New York Times

I have thus far refrained from blogging about the new video game Spore that is being widely discussed in the media for one reason: anyone can see that Spore is not really about evolution by the Darwinian mechanism; it’s about evolution by intelligent design (ID). Even in his recent September 2 New York Times article, “Gaming Evolves,” Carl Zimmer reports that “Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology” but admits that “[t]he step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution.” One biologist was quoted saying, “The mechanism is severely messed up.” And just what is that “severely messed up” mechanism? The answer is obvious: as an article Read More ›

Recently I documented ten examples of textbooks refuting the NCSE-scripted misinformation printed in the New York Times claiming that Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings haven’t been used in textbooks since “20 years ago.” In fact, just last week while browsing through some science textbooks at a local thrift store, I discovered another textbook that includes Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo drawings. In 1998, Judith Goodenough, Robert A. Wallace, and Betty McGuire published Human Biology: Personal, Environmental, and Social Concerns with Harcourt College Publishers. Some Darwinists (like Randy Olson) have claimed that if Haeckel’s drawings are used, it’s only to provide historical background on the history of evolutionary thought. Not so with this textbook: Chapter 20, “Evolution: Basic Principles and Our Heritage” Read More ›

The NCSE’s rebuttal to Jonathan Wells’ Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution, as re-published in this past Sunday’s New York Times, contains some small differences from their original response which Wells refuted in 2002. I will rebut some of the NCSE’s new false claims in a couple of posts this week. First, let’s look at the fourth question that Dr. Wells asks: “Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry — even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?” Dr. Wells is referring to the faked embryo drawings by the 19th century Read More ›

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] As Rob Crowther discussed, Cornelia Dean and the New York Times are once-again pushing Darwinism in an article titled “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.” The article is regarding the documentary film Expelled, starring Ben Stein, that exposes the distressing nationwide pattern of persecution against scientists that question Darwin. The producers apparently interviewed various pro-Darwin scientists for the film, such as Richard Dawkins. Cornelia Dean now reports that “Dr. Dawkins and other scientists who agreed to be interviewed say they are surprised — and in some cases, angered — to find themselves not in ‘Crossroads’ but in a Read More ›

Yesterday Rob Crowther recognized that Cornelia Dean and the New York Times are puffing Darwinism in an article about Expelled titled, “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.” This front page New York Times news-article blatantly editorializes that, “[t]here is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth.” But that isn’t the real story here. If Cornelia Dean and the New York Times were to report the real story, they would have instead reported: “There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth that goes unpunished.”

What a difference a month, and a couple likely internal memos, can make. Last month I discussed the fact that newly reported Homo erectus fossils predated fossils of “Homo” habilis, meaning that habilis could not possibly have been an evolutionary link between the Australopithecine apes and our genus Homo. When the press covered that story, Harvard biological anthropologist Daniel Lieberman was quoted in the New York Times stating that those fossils “show ‘just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.’” It’s a fascinating admission, and I wrote at the time, “Daniel Lieberma[n] apparently did not get the memo about refraining from making Read More ›

Has Darwin successfully replaced Marx and Freud, and, of course, the Bible, as a narrative for Western civilization? David Brooks, House Conservative at the New York Times and often a writer of real insight, apparently thinks so. (He is another example of conservatives, like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, who do not want to be bothered to actually read the works of serious Darwin critics, let alone talk with them.) Richard Kirk replies effectively to Brooks in the new American Spectator.

Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be the most common mistake in trying to sell Darwinism to the public. In “Evolution, on Broadway and Off,” Clines writes of the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on evolution:

The DNA exhibit shows how the chimpanzee’s DNA has been conclusively shown to be 98.8 percent the same as the visitor’s DNA. Hey, that’s no show stopper for the monkey-song chorus — it still allows a one in 100 chance they’re right.

In other words, you are silly for not believing in Darwinism because you have very similar genes which make the proteins in your body as the chimps do to make their proteins. Game over, right? Not so fast.

Today New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson totally misrepresented what I said in his article “Anti-Darwin Bill Fails in Utah.” I said that to the extent that the bill supported critical analysis it was a loss, but we really didn’t care about this bill because it amounted to a meaningless disclaimer, and we’ve never thought disclaimers were a good idea. I totally made it clear that Discovery was NOT keen on this bill. Honestly, I don’t think this reporter was even listening to a word I said. I never called it purely a “local Utah matter”. What the heck does that mean? A “local Utah matter?” I never said anything like that. He asked if I thought this vote would Read More ›