Evolution News & Views

Discovery senior fellow, technology guru and conservative economist George Gilder has a major essay in the new issue of National Review, titled “Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance.” (subscription required)

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Recently Discovery President Bruce Chapman sat down for an interview with Discovery senior fellow, author, and technology guru George Gilder. The subject: evolution and intelligent design. Listen to a clip of the interview on the ID The Future Podcast.(MP3 format, 53MB, download only, no streaming)

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“Everywhere we encounter it,” Gilder writes, “information does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup. It comes from mind. Taking the hierarchy beyond the word, the central dogma of intelligent design ordains that word is subordinate to mind.
Mind can generate and lend meaning to words but words in themselves cannot generate mind or intelligence.”

Throughout the article Gilder shows how irreducible complexity in mathematics, in logic, in computer science, in physics, all point to a similar irreducible complexity in biological systems as well. He winds through information theory and economics, moving smoothly from quantum physics to mathematics, all the while showing how “Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture. As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.”

You’ll want to read Gilder’s view on why Darwin’s theory of evolution falls down, and why intelligent design is a better explanation, in the new issue of National Review (July 17) available now in bookstores, and to subscribers online.

And you can download the exclusive thirty-minute interview with George Gilder about his views on evolution and intelligent design.
Listen to a short clip of the interview as featured on ID The Future podcast.
Download the full 30 minute interview here.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 11:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Intellectualconservative.com, attorney Steven Laib has a short review of Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision.

All things considered, this is a book worth reading. Anyone who takes an interest in the legal battles over how science is to be taught in the public schools will find it informative and potentially a roadmap to where the next cases in this area will be argued.

“The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It's not. We've heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side. Traipsing Into Evolution is the other side. …

A disturbing feature of the debate over evolution, especially for those of us who are distantly interested but have no settled conviction on the matter, is the aggressive campaign by many in the scientific and judicial establishments to silence the opposition so that only the Darwinist story will be heard. That campaign was in full force in the recent Dover, Pennsylvania intelligent design case, and it was rewarded with a dubious victory in Judge Jones' mammoth, meandering opinion. "Traipsing Into Evolution" is a gallant attempt to present the other side of the story. If you followed the Dover controversy and especially if you managed to wade through all or part of Judge Jones's opinion, you owe it to yourself to read this book.”
Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego and author of "Law's Quandary" (Harvard University Press, 2004) and “The Constitution and the Pride of Reason” (Oxford University Press 1998)

“A revolution in evolution education is underway and the Discovery Institute continues to illuminate the path of critical thinking with its penetrating analysis of Judge Jones' opinion in the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board case. It's a sad irony that, while Darwin devoted three of the fifteen chapters in Origins of Species to discussing weaknesses associated with his theory of natural selection, America's current crop of science textbooks leave students largely in the dark by failing to address new and vital developments in the area of origins science. In the interests of academic freedom, it's time all Americans - and especially our youth - learn the full story about evolutionism. Discovery Institute's publication of Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision sheds valuable light along that trail.”
Honorable Judge Darrell White (retired), founder and president of the Retired Judges of America

"Traipsing Into Evolution is a timely criticism of judicial overreaching arising out of the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial. It gives a thoughtful, yet succinct, analysis of the errors of the Kitzmiller court. This book is a must read for both proponents and critics of intelligent design. Unless critics of intelligent design grapple with the arguments in this book, their criticisms will be as intellectually anemic as that of the court.”
Randall L. Wenger, Esq., Attorney specializing in constitutional law and public policy litigation

“I read Traipsing into Evolution in its entirety … and it is simply excellent.

On December 20th, 2005, Judge Jones was called to make a decision on the educational policy of a Dover school board that had already been ousted. Instead of simply doing this, Jones attempted to rule for perpetuity that Intelligent Design is not science. Traipsing into Evolution is a sharply focused rebuttal to Jones’ decision. The authors show that: (1) the law is not competent to rule on what is science, since the consensus of the relevant experts, philosophers of science, is that there is no satisfactory demarcation criterion between science and non-science; (2) Jones fallaciously argues that science is what most scientists claim is science, which implies that the unpopular theories of Copernicus, Newton and Darwin were not science; (3) Jones’ decision is filled with factual errors about the Intelligent Design movement, many taken verbatim from Barbara Forrest’s unreliable accounts; (4) Jones’ ruling violates the Establishment clause by siding with secular humanists and those followers of revealed religion who think Darwinism is compatible with their faith against anyone who thinks otherwise.

Logically organized, clearly written, and well argued, Traipsing Into Evolution is a point-by-point rebuttal to Judge Jones’ Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision. Anyone who believes in genuine academic freedom and who sees the value of fully disclosing to students all sides of the controversy about neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design will want this helpful volume.”
Angus Menuge, Ph.D., DCA, Author, Agents Under Fire (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) Professor of Philosophy, Associate Director, The Cranach Institute, Concordia University Wisconsin

If you missed the book publication parties in either Washington --Seattle or DC-- you can watch the Seattle event here, and the DC discussion will be televised in the near future on C-SPAN's Booknotes. As soon as we know a date and time we'll post that information.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As we reported earlier this week, there were a number of articles equating intelligent design with creationism in the THES recently. Bruce Gordon, research director for Discovery's Center for Science & Culture, has written the following response to the THES, correcting their mistakes and outlining some of the key points of intelligent design theory.

In a spate of articles published on June 23rd in the Times Higher Education Supplement, (here, here, here, here, and here) Jessica Shepherd and Steve Farrar, perhaps unintentionally, have succeeded in spreading the misconception that intelligent design (ID) theory and young earth creationism are so closely allied as to merit being identified with each other. They are not the same. As a logically astute member of the British Cheese Board might tell you, being cheddar is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for being cheese. Similarly, being a young earth creationist is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for being an advocate of intelligent design. Most current ID theorists of consequence not only are not creationists, some of them aren’t even theists.

