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Darwinist Dr. Reed Cartwright was highly critical of my recent observation that Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with experimental breeding of bacteria or with the biotech industry. In his original article, Dr. Cartwright asserted that Darwin’s theory was responsible for the experiments that unraveled the genetic code and for the entire biotechnology industry (!).

I pointed out that Darwin’s theory was a theory of random variation and natural selection, whereas experimental manipulation and breeding of bacteria were examples of purposeful variation and artificial selection. Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with either.

I have also noted that Darwin’s seminal contribution to medicine was eugenics. Dr. Cartwright saw the flaw in my linkage between Darwin’s science and eugenics:

The Darwin vs Design conference last weekend at SMU in Dallas stirred up quite a debate in the Dallas media, and especially on the SMU campus. A number of articles have appeared in the SMU Daily Campus attacking Discovery Institute and ID, and today Anika Smith and Sarah Levy, the student who helped to organize the conference, have a very good response.

I recently noted that the article “The Positive Case for Design” had been translated into Spanish. Well, now it’s been translated into Italian (see here) over at Progetto Cosmo. Check out their website for more information on intelligent design in Italian!

Over at ARN’s Literature Update, David Tyler has an excellent post titled “An Orwellian framing of the debate about evolution and ID,” reporting on an article in Science by Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet, who tell scientists how to discuss controversial scientific issues. This same pair wrote the cover article for the influential media journal Columbia Journalism Review just before the Dover trial in September, 2005, encouraging news media to avoid “a quest to achieve ‘balance’” when covering evolution. They even stated, “newspaper editors should think twice about assigning reporters who are fresh to the evolution issue and allowing them to default to the typical strategy frame, carefully balancing ‘both sides’ of the issue.” We have noted that this provides Read More ›

Mike Lemonick, Time Magazine’s senior science writer and credulous Darwinist, has a habit of writing things that make even his Darwinist friends cringe.

He recently posted an essay sympathetic with Darwinists who are trying to shut down the Southern Methodist University Darwin vrs. Design conference. He called Discovery Institute all kinds of names, including “propagandists” and purveyors of “half truths [that] will actually make people more ignorant.”

Mr. Lemonick made this remarkable statement:

If the DI had been around when people thought lightning was stuff the gods threw when angry, we might still not have electricity.

Let’s ask: what role did the inference to design play for scientists who gave us electricity? The 19th century physicists whose research formed the basis for our modern understanding of electromagnetism were Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.

I’ve mentioned this great site before, but Ciencia Alternativa has many ID resources in Spanish. Their latest addition is El Argumento Positivo de Diseño (The Positive Case for Design). Take a look at their Artículos page for a full listing of resources.

Darwinist blogger Orac recently took issue with my observation that Darwin’s theory plays no important role in medicine. Orac, a surgical oncologist, insisted that Darwin’s theory is very helpful in modern cancer research. He wrote: Now, using the principles of evolution, Maley et al have found one potential indicator of which patients with Barrett’s esophagus will progress to cancer and which will not. Basically, they adapted a diversity measure from ecology and evolution known as the Shannon diversity index. I’m going to have to leave it to my evolutionary biology colleagues to tell me more whether this was appropriately done, but for purposes of this paper the authors treated each sample ot as a single organism but as thousands of Read More ›

The May-June 2007 issue of American Scientist contains John Dupré‘s review of Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology by Alex Rosenberg. Dupré fears that Rosenberg’s adherence to strict physicalist reductionism (“Darwinian Reductionism”), where “everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level–and that this entails that the mind is ‘nothing but’ the brain,” is based upon a failure to understand why most philosophers of biology have abandoned such reductionism rather than a new revelation. As Dupré points out, most philosophers have abandoned this view because, among other reasons, genes have a “many/many” relationship with phenotype. More specifically, his [Rosenberg’s] portrayal of the genome as a program directing development, which is the centerpiece of Read More ›

This morning’s Dallas Morning News features a bold op-ed by Bruce Chapman and John West calling for critics at SMU to employ the method of Charles Darwin himself: engage in the discussion.

The article, “Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us,” is a response to the SMU science professors who called on their university to ban the conference from campus.

Rather than “ludicrously comparing ID proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust-deniers,” as one columnist did last week, Chapman and West suggest that critics of intelligent design “engage ID scholars in a serious discussion.” They pointedly ask, “what is so frightening about allowing it [the evidence for design] to be heard at SMU?”

The published letters of Charles Darwin reveal a man who debated about design in a manner that seems “more tolerant and humble” than one encounters in the current debate, says Anthony Barnes in a book review in The Independent (U.K.). It could also be noted that Darwin was treated better by his critics 150 years ago than his followers — the dominant neo-Darwinists — treat their critics today. Darwin himself obviously thought a lot about religion, but, like his successors, he had what seems like a rather puerile understanding of theology and philosophy. He told the American botanist Asa Gray that Darwin’s own nose, which he considered large and unattractive, was evidence against design. “Will you honestly tell me that Read More ›