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A few months back, Liberty University Law Review released an article, “Zeal for Darwin’s House Consumes Them: How Supporters of Evolution Encourage Violations of the Establishment Clause,” I published in their journal last year. The article came after a legal symposium they hosted last year that included speakers such as Ed Sisson, Jay Wexler, Arnold Loewy, John Calvert, and myself. Wexler and Loewy are, of course, ID-critics so it made for an interesting dialogue. My experience at the symposium was that all were highly civil and thoughtful in the exchange. Below I reproduce the introduction to my article, and in a subsequent post will reprint my analysis of the decision in C.F. v. Capistrano Unified School District from last year. Read More ›

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8 (This Article): Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. Having now addressed all of the microevolutionary or even Read More ›

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7 (This Article): Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. In the prior post responding to Nature‘s 2009 evolution-evangelism Read More ›

At Religion Dispatches, Lauri Lebo has a perplexing post up criticizing Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman for being “disingenuous.” He had written at the American Spectator website against the move by school board members in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, to explore teaching “creationism” to students. In Chapman’s comments, Lauri Lebo finds evidence of cowardliness as well as deceit:

Once again, after pushing for anti-evolution language that opens the door to teaching creationism, the good fellows at the Discovery Institute bravely turned around and ran away from the local creationist-talking school board members who want to champion their cause.

She’s referring to the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act, which establishes the parameters under which teachers may introduce scientific supplements in the classroom with a view to developing critical thinking skills including on Darwinian evolution. The law specifically forbids promoting religion, which would in turn forbid teaching creationism.

Ms. Lebo seems to think that in supporting the LSEA, Discovery Institute intended to ease the way not merely for what the law clearly indicates, but for the teaching of Biblical literalist creationism. It’s hard to believe that Ms. Lebo, a journalist who wrote a whole book about the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, isn’t aware of the enormous difference in content between creationism on one hand, and the scientific critique of Darwinism, or the related theory of intelligent design, on the other.

You can think they are all bogus, but to fail to see they are hugely different in what they say would be evidence, on the part of a journalist, of either astonishing ignorance or incredibly sloppy thinking.

Giving Lauri Lebo the benefit of the doubt on this score — she seems bright enough — the only explanation for her outburst must be that she thinks Discovery supports critical thinking on Darwinism with the secret aim of providing a path for something wildly different, incompatible and contradictory — namely, for creationists to teach the Bible as a science text book.

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6 (This Article): Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. In the previous four responses to Nature‘s evolution-evangelism packet, Read More ›

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5 (This Article): Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. In Nature‘s evolution-evangelism packet, one of the “evolutionary gems” Read More ›

Bruce Chapman has a piece published at American Spectator today about recent rumblings amongst school board’s over the Louisiana Science Education Act. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law last year an act that sets parameters for teachers who introduce scientific supplements on Darwinian evolution, global warming, human cloning and other controversial subjects. The state’s Science Education Act encourages “open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied.” It specifically prohibits religious instruction or interpretations (or irreligious interpretations, for that matter). The law is simple, reasonable and avoids constitutional and scientific mistakes that afflicted earlier laws in Louisiana and elsewhere. But in Livingston Parish, east of Baton Rouge, some enthusiasts for a literal Biblical account of creation decided that the Read More ›

While we often are correcting mistakes and misinformation in news reports about intelligent design and evolution, it’s encouraging to know that solid, thoughtful pieces are still being produced. This story from The New York Times is making the rounds, causing Denyse O’Leary to wonder, “Have the Times people actually started connecting with the public again?”
The surprising article by Virginia Heffernan examines the strange microcosm that is Science Blogs, where, as Bruce Chapman put it, she finds “not science, but self-referencial sophomoric pranks, vitriol and cavil.” Her acute analysis:

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4 (This Article): Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. While some of the papers cited in Nature‘s evolution-evangelism Read More ›

An article appeared in The New York Times last week written by the popular geneticist, Sean B. Carroll, who is probably best known for his professional and popular work on the emerging science of evo devo. Carroll’s article attempts to refute the challenges posed by the Cambrian fossil record to evolutionary thought. Carroll writes,

The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.
In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin posited that “during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures.” But he admitted candidly, “To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.”