The reason for this divergence is not far to seek. Young earth creationists are biblical literalists who circumscribe their approach to science by deduction from Holy Writ. Intelligent design theorists are scientists or philosophers of science who derive their conclusions inductively from the empirical study of nature, following the evidence where it leads without regard to antecedent constraints artificially imposed by theodical desiderata or philosophical naturalism. In this latter respect, ID theorists are more thoroughgoing in their scientific approach than, say, Richard Dawkins, who continues to promulgate his misunderstanding of science to the public from his bully pulpit at Oxford University. Dawkins’ presuppositions are evident in his definition of biology as the study of complex living systems that “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” ID theorists prefer not to preclude design as a possible explanation in given instances without first examining the evidence.

What sort of evidence do we have in mind? Consider an example: bacterial cells are propelled by flagellar motors that function as rotary engines spinning at up to 100,000 rpm. These miniscule engines look like they were designed by engineers since they are made of proteins that comprise distinct component structures serving the same mechanical functions as rotors, stators, O-rings, bushings, U-joints and drive shafts. As the biochemist Michael Behe has pointed out, this flagellar motor depends on the coordinated function of 30 protein parts and it will not work if even one of them is removed – it is, in his terminology, “irreducibly complex.” Since natural selection works (in neo-Darwinian theory) by environmental “selection” of functional advantages manifested in the phenotype that have arisen through random genetic mutations, it can select the motor once it has arisen as a functional whole, but it cannot produce it in the step-by-step fashion required by neo-Darwinism because every stage of lesser complexity is completely nonfunctional.

Our uniform and repeated experience tells us, on the other hand, that there is one and only one cause sufficient to produce irreducible complexity: intelligence. By putting intelligence forward as the causal basis for irreducible complexity in nature, ID theorists are therefore following a standard procedure employed across a spectrum of scientific explanations from particle physics and cosmology to neuropsychology: the postulation of something unobserved (and perhaps in principle never directly observable) as the best explanation for what is observed. Such “inferences to the best explanation” are standard in scientific theorizing and should be no more controversial in this case than elsewhere. Unlike creationism, therefore, ID is an empirically driven inference from biological data.

I could multiply examples, speaking, for instance, of the precisely sequenced nucleotides in DNA that constitute the four-character digital code for the construction of biologically functional proteins, and explaining in principled fashion why no theory of undirected chemical evolution can explain the origin of its informational content, but my point has been adequately made. Why, then, the continued conflation of ID with young earth creationism? Setting aside suspicions that this is a mere rhetorical move designed to discredit without the difficult work of confronting the evidence, perhaps it’s because ID may give scientific aid and comfort to theistic belief – and this despite ancillary issues of dysteleology. To reject the theory on these grounds, however, would be to ignore the evidence because of its implications, something even Dawkins would admit to be an error – and that despite his pathological atheism.

What we are observing with ID is not a novel event in the history of science. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists initially rejected the Big Bang theory because it seemed to point to the need for a transcendent cause of the universe as a whole, but the scientific community eventually came to accept the theory because the evidence overwhelmingly supported it. A similar prejudice confronts ID today, but this new theory must also be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not prior philosophical prejudice. As the distinguished British philosopher Antony Flew counseled after making world-wide news for repudiating his lifelong atheism in response to the evidence for ID: “we must follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” Just so.

Bruce L. Gordon, Ph.D.
Research Director
Center for Science and Culture
Discovery Institute

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The noted scholar Ronald Numbers is often cited as an objective authority on the history of the debate over evolution. But when he recently co-authored an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, "Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action," I was surprised that Numbers used invective language and clearly incorrect claims to discredit the theory of intelligent design. My first two pieces on the article are here and here. Now I want to take up three other claims that the article makes: (1) Michael Behe's irreducible complexity argument ignores exaptation (co-option); (2) there are no peer-reviewed science articles defending intelligent design; and (3) ID stymies scientific progress.

Inaccuracy # 5: The article states that "Behe assumes that the component parts of irreducibly complex systems never had other functions in older organisms." This false claim, made by the Dover plaintiffs and then repeated by Judge Jones, was refuted by Part I of my April, Do Car Engines Run on Lugnuts? post, noting that Behe (and others) have devoted much discussion to the inadequate argument that the presence of other functions for a given part of an irreducibly complex system undermines a claim of irreducible complexity.

Inaccuracy # 6: The article also implies that ID has published no studies about how life came about:

However, those studies tell us a great deal about how life came to be as it is and now form the foundation of modern biology. ID, by contrast, has produced nothing.

This common fallacious claim is easily refuted by a listing of peer-reviewed articles and books, some published in highly prestigious venues, supporting ID.

Most importantly, this literature is helping us to understand the natural world. As Stephen Meyer explains in his peer-reviewed article, ID helps us to understand the origin of biological information:

Analysis of the problem of the origin of biological information, therefore, exposes a deficiency in the causal powers of natural selection that corresponds precisely to powers that agents are uniquely known to possess. Intelligent agents have foresight. Such agents can select functional goals before they exist. They can devise or select material means to accomplish those ends from among an array of possibilities and then actualize those goals in accord with a preconceived design plan or set of functional requirements. Rational agents can constrain combinatorial space with distant outcomes in mind. The causal powers that natural selection lacks--almost by definition--are associated with the attributes of consciousness and rationality--with purposive intelligence. Thus, by invoking design to explain the origin of new biological information, contemporary design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity possessing precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation. (Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories by Stephen C. Meyer, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2):213-239 (2004))

And the ID explanation can also yield fruitful insights into biology. Pro-ID biologist Jonathan Wells has suggested in a peer-reviewed ID journal (***) that intelligent design can help us to understand function of Junk-DNA:

Since non-coding regions do not produce proteins, Darwinian biologists have been dismissing them for decades as random evolutionary noise or ‘junk DNA.’ From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk.’” (Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research,” Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Vol 3.1, Nov., 2004.)

Wells's approach might have helped us to avoid pitfalls stemming from Neo-Darwinian thought. For example, a widely used college textbook on molecular biology leads students to believe that, under Neo-Darwinian thinking, introns are merely genetic junk:

Unlike the sequence of an exon, the exact nucleotide sequence of an intron seems to be unimportant. Thus introns have accumulated mutations rapidly during evolution, and it is often possible to alter most of an intron’s nucleotide sequence without greatly affecting gene function. This has led to the suggestion that intron sequences have no function at all and are largely genetic “junk”… (Molecular biology of the Cell, 3rd Ed. (1994) by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and James D. Watson)

That Darwinist statement was written in 1994. In 2003, an article in Scientific American about the functionality of so-called "junk-DNA" called our failure to recognize introns as functional within the cell "one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology":

Yet the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes, Mattick says, “were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.”

