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

The Washington Post has a story related to the showing of the film “The Privileged Planet” June 23 at the National Museum of Natural History. It will be interesting to see how the story is covered given the hysterical tone in evidence on certain ultra-Darwinian blogs in recent days. Once invitations got out and the New York Times ran a story over Memorial Day weekend (with its unfortunately misleading headline tying the film to the evolution debate, which is not its subject), the Museum apparently was flooded with calls and emails from angry Darwinists demanding that the event be cancelled. None of these would-be film-burners has seen the film, or read the book, of course.

RELATED DOCUMENTS:
PDF of recommended invitations provided by SI to DI
PDF of invitation sent out by DI
PDF of e-mail from SI saying The Privileged Planet had been reviewed and approved
PDF of letter received from Smithsonian by Dsicovery June 1

The Museum did not buckle, but it surely bent.

The event has not been cancelled. However a “Director’s Message” referencing supposed “consultation with the Secretary” (!) was circulated on the web Wednesday, and it purported to come from the Museum Director, Cristian Samper. The trouble is, Lucy Dorrick (director of development and special events) of the Smithsonian, who called us back when we telephoned Director Samper, knew nothing about it and seemed surprised to hear our report of it. She asked in turn if we had received a different, shorter message from her, on the museum’s behalf. We had not. She obligingly sent a copy to us and we sent her a copy of the questionable “Director’s Message.”

Addressed to Mark Ryland, Vice President of Discovery Institute and director of the institute’s Washington, DC office, the letter sent today to Discovery says,

Public high school biology teacher and Seattle area resident Doug Cowan has a fine piece in today’s Christian Science Monitor discussing how he encourages his students to think critically by exposing them to both the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. He begins: I am a public high school biology teacher, and I do an unusual thing. I teach my students more than they have to know about evolution. I push them to behave like competent jurors – not just to swallow what some authority figure tells them to believe – not even me – but rather to critically analyze, with an open mind, the evidence set before them. The full essay is here. And there’s more on how Read More ›

Rob Crowther blogged earlier about the New York Times article on the upcoming screening of “Privileged Planet” at the Smithsonian. The Times article is pretty fair and balanced, but it starts off with a big blooper in the headline and first sentence: Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution Fossils at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History have been used to prove the theory of evolution. Next month the museum will play host to a film intended to undercut evolution. In fact, Privileged Planet is not about biological evolution. It makes the case for intelligent design in the universe based on astronomy and cosmology. It doesn’t deal at all with the Darwinian account of Read More ›

Some bloggers (here, here, and here to start) and media are taking notice of the forthcoming premiere of The Privileged Planet at the Smithsonian (June 23).

A story in the New York Times today by John Schwartz has some bloggers seething, imagining that the film is a propaganda piece that should be banned from right-minded science institutions.

Obviously, the Smithsonian staff that actually screened the film thought differently, and they happen to be right. Randall Kremer, a Smithsonian spokesperson was quoted in the Times’ piece saying that that the film was vetted by the Smithsonian:

Supporters of intellectual engagement in academia and a public marketplace of ideas would do well to check out the latest edition of Academe, which features letters from philosopher and legal scholar Francis J. Beckwith and distinguished Mechanical Engineer Walter Bradley. (See the bottom quarter of the page, here). The two Baylor University professors set the facts straight and defend the continuing debate over intelligent design theory in the academy. The letters come in response to earlier ad hominem attacks and wild-eyed conspiracy theories thrown their way by Barbara Forrest and Glen Branch — previously blogged about here. t would be one thing if Forrest and Branch chose to vigorously argue for neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory based upon the scientific merits. That Read More ›

Leading Darwin defender Richard Dawkins had a piece in The Times of London recently, reassuring readers, “The eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called ‘The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment’ in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.”

Only someone who does not know, or does not care to know, the myriad problems with eye evolution could make such a claim with a straight face. Leading Darwin doubter David Berlinski shows just how feeble the Darwinists’ account of eye evolution is in this excerpt from Commentary. And here Berlinski’s critics criticize his critique and he responds.

Dawkins’ claim is also rebutted in this cogent Times letter from Andy McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory, University of Leeds:

A new poll of medical doctors suggests that a significant minority (34%) support intelligent design over evolution. This alone is enough to show that there is a lively debate over the adequacy of Neo-Darwinism to explain intricate structures like the human body.

However, if one looks past the press release at the details of the poll itself, one finds that actually a majority of doctors favor intelligent design over Neo-Darwinism.

Darwinists are making hay out of a mistake in a press release I wrote recently about National Academy of Sciences member Dr. Philip Skell and his open letter to the Kansas SBOE endorsing the teaching of scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution. My apologies to Dr. Skell. I mistakenly listed him as a biochemist in the very lead of the release, even though he is clearly a chemist and listed as such everywhere else, including the original letter on our website. This is doubly unfortunate, because many Darwinists will seize on any error in an effort to avoid discussing the scientific issues that really matter.

That great bastion of journalist integrity (no not the Washington Post) L.A. Beat has a laughable story about the recent Kansas SBOE hearings on evolution.

Andrew Gumbel, Darwin’s pitbull in this instance, reports in breathless tones of the evolution of creationism and warns left-coasters that it could happen there too.

“They no longer talk about creationism or biblical literalism but rather about Intelligent Design – a much more sophisticated argument that merely seeks to leave open the possibility that science, on its own, cannot account for the full story of life on Earth and that therefore some designing consciousness (for the sake of argument, God) must have been involved.”