News

Science Daily reports:

Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) today announced the publication of several studies from the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS) in PLoS Biology detailing the discovery of millions of new genes, thousands of new protein families and specifically the characterization of thousands of new protein kinases from ocean microbes using whole environment shotgun sequencing and new computational tools.

This is extraordinary and exciting research, but what does any of this have to do with evolution news?

DALLAS–Darwinists at Southern Methodist University issued a demand this week that the university withdraw permission for a scientific conference about intelligent design to be held on campus.

Discovery Institute and the SMU Christian Legal Society obtained permission to rent McFarlin Auditorium for a two-day conference on “Darwin vs. Design,” featuring presentations by the nation’s leading intelligent design scientists. The Departments of Anthropology, Biological Sciences, and Geological Sciences reacted with a letter objecting to the university’s agreement to host the conference. The Institute described the letter as an effort to censor scientists and stifle debate.

Some Darwinists have a tendency to assume that anything coming from the ID camp must be a mistaken attack on them. This can lead to a Darwinist choosing not to read the pro-ID article, then responding to the (still unread) article by misconstruing basic facts, like the name of the website hosting the article, pro-ID books discussed in the article, or even the central argument of the article. Joseph Campana of ResearchID.org exposes these errors in the responses from Pamela Thompson of the John Templeton Foundation and William Grassie of Metanexus to his article, which demonstrated that the New York Times invented claims that Templeton asked for research proposals which “never came in.”

Late last year senior fellow Jonathan Wells visited Japan to deliver two speeches on intelligent design and evolution.

Photo source: Discovery Institute.

Dr. Wells’ first lecture (in English, with simultaneous translation into Japanese) was to an international philosophy conference. More than 150 people attended, including scientists and scholars from Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Greece and Mongolia. A few Americans were present, along with participants from Bangladesh, France, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic (who brought along a copy of the new Czech edition of Icons of Evolution). According to Wells, the audience was polite, the questions were penetrating and the Q&A was lively.

On February 24, an audience of approximately 500 students, journalists, scholars and scientists gathered to hear five speakers present an international perspective on intelligent design in Istanbul’s Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall. The conference, which was sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, featured speakers from Turkey, Britain, and America. Already recognized as a success by the local leadership, the conference introduced intelligent design to the people of Turkey and was covered by mainstream Turkish media.

A 2005 New York Times article asserted that ID proponents failed to respond to a call for research proposals from the John Templeton Foundation, a group that funds research dealing with origins. The New York Times reported that Templeton’s Charles Harper claimed that he had requested research proposals from ID-proponents, proposals which “never came in.” A new report now calls the veracity of the New York Times‘s story into “grave doubt.” According to both ResearchID.org and UncommonDescent, Harper now claims that the New York Times completely invented this story.

In Think, a philosophy journal published by The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Phillip Johnson has published an article entitled “Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects” which assesses the current state of the debate over intelligent design. The full article may be read here. Johnson explains that, despite the advances of the 20th century, many Darwinists still use old arguments that merely reflect microevolution. Johnson writes regarding the Galapagos finches: To make the story look better, the National Academy of Sciences improved on some the facts in its 1998 booklet on Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version of the story omits the beaks’ return to normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a Read More ›

[Edited] Bilbo of Telic Thoughts … [references] an early, notable use of the term “intelligent design,” this one by one of the 20th century’s leading scientists, agnostic Fred Hoyle:

On January 12th, 1982, Sir Fred Hoyle delivered the Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution, London, entitled “Evolution from Space,” which was later reprinted in a book by the same title … In it he discussed the overwhelming improbability of getting the enzymes needed for even the simplest form of life to function by chance.

… The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare’s plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design [my emphasis]. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true. (27-28)

Note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the Sacramento Unified School District has not yet officially acted on the name change to its middle school.

Like most mainstream American newspapers, the Sacramento Bee is a strong and uncritical proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Bee recently demonstrated its devotion to the Darwinist cause with two news articles spotlighting the celebration of Darwin Day in Sacramento.

Ironically, the day after Darwin Day, the Bee included an editorial that rightly condemns the American eugenics movement and that rightly supports a proposal to remove a famous Sacramentan’s name from a school based on his enthusiastic support of eugenics.

As was expected, earlier today the Kansas State Board of Education voted 6-4 to adopt dumbed-down science standards that delete any mention of scientific data that might be perceived as critical of Darwinian evolution. But that’s not all. The board also gutted a history of science standard that called on students to study both the abuses and the successes of science in history. The history of science standard had encouraged students to learn about such tragedies as the eugenics movement and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. But studying the misuses of science was apparently too much of a downer for the Darwin-only crowd, so they rewrote the standard to ensure that students would be exposed only to the triumphs of Read More ›