[...]

About two thirds of the conserved sequences lie in introns, and the rest are scattered among the intergenic “junk” DNA. “I think this will come to be a classic story of orthodoxy derailing objective analysis of the facts, in this case for a quarter of a century,” Mattick says. “The failure to recognize the full implications of this—particularly the possibility that the intervening noncoding sequences may be transmitting parallel information in the form of RNA molecules—may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” (The Unseen Genome: Gems Among the Junk by Wayt T. Gibbs, Scientific American (November, 2003), emphasis added)

Intelligent design leads us to the testable expectation that designers make things for a reason--and thus ID leads us to expect that structures in biology probably have some function. Had scientists considered an ID approach, the mistake Mattlick so passionately identifies could have been avoided.

Conclusion:
The article by Numbers and his co-authors nicely encapsulates the Darwinist metanarrative about ID. A close analysis exposes that this metanarrative--though widely promulgated--is factually bankrupt.

Sadly, the article also uses harsh invectives and polemics to describe ID. These are surprising for an article appearing in a scholarly journal. Given the prestige garnered by co-author Ronald Numbers for his past works on the history of this debate, one cannot help but ask, “Has Numbers given up his role as historian and become a partisan in the debate?” Is Professor Numbers maintaining his neutrality, or is this polemical and factually-challenged article a departure from his position as an academic historian of science?

*** The Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design website states that "[t]he editorial advisory board peer-reviews articles submitted to the society's journal."

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Predictably, as soon as we announced that the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism list had topped 600 doctoral scientists, we were flooded with a wave of scientists wanting to add their names to the list. Well, okay, it was a small wave -- 14 in the past four days to be exact -- but a wave none the less.

Over at Post-Darwinist, Denyse O'Leary notes that she could probably heat her home with the energy generated by the Darwinist's voiciferous denunciations of anyone who dares to doubt the veracity of the Darwinian mechanism.

Maybe, as the rage grows, I can offer energy from, like, enormous clusters of Darwinists denouncing specific scientists, in which case I can sign on to an alternative energy provider in Canada, offering "pro-Darwin noise" as an energy source. Goodness knows, given recent American Episcopal Church pronouncements, there is enough of that to turn my modest home - and homes for a six-block radius - into a northern Banana Republic. Hey, if all my neighbours agree to sign up with me for a few evening classes in tropical horticulture (instead of the temperate/near north horticulture we know and love), we could put all our extra bananas and pineapples into the local Food Bank. Cheap at the price, and good citizenship! And at least some use for the Darwinists' rage, too.

O'Leary also notes that there has been pressure in the past to get medical doctors to support Darwinism.

This issue - demands that doctors support Darwinism - came up while I was writing By Design or by Chance?, when Texas student Micah Spradling had problems qualifying for med school because his prof insisted at that time (scroll down) that students profess faith in Darwinism; otherwise, they might make "poor clinical decisions".

In spite of the efforts of Darwinists to keep dissenters silent, each time the list is publicized we receive a surge of interest from scientists who want to sign the list. Here's a few sample comments received just this week. (I'm leaving the names off at this time as we're still in the verification process for each of these.)

• I agree with your "Dissent from Darwinism" statement and aplaud your efforts to bring the growing scientific doubt in this area to the public's attention.
  
• I find neo-Darwinism to be a flawed hypothesis, not a theory.
  
• I completely agree with your statements. When I was in college, questioning evolution was simply unacceptable. This seemed quite hypocritical to me because literally everything else was fair game.
  
• I am an academic in the chemistry area who has long been at odds with unlimited evolution and the way it is projected as incontrovertible fact.I will be most happy to sign the dissent list.
  
• I find that the continual discovery of molecular/genetic evidence that contradicts long established phylogenies derived from morphological and developmental considerations is quite damning to the modern theory of evolution as is the plethora of contradictory trees proposed in almost every phyla of life. Clearly there is also a profound lack of understanding of the interrelationships of the different phyla, something that one would imagine a comprehensive and robust theory of evolution might aim to provide.

I realize I'm not eligible to sign the Dissent List without a doctoral degree. But I at least wanted to send a quick message in support of the program, and to thank you for the encouragement that I and others have in seeing this stand for honest scientific discussion and debate.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 4:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Despite the Darwinist community's long-standing campaign to help the public come to the "correct" view that "evolution and religion are compatible," public skepticism of evolution remains high. (See this link for documentation.) This would logically lead one to the conclusion that there are other factors besides religion that drive skepticism of evolution. Perhaps, one might even suggest, for many people the issue has a lot to do with science!

Recently I was told about a 1997 article in Scientific American which reported a study conducted by Brian Alters on students' reasons for rejecting evolution ("What Are They Thinking?: Students’ reasons for rejecting evolution go beyond the Bible," by Rebecca Zacks, Scientific American, October 1997, pg. 34). The study surveyed over 1200 college freshman, and found that large percentages of students who reject evolution stated scientific reasons for holding their views. Alters claims that all their scientific reasons are wrong, and another educator simply believed that students' views could be corrected by telling them what to think, i.e., if "misconceptions are countered with specific evidence."

While some of their reasons may be questionable, some of them are on the right track—i.e., students rejected evolution due to insufficiencies of the mechanism of random mutations or the statistical impossibility of the origin of life. As the article stated, "nearly 40 percent of those skeptical of evolution believe the chance origin of life to be a statistical impossibility"!

These are good reasons to be skeptical of evolution—and this shows that for many people this issue is not a matter of evolution vs. religion, but rather of evolution vs. science.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 3:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Times (London) Higher Education Supplement (THES) confuses intelligent design with young earth creationism in a slew of articles as part of a crusade against ID.

The main article of the four on the subject is stereotypical of the mainstream media's insistence that this is about religion and not science, starting out reporting on a tent revival meeting and going on to focus on religion rather than on any of the serious scientific issues under debate.

In this article the reporters go after creationists, and at the end of the piece there is a short description of intelligent design and how it differs from creationism. However, this article is not available online, and it is the only place where the differences between ID and creationism are cited.

