that “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes, Mattick says, ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia was then quoted saying this might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” (Wayt T. Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems Among the Junk,” Scientific American (Nov. 2003), emphasis added) Of course known functionality for non-coding DNA now goes far beyond intronic DNA. Read More ›

Some of the recent reporting on the evolution debate in the UK has been less than accurate. Looks like we’re not the only ones to notice. Peter Hitchens had an insightful op-ed in The Mail last Sunday looking at why it is that some many in Britain are up in arms about the possibility of schools teaching criticisms of Darwin as well as the argument for intelligent design. He rightly points out that proponents of ID are, for the most part, misrepresented in recent reporting.

Our popular podcast (20,000 subscribers in just the past six months) today features Casey Luskin interviewing Dr. Thomas Woodward. They discuss his new book, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, which analyzes the rhetoric used by Darwinists in their critiques of intelligent design. Woodward documents how Darwinists often use ad hominem attacks and promote “fantasy themes” about the supposed “theocracy” of intelligent design to avoid discussing the scientific issues. Click here to listen to the interview.Woodward of course is the author of Doubts About Darwin, the 2004 book that documented the emergence of intelligent design among scientists. Darwin Strikes Back is the sequel to that book and in it Woodward asks and answers some key questions, such Read More ›

The debate over how to teach evolution has ignited a firestorm of controversy in Britain. And, as hard to believe as it is, the truth is that the reporting in the UK has been even worse than the reporting on the issue here in the US.

Thanks to an informed and irenic Turkish blog that I follow (thewhitepath.com), I already knew much of material covered in a Reuters story on Turks’ dislike of Darwinism. But it probably is news to many in this country, including the media. The Darwinists’ propaganda trope is that six-day creationism is the same as intelligent design, or might as well be the same. Yet it is obvious that Turkey really is primarily creationist — following a literalist reading of the Quaran rather than the Bible, of course — and that the creationists in Turkey have substantial funding, while ID has virtually none

BBC News is reporting that 89 British secondary schools are using the materials sent to them by Truth in Science (TiS), which we reported on last month. The packets include the documentary “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and were sent to over 5000 schools in Britain, igniting a national debate over the teaching of evolution.

The Associated Press has a story on the Kansas Science Standards which repeats the rhetoric of Kansas Darwinists. It states, “While Kansas public schools are likely to get their fifth set of science standards in eight years, the officials who want to ditch the anti-evolution ones now in place aren’t planning to act immediately.” But the present standards are not “anti-evolution.” The present standards teach more about evolution than do most statewide science standards and include extensive sections discussing the evidence both for and against evolution. The article also wrongly asserts that the standards have a “tilt toward intelligent design,” and the article mentions intelligent design 7 times. This focus on intelligent design is misleading: as we’ve repeatedly discussed, the Read More ›

A common Darwinist myth is that the only people who are skeptical of evolution are Americans. A recent article in the Virginia Informer stated, “John Swaddler, UK native and associate professor of biology at the College [of William and Mary], noted that the media phenomenon of creationism/ID vs. evolution doesn’t happen in countries besides America.” Saddler is promoting a common Darwinist claim which is simply untrue: As we’ve noted recently, there has been a push to teach intelligent design in the United Kingdom. This summer an article in the London Guardian noted that over 30% of British students support non-evolutionary accounts of the history of life. Such skepticism extends far beyond the U.K. Nature reported that Poland is experiencing an Read More ›

(Editors Note: This Post Was Revised and Updated on November 28, 2006): Some people have contacted me insisting that not all freshmen were required to attend the lecture by Robert Pennock at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) (first discussed here). In this regard, consider the following points: On a related matter, it seems that I misunderstood Ed Brayton’s recent report on his experience with Robert Pennock, where I thought Brayton provided further corroboration that the UCSD lecture was required of all first-quarter freshmen. Brayton has responded that he has no independent information that the UCSD lecture required all freshman to attend other than my original post. So I have retracted my prior post here on Brayton. It’s interesting Read More ›