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No news continues to make news. Or maybe it’s agenda driven reporting making up news? Either way, this article trumpets the fact that Nebraskans need not worry that evolution will be replaced with intelligent design in science classes. Of course, that wasn’t being suggested and discussed anyhow. So, here’s a case of the media taking no news and goosing it into a “news” story. Three members of the Nebraska Board of Education say they’re not aware of any effort by board members or the public to include intelligent design in Nebraska’s new science standards.“I’ve had zero contact from anyone,” said board member Robert Evnen of Lincoln, who is on a committee reviewing the standards. Why is not being asked to Read More ›

I was not in Los Angeles on May 14, when Stephen Meyer debated Stephen Matheson and Arthur Hunt at Biola University. But I have followed some of the blog war that preceded and followed the debate–a blog war that now includes Richard Sternberg and Laurence Moran.

Since Matheson, Hunt and Moran are all tenured professors at institutions of higher learning, one might have expected a discussion based on reason and conducted in a collegial spirit. And since the discussion is about science, one might have expected lots of references to evidence published in the scientific literature. But Matheson, Hunt and Moran have abandoned reason and resorted to ridicule; and instead of citing evidence they expect us to bow to their authority.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel in a memorable phrase laments ‘the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life’ — where there is nothing too sensational, extraordinary or bizarre about the living world that cannot be accounted for as having evolved to be that way over billions of years by the same known materialistic process of natural selection acting on random genetic mutation.

This façade of knowing cannot last, of course, and 20 years or so hence historians and commentators will rightly wonder how science could conceivably have endorsed so simplistic a theory to explain the billion fold complexities of the living world — and for so long.

The impetus for that disillusionment can only come from within science itself, where it is probable that the current baffling perverse findings of genomic science will, in retrospect, be seen to have played the decisive role. To clarify.

Over at BioLogos, Professor Francisco Ayala has responded to Signature of Controversy — the collection of responses to criticisms of Signature in the Cell. As with the previous Ayala response at BioLogos, this one includes an introduction by Darrell Falk. The burden of Ayala’s response is to wax indignant that some of us have suggested, based on his original “response” to Signature in the Cell, that he had not actually read the book. Why would we suggest that? Well, because he so profoundly misrepresented Meyer’s thesis. Here’s what he said: “The keystone argument of Signature [sic] of the Cell is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms.” He goes on to Read More ›

Poor Alex Wilhelm huffs, and he puffs, and all he does is blow his credibility in his Huffington Post piece where he sputters up this laugher: “You will never meet a non-religious person who is a proponent of Intelligent Design.” Wilhelm, meet Bradley Monton. Meet Thomas Nagel. Meet Steve Fuller. Heck, meet me.It gets even better when he forgets the name of the person he’s attacking.

Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s the memorable opening line in Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” and, in following the Darwin debate, I often think of it. Making sense of disparate personal experiences and bits of information gleaned from the news or other sources, we are powerfully moved to weave a narrative that makes sense of it all. Darwinians and creationists alike have complained precisely that intelligent design refuses to offer a tidy historical narrative of how a designer might have exercised “his” creative influence. This refusal annoys and confuses people beyond belief.

Of course, some stories are true. Others are fabrications, maintained only by steadfastly turning your face away from contrary evidence. Either way, human beings are incorrigible storytellers, and information that doesn’t fit our story tends to get ignored. This may explain why news venues have so far mostly declined to report on what happened to David Coppedge.

He is a top-level computer specialist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Cassini mission to Saturn whose supervisors demoted and humiliated him for raising scientific issues about intelligent design. Last week he sued in the Superior Court of the State of California, complaining of religious discrimination, harassment, and wrongful demotion. Sounds like a news story, doesn’t it?

The current travails of David Coppedge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory hit close to home. He’s being unjustly, perversely punished simply for lending copies of two ID documentaries, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet, the latter based on the book by Guillermo Gonzalez and yours truly. Guillermo, of course, suffered similar bigotry at Iowa State a few years ago, and endured (among other things) a barely disguised campaign to deny him tenure led by, among other people, an atheist professor of religion at Iowa State. It’s hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn’t Read More ›

I usually ignore ScienceBlogs because unfortunately it’s a home for many ad hominem attacks and not serious response-worthy posts. However, given that Jay Richards’ second criteria on When To Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ is “When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate,” it’s worth noting that over at ScienceBlogs, Orac has replied to me and Jay Richards with, you guessed it, ad hominem attacks. He argues that if you show “hostility” towards the consensus, then you are a “crank.” Orac further writes: If Casey had two neurons to rub together, he could answer the question in two sentences and echo how scientists would answer the question: When you have an actual scientifically valid reason, based on science, evidence, experimentation, and observational Read More ›