In the only article widely available online, "Intelligent design creeps on to courses", the THES clearly equates ID with creationism. The headline implies the article is about ID, but the people quoted and the groups discussed are all creationists, and are referred to as such in the article. This is clearly misleading the reader to equate the two concepts.

The THES is reporting that courses on intelligent design and creationism now will be compulsory in zoology and genetics classes, as will criticism of the theories.

But there’s a twist: lecturers will present the controversial theories as being incompatible with scientific evidence. “It is essential they (students) understand the historical context and the flaws in the arguments these groups put forward,” says Michael McPherson, of Leeds University.

Despite the clear anti- creationist stance of these lecturers, the move has set warning bells ringing across the UK science community.

In a case of "False Fear Syndrome" going global, the THES also grossly misrepresents the American debates over science education policy as being about biblical creationism. The headline screams out "Cadre of US fundamentalists determined to see biblical tenets added to courses" but gives no evidence of this claim other than quotes by people who "think" this could happen, or "believe" people are doing this. The THES itself only reports that people are concerned when they hear about it, but never give any details of it actually happening.

Each time a US state education board decides that a literal interpretation of Genesis ought to be taught alongside evolution in science lessons, UK academics have voiced their concern while privately feeling relieved at not having to face a similar situation at home.

This is simply a case of poor reporting twisting the facts to force-fit them into an agenda. Some basic research on the part of the THES reporters would have clearly shown that their portrayal is false. Why didn't they investigate this further? We provided them with a lot of information about the state of the debate in the United States which they apparently ignored.

They also ignored any of the real debates over the inadequacies of Darwinian evolution, and the growing number of scientific challenges the theory faces.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Science magazine has issued a correction for incorrectly calling Discovery Institute "creationism's main think tank." (see original post here)

Corrections and Clarifications

News of the Week: "Court revives Georgia sticker case" by C. Holden (2 June, p. 1292). The article incorrectly characterizes the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, as a think tank for the creationist movement. The institute is a public policy organization that operates many different programs, including the Center for Science & Culture, which supports the work of scholars who explore challenges to evolution and promote the concept of intelligent design.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 6:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ronald Numbers is a well-known historian of science, but when he co-authored a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, "Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action," I was surprised by the invective language the authors used in comparing peer-reviewed scientific monographs by ID proponents to religious "tracts."

Unfortunately, the flaws of this article go far beyond merely employing inflammatory remarks. Given Numbers’ previously more objective scholarship, I was surprised to find myself reading an article co-authored by him that recycles the standard Darwinist metanarrative, one that repeats false claims about intelligent design and science standards. I describe the metanarrative and rebut two of its claims here. In the current piece, I want to consider the article's claim that ID is simply a negative argument against evolution, one that supposedly makes untestable appeals to the supernatural.

Inaccuracy # 3:The article states that Kansas now includes the supernatural in its state standards' definition of science:

Even the definition of science itself has fallen victim to political attack; the state board of education in Kansas decided that the supernatural may now be taught as science in the classroom.

That is a false statement. The new Kansas science standards simply re-set their definition of science back to how approximately every other state in the country defines science, essentially the way Kansas had defined it until 2001, as a way of knowing that investigates the natural world through the use of observation, experimentation, and logical argument, and makes only testable hypotheses:

Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. Science does so while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses. Scientific explanations must meet certain criteria. Scientific explanations are consistent with experimental and/or observational data and testable by scientists through additional experimentation and/or observation.(2005 Kansas Science Standards, pg. 10, emphasis added)

When the Darwinists took over the Board of Education in 2001 and defined science as "seeking natural explanations," Kansas became the only state in the United States to explicitly advocate for hard-code methodological naturalism into its state science standards. Thus, the new Kansas standards (2006), by removing such language, moves closer to the norm for U.S. science standards.

There is a great irony in the fact that this article criticizing the Kansas science standards was co-authored by Wisconsin State Representative Teresa Berceau (D). Ms. Berceau submitted a bill to the Wisconsin legislature that she thinks outlaws ID because the bill requires that material taught as science be “testable as a scientific hypothesis.” Ignoring for the moment the fact that ID is testable, the article's assertion on this contradicts Berceau’s own logic: she thinks ID is an untestable supernatural explanation, so she submitted a bill that she thinks will outlaw ID because the bill requires that all science taught must be “testable as a scientific hypothesis and describes only natural processes.” Yet in the article discussed here, she claims Kansas’s definition of science includes the supernatural despite the fact that testability is a strong thread throughout Kansas’s definition of science (see emphasized portions above). Berceau making contradictory arguments, and she is doubly wrong: Not only is ID not outlawed by her bill (because ID is indeed testable and doesn't invoke the supernatural) but the Kansas science standards nowhere incorporate the supernatural.

Here's a question I submit to Berceau and all proponents of the false conspiracy theory that Kansas now teaches the supernatural in science classes: if Kansas incorporated the supernatural into its definition of science, then how do you explain the fact that its science standards emphatically require that all science be testable?

...This leads us to the next and perhaps most important inaccuracy in the Berceau/Numbers article:

Inaccuracy # 4: The article makes various false statements that ID postulates a supernatural creator and is untestable: "ID and its progeny rely on supernatural explanations of natural phenomena," and "ID makes no testable predictions. There is nothing in this concept that allows for scientific investigation of the 'designer.' It is simply an argument by default; the failure to explain something is said to lend credence to a supernatural explanation."

These quotations recapitulate the Darwinist metanarrative at its best. Yet the writings of ID proponents make it clear that these statements are completely false:

(1) ID does not require supernatural causation because to do so would go beyond the limits of scientific inquiry.

(2) ID is not merely a negative argument against evolution; and (3) ID makes testable predictions.

Indeed, the very text Of Pandas and People, the supplemental biology textbook Numbers and his co-authors claim demonstrates that ID is creationism, instead makes clear that it does not rely upon supernatural causation and shows that ID makes positive arguments:

If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. But what kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy. But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist. This is no different, really, than if we discovered life did result from natural causes. We still would not know, from science, if the natural cause was all that was involved, or if the ultimate explanation was beyond nature, and using the natural cause.

