Science and Culture Today | Page 1456 | Discovering Design in Nature

American Spectator editor George Neumayr has an insightful op-ed titled “The Monkey Wrench” on the efforts by dogmatic Darwinists to stifle any criticism of Darwin’s holy writ.

Treat critics of evolution no more seriously than segregationists, Darwinists urge the media and school boards. Just as segregationists, whose views are manifestly irrational, don’t deserve “equal time” in discussions, the critics of evolution don’t deserve equal time either, Darwinists plead.

In a media forum aired on C-SPAN a while back, Slate ‘s Jacob Weisberg in effect said this to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, upbraiding him for running stories about a school board controversy in Kansas that had quoted critics of evolution. Why did you give them equal time? Weisberg asked Keller. Would you give segregationists their say? Keller found Weisberg’s criticism too radical and unfair, but assured him that anybody who read the Times ‘s Science section would know that the paper was in the tank for Darwin.

A Darwinist blog is trumpeting a quote by George Gilder in yesterday’s Boston Globe which they have taken out of context in an attempt to make him look bad.

“Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

First, it would be helpful to see the quote in context of what was being discussed, namely Discovery Institute’s position on education policy.

“I’m not pushing to have [ID] taught as an ‘alternative’ to Darwin, and neither are they,” he says in response to one question about Discovery’s agenda. “What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

If you listen hard enough you can hear the “I told you sos!” already. “Wedge II” Discovery at Discovery Dumpster Reveals Theocracy Plan

The Boston Globe continues to report on the debate over evolution with nary a care for anything resembling a basic understanding of what’s being debated. Today they have an interesting interview with Discovery co-founder and senior fellow George Gilder, “The Evolution of George Gilder.”

Right out of the gate the reporter mischaracterizes the issue by giving some terrible definitions to three key terms.

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.