Science and Culture Today | Page 1451 | Discovering Design in Nature

A couple of letters to the editor caught my attention this last weekend, one in the Salt Lake Tribune and another in The Advocate in Baton Rouge, LA.

The Salt Lake Tribune letter is interesting because the writer takes the Tribune to task for the editor’s unwillingness to have the paper’s editorial pages engage in a dialogue.

In the wake of a libel lawsuit, NCSE, Inc. Director Eugenie Scott has a published a letter retracting her prior false statements concerning California parent Larry Caldwell. The letter is published in California Wild, the magazine of the California Academy of Sciences — and the same magazine that published her earlier article containing her false assertions about Caldwell. (Available online, here.) Caldwell’s letter in response to Scott was also published in California Wild.

John West has previously blogged about Scott’s defamatory article and attacks on Caldwell (here, here, and here). As Caldwell noted in a press release from last month:

It’s a shame it took a lawsuit to get Scott, the author of the article, to retract some of the more outrageous factual misstatements in her article.

I would personally like to thank Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin for highlighting the deeply held convictions of the new branch campus of the Darwin-only lobby in Fairfax Virginia. Like the cause-heads of PCU this group of freeze dried protestors “led mostly by Vietnam-era protesters” who “came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs.”

Said Richard Lawrence, 63:

‘”We’re just a small group, maybe with a powerful idea. We don’t have a clue, but we’re not letting go.”‘

Discovery President Bruce Chapman has an essay — “A Darwinist’s Declension (Nude Descending a Staircase)” — with a delightful ending, that explains the hypocritical progression of argument employed to prevent questioning of Darwin’s theory.

Eighty years ago Thursday the famous Scopes Monkey Trial ended in Dayton, Tennessee. Time for a quiz:

History tells us that two great lawyers faced off. On the one side was (A) a progressive and a pacifist, an educated man who rejected the idea of a young earth and worried about efforts to peddle racism and eugenics in the South. On the other side was (B) a master orator who defended some flagrantly racist ideas long since discredited by science. Lawyer A sought a full and fair debate over the evidence. Lawyer B used a procedural tactic to shut down the debate so that only his position was heard.

Surely Mr. A would be the darling of any contemporary liberal journalist, right? But Mr. A was William Jennings Bryan, the creationist.

NPR and the Darwinist Effort to Spin the Catholic Church.

NPR had a story Sunday by Jason De Rose on the Catholic Church’s position on evolution. The story was unbalanced, but it did report accurately, as some news outlets did not, that when Cardinal McCarrick of Washington spoke at the National Press Club last week he essentially backed up Cardinal Schoenborn. A theologian at Catholic University does the same in the story. On the other hand, the NPR piece takes the view that this is now an issue where the church is now opposed to “scientists.” It never occurs to De Rose to suggest that some scientists agree with the church and, if interviewed, would contend that Darwinists have been claiming more for their materialist philosophy than their science can justify by the evidence.

Just in time for the anniversary of the Scopes trial, the folks over at Panda’s Thumb are continuing their unseemly crusade against Ohio State doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. Even though these Darwinian fundamentalists don’t support academic freedom for teachers and scientists who are skeptical of Darwin, you’d think they might draw the line at going after students. Apparently, however, their bigotry and intolerance knows no bounds. Unhappy that Leonard’s dissertation committee has effectively refuted the misinformation spread by Panda’s Thumb and others, blogger Richard Hoppe has responded with even more smears. Here are replies to some of the new disinformation put out by Hoppe:

Many news stories and editorials from hyper-Darwinists and/or opponents of the theory of intelligent design (ID) have claimed that 12, 15 or even 20 states are considering legislation to MANDATE the teaching of ID in schools. This is completely false. Most of the stories and op-eds making these claims have lumped together local school board, state school board and state legislative activity relating IN SOME WAY to the teaching of evolution, misrepresenting the situation by lumping them all together as “states considering the mandating of ID.”

My letter responding to George Will’s “A Debate That Does Not End” appears in the July 18 print edition of Newsweek. George Will says the theory of intelligent design isn’t falsifiable—isn’t “a testable hypothesis.” Actually, particular design arguments are falsifiable. Design theorist Michael Behe, for instance, argues that we can detect design in the bacterial flagellum because the tiny motor needs all of its parts to function at all. That’s a problem for Darwinian evolution, which builds novel form one tiny functional mutation at a time. How to falsify Behe’s argument? Provide a detailed evolutionary pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. The flagellum might still be designed, but Behe’s argument that such design is detectable would have been falsified. Read More ›

Mark Franek had a piece in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer showing off his ignorance on intelligent design. Here’s his attempt to describe ID:

“The basic tenet of intelligent design takes about five seconds to teach – the mechanisms of life are so complex that they could have only been orchestrated by a supreme power – but the implications of this belief are better taught and served in a religion or philosophy class, or better yet, in a place of worship.”

He’s right, his definition of ID would be better suited for a religion class. But, that’s not the standard definition of ID and is in fact a definiton that we reject outright.