(Of Pandas and People, pg. 7, emphasis added)

Oddly, the article also states that ID proponents "conveniently omi[t] mention of God." Call this the opposite-arguments-regarding-ID-and-the-supernatural fallacy: You cannot critique ID because it requires "rel[ies] upon supernatural explanations" and then on the other hand critique it for allegedly cleverly removing references to the supernatural (i.e., God). Darwinists can’t criticize ID on the one hand because, as they claim, it does identify the designer as supernatural, and then on the other hand because it doesn’t.

What does ID actually do? ID shows appeals to our uniform experience of presently acting causes to show that certain features of the natural world are best explained by reference to intelligent design rather to some purely material cause like Darwinian natural selection. This is a program of inquiry that can be undertaken apart from religious questions about the supernatural.

Contrary to what the articles says, ID proponents do not "conveniently omi[t] mention of God." Consider how Michael Behe has explained that, while he does believe in God, the scientific data from biology do not allow one to tell if the designer is God or even whether the designer is supernatural:

The most important difference [between modern intelligent design theory and Paley's arguments] is that [intelligent design] is limited to design itself; I strongly emphasize that it is not an argument for the existence of a benevolent God, as Paley's was. I hasten to add that I myself do believe in a benevolent God, and I recognize that philosophy and theology may be able to extend the argument. But a scientific argument for design in biology does not reach that far. Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. (Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis," Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), pg. 165, emphasis added.)

Thus Behe is open about the fact that he believes that the designer is God. I, too, believe in the same God that Michael Behe believes in. But these are our religious beliefs, which are not derived from the scientific claims of intelligent design. Many ID proponents may share our view that the designer is God (though some do not), but that belief is not derived from ID theory.

Behe's characterization of intelligent design is consistent with what the early pre-publication drafts of Of Pandas and People stated, as well as what the published version stated:

[S]cientists from within Western culture failed to distinguish between intelligence, which can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural, which cannot. Today we recognize that appeals to intelligent design may be considered in science, as illustrated by current NASA search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Archaeology has pioneered the development of methods for distinguishing the effects of natural and intelligent causes. We should recognize, however, that if we go further, and conclude that the intelligence responsible for biological origins is outside the universe (supernatural) or within it, we do so without the help of science." (Of Pandas and People, a pro-ID textbook, pg. 126-127, emphasis added)

Ronald Numbers and his colleagues misunderstand intelligent design and are misrepresenting it to the public. I am surprised that a historian such as Numbers would have added his name to this article.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

A new website, ResearchID.org has just launched and this is the announcement we received.

A new intelligent design website, ResearchID.org has been launched. that will provide high-quality online resources for scientists and scholars researching intelligent design. As a research website, ResearchID.org is an on-line knowledgebase for theoretically, empirically, and technologically exploring intelligent design. This site has no affiliation with Discovery Institute.

Established by ID theorist and author Joseph C. Campana, the site assembles the many separate lines of information, reasoning, and evidence that support ID and melds them into a lucid, unified, and accessible corpus. ResearchID.org will help those who are doing intelligent design researcy by producing and cataloging many types of resources: research proposals, biographical entries, project descriptions, articles on related issues, and a glossary that defines ID jargon.

The website was featured on several blogs and forums for one of its articles, entitled "ID at the Academy," which catalogues university classes around the world covering intelligent design. Campana is currently writing an essay series called "Paradigm Dawning," which touches on many topics related to intelligent design, including scientific curiosity, research criticism, teleology, ID research programs, and technological trends in science.

Additionally, ResearchID.org has initiated a Catalog of Fundamental Facts, which William Dembski and David Berlinski identified as an invaluable resource for the intelligent design community.

The site is a collaborative project where serious users can register free and contribute. With its easy access nature and collaborative features, ResearchID.org is sure to be an asset to the intelligent design community and a thorn in the side of ID critics.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ronald Numbers is a widely respected historian of science. He is an exceptional scholar who has garnered the respect of people on all sides of this debate. However, a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, "Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action," co-authored by, among others, Ronald L. Numbers, Elliot Sober [anti-ID philosopher], and Terese Berceau [anti-ID legislator], gives one pause to wonder if Numbers is shifting his role from commentator, to partisan.

In a twist unexpected from the scholarship of Dr. Numbers, the article launches into polemics using invective language:

"After the Edwards ruling [Edwards vs. Aguillard, 1987], they set about removing references to God and creationism from their tracts." (Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action, emphasis added)

Such emotive language is not commonly found in scholarly journal articles. A "tract" is "A leaflet or pamphlet containing a declaration or appeal, especially one put out by a religious or political group." To compare ID literature, such as William Dembski’s Cambridge University Press The Design Inference, or Stephen Meyer’s paper published in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington to “tracts,” “leaflets,” or “pamphlets” with purely religious or political language is out of character for an article in a scholarly journal, and out of character for Ronald Numbers.

Is William Dembski's peer-reviewed, Cambridge University Press-published, academic monograph The Design Inference a mere religious "tract"? What about Stephen Meyer's peer-reviewed critique of natural selection's ability to create new genetic information, and his closely reasoned argument in the same essay that intelligent design is the only presently acting cause of information and, therefore, the best explanation for the quantum increase in biological information during the Cambrian explosion, an argument that draws heavily on his extensive training in the history and philosophy of science (Ph.D., Cambridge University), and carefully reviews all of the leading materialistic hypotheses for the Cambrian explosion, including structuralist and self-organizational models? Does labeling these two works "tracts" answer the arguments these two scholars put forward? Will other labels work the same rhetorical magic--"garbage," "bilge," "doo doo"? If so, is this why they offered no substantive critique of the central arguments made by Dembski and Meyer? I mean, why bother to engage in close, reasoned debate when a quickie label like "tracts" can make all of your opponent's pesky arguments disappear.

Apart from using polemics, this article recapitulates the standard Darwinist metanarrative about ID, which goes something like this:

"ID is just an evolved version of creationism where creationists got smart and took out the word "God" to avoid a legal decision, but in reality it's just an untestable appeal to the supernatural, which says that if evolution cannot explain some things, then therefore it must have been created by miracles from a supernatural or divine being: that claim isn't testable, and therefore isn't science, and that's why ID has never published any peer-reviewed work supporting its ideas. ID is nothing but religion, and cannot contribute anything to science other than stopping otherwise fruitful research. ID proponents should stop trying to push it into the classroom because ID threatens science education, science, and the security of our future."

