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[Read the full article, “Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn’t Identify the Designer,” here.] Mike Gene recently posted on Telic Thoughts responding to professor James F. McGrath, who accuses intelligent design (ID) proponents of being dishonest when they claim that ID does not identify the designer. This professor wrote: “That isn’t an instance of humility, but of strategy, and we all know why the strategy is being used: to wedge ID into science classrooms by disconnecting it from religion.” Similarly, I recently read a law review article co-authored by Barbara Forrest where she asserts with Stephen Gey and Matthew Brauer that “an intelligent designer is simply a subtle reference to God.” (More on problems with this article in Read More ›

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In a bold move, the little-known group Florida Citizens for Science are excommunicating all scientists who raise any concerns about neo-Darwinism from the “scientific community.”

In an Orlando Sentinel story about the adoption of new science standards, Joe Wolf, president of Florida Citizens for Science and newly anointed spokesperson for the worldwide “scientific community,” had this to say about the scientific problems with neo-Darwinism:

“It’s a PR issue,” he said. “And it’s a religious issue. In the scientific community, it’s not an issue.”(emphasis mine)

Here are members of the scientific community to whom it is an issue, and who I am sure will be surprised to be so unceremoniously booted from the “scientific community”:

Micheal Behe has a three-part post titled Kenneth R. Miller and the Problem of Evil (part 1, part 2, part 3)on his Amazon author’s page in which he makes a pretty bold assertion about one of his loudest critics: Kenneth Miller is an intelligent design proponent. Behe is serious, adding that “with respect to design, he and I differ only on degree, not on principle.”Behe’s posts come as a response to a second, needless to say negative, review of his new book The Edge of Evolution by Miller in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Despite Darwinist’s efforts to affect a sort of crib death by attacking the book relentlessly, The Edge of Evolution is doing well in terms of sales to Read More ›

In Part 1, I discussed the fact that the Council of Europe (CoE) has recently adopted a resolution alleging that intelligent design (ID) is “a threat to human rights.” The CoE resolutions carry no force of law, but regardless, it’s difficult to keep a straight face that these European politicians would let their dogmatism shine so brilliantly that they would label the questioning of Darwinism as a threat to human rights. As mathematician and Parisian David Berlinski stated, “if this is what a threat to human rights amounts to, count me among its supporters; I’m threatening away with the best of them.” It’s also worth noting that only about 7% of the total members of the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly voted Read More ›

In Part 1, I recounted how Darwinists are deeply invested in the rhetorical value of the emotional argument that humans and chimps have a 98% – 99% genetic similarity. Anthropologist John Marks reports that sometimes Darwinists even use this statistic to contend that our lives are “meaningless”! To explore this debate, I recently blogged about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%” that reported that the 1% human/chimp genetic difference statistic was a “myth,” because “studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe.” The Science news article reported that improved genome comparison modeling methods indicate that humans and chimps are “6.4%” genetically distinct from one another. Apparently my Read More ›

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway. Nonetheless, on a rhetorical level, the claim that humans and chimps are 99% the same is a powerful emotional argument aiding those seeking to evangelize for Darwinism. For example, last year a cover story of Time magazine proclaimed: “chimps Read More ›

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O’Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O’Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so. (see here, here and here to start) Compare O’Reilly’s misunderstanding with this letter from a guy who clearly gets it. It was unfortunate too Read More ›

By Pete Chadwell

The mainstream media in the United States–and some of the conservative press, for that matter–are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists.

So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.