__k-review

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Tackles Giraffe Evolution Last year, German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig critiqued evolutionary accounts of the infamously complex long neck of the giraffe. He recounts how various Darwinists had claimed things like “the evolution of the long-necked giraffe can be reconstructed through fossils,” but Lönnig concluded that “the fossil evidence for the gradual evolution of the long-necked giraffe is — as expected — completely lacking.” Lönnig has now written part 2 of his refutation of this evolutionary tall tale, where he now shifts the focus away from paleontology and on to giraffe anatomy, diet, behavior, and zoology, tackling evolutionary hypotheses about giraffe origins. Part 2 can be read at “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe: What Do We Read More ›

I recently discussed how Wikipedia has inaccurate information on intelligent design, or constantly rebuts (fallaciously) the claims of ID proponents. This post looks at merely two sentences out of the long Wikipedia entry on intelligent design and finds inaccuracy, misrepresentation, bias, and hypocrisy. These two sentences come from Wikipedia’s discussion of polls and intelligent design. Wikipedia presently states: According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as “so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them”.[17] Although some polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls have been criticized as suffering from considerable flaws, such as having a low response rate (248 Read More ›

Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a “creationist,” meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.

“If conservatives want to address root causes rather than just symptoms they need to join the debate over Darwinism, not scorn it or ignore it,” said CSC’s John West at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) debate earlier this week about whether Darwinism can be aligned with conservatism. He’s exactly right, and conservatives are starting to agree–at least that the discussion needs to take place. Case and point, the AEI event itself. The New York Times took the event seriously enough to send Patricia Cohen to cover the event and pen this report on it, which appears on the front page of today’s paper.

In speeches in Washington and Philadelphia this week, Discovery Institute senior fellow and former political science professor John West has begun his program to describe the way Darwinism gave birth to the eugenics movement, and he is getting some attention. Protests are expected, but it won’t do any good for Darwinists to huff and puff about West’s linkage of Darwinism and the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany. Indeed, the replies given by the Darwinists in the Crosswalk article were anticipated–and rebutted–by West in his speech.

Who were the Neanderthals? Were they ape-like primitives with low intelligence, or were they more like us–perhaps nearly identical to modern humans in both body and mind? Biology textbooks often portray Neanderthals as unintelligent versions of modern humans. For example, this graphic from Biology: The Dynamics of Life (pg. 483, 2000 ed.) portrays Neanderthals as stooped primitives struggling kill a giant bear using clubs, spears, and incompetently, a burning stick: But according to a recent article in the Washington Post, Neanderthals may have been virtually indistinguishable from modern humans in terms of both their appearance and intelligence. A lead author on the study declared that “we would understand both to be human. There’s good reason to think that they did Read More ›

We are repeatedly impressed to find that supposedly professional reporters use Wikipedia as an information source on Discovery Institute, intelligent design and various people related to these topics. I think the TV series “The Office” says it best (please don’t miss the irony): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRlXZ5W8lTs

In the Soviet Union, censors would routinely make out-of-favor party leaders disappear from photographs. In this photograph, Trotsky was made “photographic history” not too long before he was made “history” in a more tangible sense.
Darwinists, who are scientific, rather than political, materialists, have an affinity for airbrushing as well. When sneering, name-calling, and obfuscation don’t make the evidence go away, Darwinists just wipe it away. A recent example of Darwinian airbrushing is worth noting.

In recent years, a number of states have apologized for their role in promoting the Social Darwinist crusade known as “eugenics” through forced sterilization laws. In “It’s never too late to say you’re sorry,” writer Knute Berger of the internet newspaper Crosscut is calling on Washington state to apologize for its forced sterilization law, noting that Washington was the second state to adopt such a law. He’s right. Washington state—and other states—should apologize for their role in promoting eugenics. This is a sad and disturbing chapter in American history, and citizens need to know about it (although the new Kansas State Board of Education seems to think otherwise).

We’ve already pointed out how fiction passes for good science at SMU. Apparently, ridicule and disrespect pass for tolerance, as well.

The SMU physics department went to the trouble of housing this fun little site, where they’ve even compiled a list of news articles referring to the event and pithy responses to ID proponents (i.e., they’ve resorted to calling us “IDiots”).