But is this metanarrative true, or is it simply another Darwinist creation myth? This response will come in a series of three separate posts that will collectively track how this article makes each claim in the Darwinist metanarrative, and will argue that each claim is false. An elaboration of each inaccuracy will be delivered below, and also in a series of two subsequent posts.

Inaccuracy # 1: The article claims to be inspired by a desire "to address the attempts to undermine science education in Wisconsin." That made me suspicious because I know of no group in Wisconsin that is trying to undermine evolution education, or, as the metanarrative states, to push ID into the classroom. The authors hold such an opinion, but again, such polemics are unexpected in a scholarly journal article. The article claims:

"In 2004, the school board of Grantsburg, Wisconsin, voted to have ID taught as an alternative scientific theory to evolutionary theory." (Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action)

"Students are expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information. Students shall be able to explain the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory. This policy does not call for the teaching of Creationism or Intelligent Design."

Inaccuracy # 2:The article states that the removal of the phrase "creationism" from the textbook Of Pandas and People implies that ID is just creationism "mutated" over:

"The creationists once again mutated and adapted. After the Edwards ruling, they set about removing references to God and creationism from their tracts. For example, as revealed at the Dover trial (8), the authors of the intelligent design (ID) text Of pandas and people: the central question of biological origins stripped the direct mentions of creationism present in early drafts of the text and systematically substituted the novel term 'intelligent design'" (Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action)

The legislative history therefore reveals that the term "creation science," as contemplated by the legislature that adopted this Act, embodies the religious belief that a supernatural creator was responsible for the creation of humankind. (Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 591-592, emphasis added)

Yet pre-publication drafts of Pandas juxtaposed the word "creation" with statements to the exact opposite effect, noting that science cannot scientifically detect a supernatural creator. Consider these important excerpts from pre-publication drafts of Pandas, showing that from the beginning, their project did not do what made traditional "creationism" unconstitutional: it did not delve into supernatural explanations:

---

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In each of these excerpts from pre-Edwards v. Aguillard drafts of Pandas, it is clear that the idea of "creation" discussed in pre-publication drafts of Pandas was specifically NOT trying to postulate a supernatural creator! The concepts advanced by even pre-publication, pre-Edwards drafts of Pandas were sharply different from what the courts have defined as "creationism." These early drafts were not trying to study the supernatural.

To solidify this point, consider the deposition testimony of Charles Thaxton as to why he started to use the term intelligent design in the Pandas book:

I wasn’t comfortable with the typical vocabulary that for the most part creationists were using because it didn’t express what I was trying to do. They were wanting to bring God into the discussion, and I was wanting to stay within the empirical domain and do what you can do legitimately there.

(Deposition of Charles Thaxton 52-53, Kitzmiller, No. 4:04-CV-2688 (M.D. Pa., July 19, 2005))

Similarly, a 1990 post-publication rebuttal to a critic, written by the Pandas publisher explains:

As a consequence, yes, we are careful not to identify the intelligent cause behind the biological phenomena presented, but not for purposes of stealth, but rather precisely because we think that this is a religious conclusion.

The authors of the article are wrong to say that ID "mutated" to avoid a court decision. ID was formulated in its present form--an empirically based argument that would not stray into the supernatural--before the Edwards case was decided. Thus, even before Edwards v. Aguillard, ID lacked the very quality that caused creationism to be declared unconstitutional: it did not postulate a "supernatural creator." [sentence deleted soon after posting for clarity--please see this post for a full discussion of the similar definitions issue]

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

SEATTLE — Over 600 doctoral scientists from around the world have now signed a statement publicly expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution. The statement, located online at www.dissentfromdarwin.org, reads: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The fastest growing segment of the list is scientists from outside the United States. International scientists now represent just over 12% of all signers, and as a group has seen nearly 40% growth in the past four months.

“I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma,” said Raul Leguizamon, M. D., Pathologist, and a professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico.

“Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all,” added Leguizamon. “Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as Bernard Shaw used to say. The hold it has in academic circles is not at all due to the empirical evidence that allegedly supports it, but to its philosophical presuppositions and implications, the political correctness of the Darwinian paradigm and the intellectual inertia of academia in general. "

The list of 610 signatories includes member scientists from National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland, Russia and the United States. Many of the signers are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, British Museum of Natural History, Moscow State University, Masaryk University in Czech Republic, Hong Kong University, University of Turku in Finland, Autonomous University of Guadalajara in Mexico, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in France, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton.

“Dissent from Darwinism has gone global,” said Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman, former US Ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna. “Darwinists used to claim that virtually every scientist in the world held that Darwinian evolution was true, but we quickly started finding US scientists that disproved that statement. Now we’re finding that there are hundreds, and probably thousands, of scientists all over the world that don’t subscribe to Darwin’s theory.”

Discovery Institute first published its Scientific Dissent From Darwinism list in 2001 to challenge false statements about Darwinian evolution made in promoting PBS’s “Evolution” series. At the time it was claimed that “virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true.”

Prominent signatories include U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell; American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow Lyle Jensen; evolutionary biologist and textbook author Stanley Salthe; Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information Richard von Sternberg; Editor of Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum --the oldest still published biology journal in the world-- Giuseppe Sermonti; and Russian Academy of Natural Sciences embryologist Lev Beloussov.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 2:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

While the New England Journal of Medicine recently refused to publish a pro-ID letter-to-the-editor commenting on the Kitzmiller ruling, other medical journals are still clearly open to discussion on these matters.

Michael R. Egnor, professor of Neurosurgery at S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook has published a letter in the Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled Defending Science from Censorship. The letter responds to an anti-ID article published in Journal of Clinical Investigation entitled "Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action," which had many co-authors, including the notable names Elliot Sober, Ronald Numbers, and Terese Berceau.

The original article by Berceau, Sober, & Numbers et al. is surprising for something published in a scholarly journal: it uses uncommonly inflammatory rhetoric to call the scholarship of design scientists mere religious "tracts." Does the usage of such language depreciate scholarly value of this article? Moreover, the original article is highly partisan in that it simply recapitulates the "Darwinist metanarrative," a widely-held though mainly fictional account of intelligent design that has little-to-no basis in reality. The many incorrect and ironic statements in the article will be analyzed in a three-part series of posts here at Evolution News & Views in coming days.

