adaptation
Evolution in Kindergarten
Intelligent Design Is Older Than You Think — A Lot Older
Lewontin and Numbers: Day One of Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago
“Go to hell!” said Ron Numbers cheerfully to me, as we greeted each other at the front of Rockefeller Chapel last night. “Hey, did I say that loud enough?” he asked, looking around at the various evolutionary biology and history and philosophy of science worthies — Lewontin, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Dennett, Richards, and so on — milling about. Ron’s smiling insult was a mocking attempt to redress the widespread criticism that he had let me off easy in our notorious Bloggingheads conversation. A spirit of raillery was in the air, given a vigorous kick at the beginning of the evening by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. Little of the secular sanctimony of the 1959 Darwin centennial (see below) was in evidence. Read More ›
AP Texas Spins Story About Scientists Uniting Against Teaching the Controversy
The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that “Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction.”
We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.
In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do.
Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That’s why she makes a point of giving credibility to the several Darwinists in the story before calling McLeroy a creationist, then discrediting the position she assigned him:
Read More ›On Non-Nihilistic “Scientific” Atheism
Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg recently revamped his 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University for an essay entitled “Without God” in The New York Review of Books. As the essay moves toward a close, Weinberg tells us:
the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
What, then, can we do?
Answering his own rhetorical question, Dr. Weinberg believes
Read More ›