Science and Culture Today | Page 1455 | Discovering Design in Nature

Sports columnist turned news analyst Lloyd Garver normally opines about the morality of the designated hitter in baseball but all too often unsuccessfully attempts to weigh in on weightier matters. Today CBSNews.com published a column that betrays Garver’s complete ignorance about anything to do with the debate over evolution.

Garver claims that those “pushing” intelligent design don’t know what a theory is, and falls back on the tired old complaint that ID proponents think theory means conjecture. Lloyd, we don’t, check it out on the CSC website sometime.

A good friend of mine getting his teaching credential to teach public high school called me this weekend to converse about his professor’s response to a paper he wrote supporting the teaching of ID. Apparently his professor disapproved of teaching ID because he felt that ID was untestable science. The professor’s criticism went something like this: “My main problem with ID is that it purports to not identify the designer when everyone knows it’s really just God. Intelligent design thus shouldn’t be taught because it is essentially creation science repackaged. Thus, it’s just an untestable appeal to the supernatural. However, if I had to choose, I would actually prefer creation science to ID because at least creation scientists are up-front Read More ›

Here is another editorial (registration and payment required) from the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio that shows that editors there — even after several years of trying — cannot seem to get it through their heads that no one is trying to require the teaching of intelligent design in their fair state, that creationism and intelligent design are not the same thing, and that serious critics of Darwin argue on scientific, not religious, grounds. We suspect that they know better, but cannot stand to admit it. The editorial states that “the future of the nation depends on scientifically literate students” and asks, “Just what is there to fear about Darwinian theory”? The question isn’t what there is to fear about Darwinian Read More ›

A recent essay in The Scientist and a second piece newly available here show that Darwinism is not the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. I blogged Philip Skell’s essay from The Scientist on Tuesday. There’s now also available online a paper by Roland Hirsch arguing, as William Dembski explains in the introduction to the book of essays where it’s found, “Roland Hirsch overviews many of the recent advances in molecular biology and biochemistry, showing how Darwinism has failed both to anticipate and to explain them.” The International Society for Complexity, Information and Design website says that Hirsch is the “program manager in the Medical Sciences Division in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research at the DOE, where he is Read More ›

CSC senior fellow David Berlinski writes:

Paris —

This link is to an article by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. Please read the article while endeavoring not to laugh, chortle, snicker, hoot or whistle. You will find it cannot be done. In the course of affirming why there is absolutely no controversy about anything over there where Darwinian biologists hang out, they indicate quite soberly that, in fact, there are lots of controversies after all — all of them precisely of the sort that Darwinian critics have been insisting were there all along and that Darwinian biologists have all along insisted did not exist and were of no consequence. You could, if you wished, line up Darwin on Trial or my own The Deniable Darwin and compare it to the remarkably frank admission and ask yourself just what the hell Coyne and Dawkins are not saying that we did not say long before them?

Over at Redstate.org Homunculus has embarked on a series of posts related to intelligent design, and the first post properly addresses what the definitions of Darwinism and ID are. I suspect that Homunculus will be inundated by rabid Darwinists irked by such an insighful post. Should be interesting to see where this all leads.

The Darwinist inquisition is spreading — as if by design. Inquisitors at George Mason University, Ohio State University, and the Smithsonian have recently hunted down and tried to disgrace scientists and educators for daring to defy the Darwinian orthodoxy. Now we see that the witch hunt has turned to Iowa State University and CSC senior fellow, astronomer, Guillermo Gonzalez.

Discovery’s resident sports fanatic Marshall Sana provided these thoughts on today’s Washgington Post column by Sally Jenkins.

Kudos to Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins for her thoughtful piece on intelligent design and athletics.

Jenkins, a well-regarded Post sportswriter, starts off her August 29th column (“Just Check the ID”) saying:

“the sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution.”

Update: In my hurry to get this posted I inadvertently left out the fact that it is not from me, but rather are thoughts from a CSC Fellow. Some Darwinists are upset with Ken Chang for his recent New York Times report on the controversy over evolution and intelligent design. It seems that the Darwinists would have preferred a propaganda piece advertising only their side in the debate. Oh, well; they should take comfort in the fact that they managed to slip at least one piece of pro-Darwin propaganda into the article. Chang wrote: “Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin Read More ›