In the mean time, Egnor's letter: is worth highlighting because it argues that the "call to action" is actually a call to censorship of non-Darwinian views.

To the Editor:

The essay by Attie et al (‘Defending science education against design: a call to action’) is an odd 'call to action'. Scientists generally consider a ‘call to action’ to be a call for more vigorous discussion and research. Dr Attie’s ‘call to action’ is a call for censorship.

Dr. Attie assembles a philosopher, an historian, a lawyer, and a couple of politicians to coauthor an essay encouraging scientists to lobby for laws that censor criticism of Darwinism in schools. They assert that if you don’t accept Darwinism as an adequate explanation for biological complexity, you’re ‘anti-science’.

The authors’ preference for censorship, rather than debate, is understandable. Poorly thought-out arguments don’t hold up well in open debate. They devote a paragraph to testing (and claiming to refute) Mike Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity. The first sentence of their next paragraph is “ID makes no testable predictions.” They propose a law that mandates that public school students be taught material that ‘describes only natural processes’. That rules out the Big Bang, black holes, multiverses, and much of modern cosmology. Emergence of the universe ex- nihilo, physics in singularities, and the existence of countless other universes are by definition not 'natural processes'. Censor quantum mechanics as well. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about Schrodinger’s cat!

The authors' policies, if taken seriously, would exclude many of the most important advances in 20th century physics. The most interesting and fruitful science challenges dogma, and the most entrenched dogma in modern biology is Darwinism.

The authors express concern that discussion of Darwinism and intelligent design will cripple science education. Yet the United States leads the western world in science and in skepticism about Darwinism. The current American debate about the origin of biological complexity is clear evidence that free inquiry is quite compatible with leadership in science.

Science thrives in an atmosphere of free inquiry. Teach the controversy!

Michael Egnor, M.D.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Scripps Howard News Service is carrying this arresting story by Deroy Murdock:

Most ecologists want to make life easy for butterflies and waterfalls. Who can argue with that? Some environmental extremists, however, think what Earth really needs is fewer people. In some cases, billions fewer.

"We're no better than bacteria!" University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka recently announced. "Things are gonna get better after the collapse because we won't be able to decimate the Earth so much," he added. "And, I actually think the world will be much better when there's only 10 or 20 percent of us left."

Pianka dreamed that disease "will control the scourge of humanity." He celebrated the potential of Ebola Reston, an airborne strain of the killer virus, to make Earth nearly human-free. "We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that."

Just five hours after Pianka's March 3 speech to the Texas Academy of Science, which Forrest Mims III covered March 31 in The Citizen Scientist, the Academy named Pianka its 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. Several hundred scientists gave Pianka a standing ovation, Mims reported.

Pianka is not alone.

Murdock's story adds several new instances of the disturbing sort of thinking noted in previous Evolution News stories on the subject (here, here, and here). What's the tie-in to evolution? Pianka is an ardent defender of modern evolutionary theory and the materialist worldview it underpins. Materialism denies any role for a creative intelligence in the history of life or the universe. Historically, this has also led both materialists and those influenced by materialism to de-emphasize or ignore the crucial role of creativity in human culture. In the arts it has led to an attack on the category of artistic genius, replaced by the idea that claims of artistic authority are little more than a tool of the upper classes to maintain power. In economics, it has led to the zero-sum-game thinking of the hard left, where it's believed that wealthy entrepreneurs do not create new wealth but merely appropriate a disproportionate piece of the pie, to the detriment of the poor laboring class. Like those who go right on believing in Darwinism against the growing tide of evidence, so too do these zero-sum thinkers go right on believing their economic model despite the fact that laborers are consistently better off in free market economies than in countries controlled by zero-sum thinking (e.g., the Soviet Union, East Germany). In ecology, it has led to a similar kind of zero-sum thinking, where it's assumed that individual humans cannot bring anything creatively positive to planet earth.

Or perhaps I'm making this more complicated than it is. If the ecologists are like a lot of us, they fantasize about having a nice place in the country with ready access to unpeopled nature. If humans--as materialism teaches--are no more valuable than a cockroach, then why not fantasize about wiping out roughly 90 times as many people as were killed in the war Hitler started?

I know why our country doesn't lock up people who fantasize about a new holocaust on a scale that would dwarf all others in human history. We're a republic that rightly defends intellectual freedom. What I don't get is why our country--populated overwhelmingly by people who reject the materialistic, nihilistic vision propounded by Pianka and others--nevertheless sets up Ebola holocaust lovers and their nihilistic/materialist cohorts in tenured and taxpayer funded positions at our public universities, not roughly in proportion to their representation among our total population (about 10-12% of us) but in numbers so great that these materialists function as the ideological gatekeepers at these institutions? Maybe when enough socially conservative and moderate Republicans and Democrats begin asking that same question, something will change.

Posted by Jonathan Witt at 1:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On June 2, 2006, I submitted a short, 175-word letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), responding to the incomplete and one-sided discussion of the Kitzmiller ruling they published, "Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom," by George J. Annas (NEJM, Volume 354 [21]:2277-2281 [May 25, 2006]). Today I learned that they have rejected my letter.

I've had letters rejected or accepted in various venues before, so that's fine. The rejection notice stated that "[t]he space available for correspondence is very limited, and we must use our judgment to present a representative selection of the material received." NEJM devoted approximately 3,426 words to Mr. Annas's article, which was completely one-sided and simply regurgitated the Kitzmiller ruling without any sort of critical analysis. Let us now see if they can devote 175 words to a different viewpoint that is critical of the Kitzmiller ruling.

To my knowledge, NEJM has not yet published a single pro-ID letter in response to "Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom." If you subscribe to The New England Journal of Medicine, keep reading their upcoming issues (and review recent ones) to see if they are willing to publish any letters critical of the Kitzmiller ruling or to see if they do indeed engage in viewpoint censorship and only publish material which is anti-ID.

Here is my letter, which they rejected:

As an attorney and scientist who observed the Dover intelligent design (ID) trial, I can testify that George Annas’s account is incomplete.

Judge John Jones ruled that ID "has not generated peer-reviewed publications." This is demonstrably false.(1) Moreover, the Judge ruled ID hasn't "been the subject of testing and research," ignoring microbiologist Scott Minnich's testimony about his mutagenesis experiments indicating the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.

