Discovery Institute Evolution News & Views

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...

If you're looking for a summary of Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help, I've tried to provide one below. The article was originally written for InsideCatholic.com. If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists—a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism....

Dogmatists committed to a dying paradigm will argue with falsehoods to convince the public of their claims... especially when they're targeting children. As we've covered here this week, Haeckel's faked embryo drawings are still used in science textbooks because, according to some Darwinists, "it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students." That's right. According to Darwinist biology professor Bora Zivkovic, who blogs as Coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock and is Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE, sometimes you have to lie to students in order to get them to accept evolution. Why?...

We've covered Biologic Institute's remarkable Stylus program before; now ID the Future has an exclusive interview with Brendan Dixon, who co-developed the computer program designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. From ID the Future: Click here to listen. In this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin is joined by Brendan Dixon, a programmer with the Biologic Institute who recently coauthored a paper on his co-developed program, Stylus. Dixon explains that Stylus is a computer program that is designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. It tests and applies the principles of evolution to determine what evolution can...

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...

[Editor's Note: The following article was written by Jonathan Wells and published in 2002.] According to the NCSE, many of the claims in my questions "are incorrect or misleading," and they are "intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students' minds about the validity of evolution as good science." It is actually the NCSE's answers, however, that are incorrect or misleading. My original questions (in italics) are posted below; each question is followed by the NCSE's answer (in bold), a brief outline of my response, and then my detailed response. Numbers in parentheses refer to research notes at the end....

The New York Times seems to be afraid that students about to go back to school might have their heads filled with ideas that challenge Darwinian evolution. Thus today it uncritically republished a 6+ year-old error-filled response by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to Jonathan Wells' Ten Questions to Ask your Biology Teacher About Evolution. Bruce Chapman already responded to the Times articles on DiscoveryBlog, here. Of course, the NCSE's attempted response didn't really answer the "Ten Questions" then, and it doesn't now. In fact, in 2002 Jonathan Wells authored a forceful rebuttal to the NCSE, "Inherit The...

Danio, guest blogger at Pharyngula, has a post advocating the denial of legal protection for health care workers who, because of religious beliefs or other moral objections, refuse to provide services such as abortions or contraception. It’s hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of respect for individual rights would support taking legal sanction against physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who, because of genuine deeply held religious belief or other moral principles, believe that such acts as abortion or contraception are immoral. From the standpoint of traditional medical ethics, healthcare professionals are only under legal compulsion to provide...

In his "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution" on TalkOrigins, Douglas Theobald claims that "Endogenous retroviruses provide yet another example of molecular sequence evidence for universal common descent." The presumption behind his argument is that endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are functionless stretches of "junk" DNA that persist because they are "selfish"—but they have no function for the organism. If we find the same ERVs in the same genetic loci in different species of primates, Theobald concludes they document common ancestry. But what if ERVs do perform important genetic functions? Even theistic evolutionist Francis Collins acknowledges that genetic similarity "alone does not, of course,...

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will discuss the medical and ethical aspects of persistent vegetative state (PVS). As I noted in an earlier post, I believe that the emergence of PVS as an accepted medical diagnosis is in part a consequence of the emergence of strict materialistic theories of the mind in the late 20th century, especially the theory called "functionalism," which is the theory that the mind is what the brain does, in the same way that running a program is what a computer does. If the mind is entirely caused by...

Denyse O'Leary has taken fellow Canadian Bob Breakenridge to task in The Calgary Herald for writing a column which, as O'Leary says, "is an excellent illustration of why one should not write about big topics without basic research." The 2005 Judge Jones decision in Pennsylvania, to which Breakenridge devotes much of his column, has not crimped the worldwide growth of interest in intelligent design. That is no surprise. A judge is not a scientist, and Jones cannot plug gaping holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is—contrary to its (largely) publicly funded zealots— in deep trouble, for a number of...

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post anonymously.] The Establishment clause of the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof […]." Today the popular argument against intelligent design (ID) is that it is just an extension of creationism, which implicates ID as a religious theory. The argument begins when proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution attempt to use some definition of science to disqualify ID from being a scientific theory. Intelligent design is then equated with religion through...

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post anonymously.] In 2006, Martha M. McCarthy wrote an article ("Instruction About the Origin of Humanity: Legal Controversies Evolve") arguing that "concerns have been raised…that if the 'controversy' is taught and ID is actually subjected to scientific criticism, this may 'be more confrontational to students' beliefs than most high school teachers feel is appropriate.'" (FN 68) This misguided statement assumes four things. First, it assumes that students have a set of beliefs on the origin of humanity before they take biology. The second assumption...

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post it anonymously.] Immediately following the publication of "Teaching the Origins Controversy: Science, or Religion, or Speech?" in 2000 in Utah Law Review, multiple law review articles appeared opposing the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design (ID). It seems that the law review article by Professors DeWolf and DeForrest and Meyer hit a nerve that incited various law students to ardently defend the evolutionary theory they were uncritically taught in high school. Once such student was Eric Shih, who published an article in the Michigan...

Larry Moran has a post on Sandwalk excoriating Matt Nisbet for his criticism of P.Z. Myers' recent desecration of the Eucharist. Myers, a vocal Darwinist and militant atheist, obtained a Eucharistic Host, nailed it, threw it in the garbage, and photographed it, along with a Qur'an and a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Nisbet, sensitive to the implications of Myers' performance art, took Myers to task:...

Unfortunately I spent much of July at home feeling sick and miserable. For part of that time, all I could do was sit and catch up on episodes of the comedy cartoon, South Park. Before elaborating, I must first note that I don’t recommend watching South Park if you have squeamish ears or a distaste for shock humor. And if you’re a kid, ask your parents before watching it; South Park may be a cartoon but it is not intended for kids. But I confess that I find South Park quite entertaining, largely because they poke fun of all sides...

Yale neurologist Dr. Steven Novella and I have been involved in a vigorous discussion (example here) of the mind-brain problem in science and philosophy. There are real-world implications of our understanding of the mind, and nowhere are these implications more important than in the medical management of people with severe brain damage. Dr. Novella recently posted a commentary on the Terri Schiavo case. Dr. Novella’s post was prompted by a study just published in the journal Neurology that analyzes the media coverage of the affair and offers suggestions as to how experts and journalists can convey the truth of such...

Last year I blogged about how Newsweek science columnist Sharon Begley had promoted the multiverse hypothesis as if it were a reasonable scientific proposition, avoiding mentioning to readers that this speculative idea was invented for the purpose of avoiding the conclusion that the cosmos was intelligently designed. As I wrote, "Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis--a pet philosophical favorite of materialists--while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if she...

CSC Fellow Richard Weikart sent us his article, "'Expelled' and the Darwinism-Nazi Connection: A Response to Jeff Schloss," which is now up at the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) website. Weikart details the historical connection between Darwin's theory and Hitler's Nazi ideology, responding to a similarly ASA-published article by Jeff Schloss. There's a history with Schloss, which Bill Dembski explains over at Uncommon Descent. Suffice it to say that Schloss is critical of intelligent design and quick to repeat the standard objections to the connection Expelled draws between Darwin and Hitler... and Weikart doesn't let him get away with it: In...

How many times have we heard the old Darwinist canard that the human eye is "poorly designed"? As the argument goes, the vertebrate eye is poorly designed because our photoreceptor cells face away from the incoming light and the optic nerve extends over them, allegedly blocking some light. William Dembski and Sean McDowell’s new book Understanding Intelligent Design has an easily accessible and forceful rebuttal to this poorly designed Darwinist objection to ID, explaining that the design of the human eye is actually quite optimal:...