The Judge asserted, "ID requires supernatural creation," and therefore isn’t science. This misconstrues ID, for the textbook used in Dover agreed that "intelligence ... can be recognized by uniform sensory experience," but "the supernatural ... cannot." Thus "All [ID] implies is that life had an intelligent source."(2)

Finally, the ruling lambasted ID for having "failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community," ignoring the historical fact that every hypothesis begins as a minority view. A recent poll found that between 34% and 60% of U.S. physicians think intelligence played a role in the origin of humans.(3) How do we settle this scientific controversy? Not by judicial fiat!

Casey Luskin

(1) For one example, see Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 117(2) (August, 2004):213-239.

(2) Dean Kenyon & Percival Davis, Of Pandas and People (2nd ed., 1993), pg. 127, 161.

(3) See HCD Research / Finklestein Research Institute Poll available at http://www.hcdi.net/polls/J5776/.

A complete response to Mr. Annas's article was published here on Evolution News and Views in three parts:

Part I: New England Journal of Medicine Traipses Into the Kitzmiller Decision (Part I)

Part II: New England Journal of Medicine Traipses Into the Kitzmiller Decision (Part II)

Part III: New England Journal of Medicine Traipses Into the Kitzmiller Decision (Part III)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Seattle – According to a report issued by a liberal media resource, FAIR, the Discovery Institute has become one of the most sought after think-tanks in the country, with greater percentage growth in news notice than any other think tank. Discovery, founded in 1990, is a non-partisan public policy center specializing in issues surrounding transportation, technology, and the scientific theory of intelligent design.

The FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting ) study found that among the nation's top think tanks, Discovery attracted the "greatest increase in [media] exposure" in 2005, making it the 20th most cited think tank in news stories. By FAIR’s count, the Institute was cited over 400 times in the national news media throughout 2005, and the Institute’s scientists and scholars participated in153 print interviews, 81 nationally syndicated radio programs, 226 market radio programs and penned 68 OP-ED articles.

Overall the exposure of the top national think tanks fell by 10 percent in the news media from 2004 to 2005, yet exposure for Discovery Institute skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent over the same period.

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman pointed out that the liberal FAIR classified some think tanks –including Discovery Institute—as conservative, but did not classify any as liberal, but rather described them as either centrist, progressive or center-left.

“There’s a whole group of hard left think tanks FAIR left out of its study,” said Chapman. “They’re called universities. This is more than a joke since conservative think tanks were started, in many cases, as a response to the increasing stranglehold of the left on our universities.”

Many attribute the newfound acclaim of the Discovery Institute to its Center for Science and Culture and its scientists' work on the scientific theory of intelligent design. The New York Times reported in a 2005 front page story that “The Center is pushing a “teach the controversy” approach to evolution, transforming the argument from one between religion and science to one of academic freedom and discussion.”

According to Nature magazine, an international weekly journal of science, “Discovery Institute is the nation’s leading intelligent design think tank” And, Newsweek magazine said, “[Discovery Institute] has almost single-handedly put intelligent design on the map.”

ABC Nightline anchor, Ted Koppel, said in 2005 that Discovery, “has done an absolutely brilliant job of taking a difficult position and in effect infusing the mass culture with it about as effectively as anything I’ve seen in recent years.”

Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture has more than 40 affiliated biologists, biochemists, physicists, philosophers and historians of science, and public policy and legal experts, most of whom also have positions with colleges and universities. Over 500 scientists have signed the Institute’s Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement (www.dissentfromdarwin.com).

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Microbiologist Ralph Seelke of the University of Wisconsin, Superior, testified before the Michigan State Legislature in favor of critical analysis of evolution, last week. Dr. Seelke spoke before the Michigan House Education Committee in favor of HB 5251 which would require students to "Use the scientific method to critically evaluate scientific theories including, but not limited to, the theories of global warming and evolution." Seelke explained why critical analysis is vital to avoiding indoctrination:

"Why do I think that having students critically analyze evolution is a good idea? First of all, in any area where there is considerable disagreement, a sound teaching strategy is to teach the controversy: allow the students to examine both the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for both sides, and in so doing make up their own minds about the subject. There is a term used when we only want student to learn one side of a story. It is called indoctrination, not education."

Finally, Seelke emphasized the benefits of the bill, stating, "I urge your support for this bill. It is constitutional; it is solidly in the tradition of a liberal education; and it will produce a better informed citizenry, and more open-minded scientists." It would be great to see Michigan join the ranks of Kansas, New Mexico, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania as states that presently have science standards requiring critical analysis of evolution. A full transcript of Dr. Seelke's testimony is available at the link below:

Testimony of Ralph W. Seelke, Ph.D., before the Education Committee of the Michigan House of Representatives

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

According to the recent Associated Press story on South Carolina's new critical analysis of evolution standard, the South Carolina Department of Education does not think critical analysis means teaching alternative theories, like intelligent design (ID):

"Education Department spokesman Jim Foster says scientific inquiry is taught at every grade level and in every subject. Foster says the wording does not require students to study alternatives to evolution that are out of the mainstream."

(Education panel approves wording on biology standards)

We've been agreeing all along that critical analysis of evolution policies do not require teaching about alternative theories like ID! This just shows that the Darwinist claim that critical analysis = ID is just another tired conspiracy theory. So is the South Carolina Department of Education now in on the big conspiracy too?

Teaching students to critically analyze evolution is different from teaching them about ID for a number of reasons:

1) The Educational Approaches are Logically Distinct:

One can critique evolution without discussing "replacement theories" or alternative explanations such as intelligent design. For example, the Kansas Science Standards require students to learn about critiques of arguments for evolution from the fossil record, molecular data, and embryology, without any appeals to any alternative explanations. The standards also critique chemical origin of life scenarios without proposing any alternative hypothesis. ID is not based upon mere refutation of evolution: thus teaching ID requires some positive argument. Mere critical analysis of evolution does not logically lead to the conclusion of ID.

2) Explicit Statements of Intent to Not Require Teaching ID:
Many districts and states which have sanctioned critical analysis of evolution have also included in their policies explicit disclaimers to ensure that teachers, students, and the public understand that