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Left wing ideology, the pursuit of government grants and the stifling of scientific dissent work together to hobble progress, reduce freedom and raise costs. Slowly people are going to figure it out. Support the right to scientific dissent, therefore, or give another weapon to Leviathan.
Unintentional assistance comes our way today from The New York Times.
On its front page the Times reports that Darwin skeptics have decided on a new strategy — linking doubts about Darwinian evolution to doubts about man-caused global warming. The article by Leslie Kaufman makes the ludicrous assertion that there is some sort of plot hatched by conservative Protestants.
Continue reading "Connect the Dots Between Scientism and Government Spending: Add up the Human and Financial Costs" »
University of California evolutionary biologist John Avise has penned a book, Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design, and gotten it published by a top academic publishing house, Oxford University Press. Avise, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has for decades been a leading researcher in evolutionary and ecological genetics. He has written hundreds of research articles and over a dozen books. Clearly he has an impressive scientific mind.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that his new book shows all the intellectual savvy of a typical late-night college dormroom bull session. As his subtitle announces, Avise is anxious to show that, despite the claims of certain renegade biochemists, the molecular features of the human genome discovered by science in the recent past show no traces of intelligent design. They are chaotic, haphazard, a mess. Any designer with the smarts of at least, oh, say, John Avise, would have done a much better job.
Avise tries to steal three bases on a bunt. He claims that both [Darwinian] evolution and intelligent design can explain the functional parts of the genome, but only evolution can explain the dysfunctional parts (because a beneficent God would not have made those). So he points to what he deems to be poor design and, voila!, that proves the most intricate, functional molecular machines arose by random mutation and natural selection. No actual separate demonstration of that is thought necessary. In fact, Avise makes only the most cursory attempt to address the scientific argument for ID. His chapter 5 is in large part devoted to answering (after a fashion) my Darwin’s Black Box. Yet in the chapter Avise’s only attempt to explain one of my book’s examples of irreducible complexity is to cite Liu and Ochman’s (2007) dubious endeavor to tag all bacterial flagellar genes as descendants of one amazing prodigy gene. The rest of the chapter is pretty much hand waving.
Continue reading "A Malodorous Argument for Darwinian Evolution" »
The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology recently published several papers from a workshop sponsored by the International Society of Protistologists titled “Horizontal Gene Transfer and Phylogenetic Evolution Debunk Intelligent Design.” So here we have a respected scientific society, presumably planning a workshop months in advance, and finally laying out their considered case for why intelligent design fails. As you might imagine, I was most anxious to read about it. Unfortunately, rather than scholarly papers, the manuscripts read like press releases from the National Center for (Darwinian) Science Education. So the introductory essay1 by Avelina Espinosa tells us that ID has “creationist beginnings,” claims that I say “evolution” is “impossible,” and places in my mouth the phrase “design creationism” (I have never uttered that phrase except to disparage it). Blah, blah, blah. About as much scholarship as you’d get from a typical politician.
Continue reading "Misusing Protistan Examples to Propagate Myths About Intelligent Design" »
Intelligent design (ID) has attracted its fair share of critics. If it’s not the fulminations of New Atheists, it’s extremely uncharitable readings from some Catholic intellectuals who think they smell mechanism or interventionism. While the criticisms vary, they tend to have one thing in common: they’re based, not on actual ID arguments, but on stereotypes and misunderstandings of those arguments. It’s hard to find ID critics who actually describe an ID argument correctly before proceeding to refute it.
Catholic physicist Stephen Barr is a constitutionally uncharitable critic of ID. It’s not clear that he has even read the books that he criticizes. But he criticizes them nonetheless.
In a February 9 diatribe in First Things, he makes several complaints. For instance, he asserts, bizarrely, that ID claims that science is incompetent. He faults ID for effectively disagreeing with Bacon on the arbitrary rule that “science” can’t consider intelligence or purpose, implying that this somehow puts ID at odds with the Catholic tradition, even though science for St. Thomas and the Catholic tradition generally was never limited to a positivistic rendering of natural science. He faults ID for not using the same examples of design used by the author of the Book of Wisdom around 100 B.C. He claims, without evidence, that “very few religious skeptics have been made more open to religious belief because of ID arguments.” (How could he possibly know that?)
And he offers this stereotypical complaint, to which ID proponents have responded ad nauseam:
Continue reading "How to Completely Misunderstand Intelligent Design: A Response to Stephen Barr" »
Over at Scott McKnight's blog at Beliefnet, an anonymous blogger has started a review thread on Steve Meyer's book. Signature in the Cell. While the blogger ("RJS") says he ultimately disagrees with Meyer's argument, it's clear that he takes Meyer's argument seriously and is trying to do his best to present the argument accurately. This is much more than can be said for the many hysterical and misinformed "critiques" of Meyer's argument that are now floating around the Internet. Anyone who's actually read the book will know that most of these critiques are cliches that Meyer addresses in detail in the book, suggesting that the critics don't even know the argument they are criticizing.
A civil review like this is welcomed, and I look forward to reading the installments.
In his first installment, RJS suggests that there's a promising "third way" that Meyer doesn't address in the book:
Continue reading "Intelligent Design, Front-Loading, and Theistic Evolution" »
“Before going on,” said Frost, “I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to each other are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts.”
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1946)
The relevance of this passage from Lewis will be clear below. But first…
Continue reading "A Glimpse Into the Abyss" »
Occidental College professor Donald Prothero, who along with Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg on November 30, complains that folks at the Discovery Institute are now attacking him with “everything they have.” Prothero writes on the NCSE’s blog Panda’s Thumb, “Normally, it is not worth dignifying their garbage with a response,” but in this case he wants people “to get the straight facts.”
According to Prothero:
When evo-devo came up in Monday’s debate, Meyer and Sternberg began arguing with each other about reconstructions of a 12-winged dragonfly that I had published in my book. They tried to get a laugh by claiming that such a bug has never been found. As usual, they completely missed the point of that illustration, and failed to read any of the explanation or discussion in the caption or text. The text clearly points out that the 12-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods, with their modular body plan of adjustable numbers of segments and interchangeable appendages on each, to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes. This is the aspect of evo/devo that should answer structuralist Sternberg’s objections to Neo-Darwinism, if he only bothered to comprehend it, and solves much of the question over how macroevolutionary changes take place.
Unfortunately, it’s Prothero who needs “to get the straight facts.” First, the dragonfly in his book did not have 12 wings, but 18. Second, there is no evidence that “such a bug” ever existed, so it was not “reconstructed,” but invented.
Continue reading "How to Make Eighteen Equal Twelve" »
Need evidence for Darwinian evolution? Just make it up.
That’s the lesson of Donald Prothero’s book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero is a professor of geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. On November 30, he teamed up with atheist Michael Shermer (founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine) to debate Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg of the Discovery Institute.
Continue reading "Donald Prothero’s Imaginary Evidence for Evolution" »
I recently received an email asking if the correspondent correctly understood my views about intelligent design and God. Since I sometimes get similar questions, I’m posting this correspondence for anyone who is interested.
Q: I understand your current position to be that design is detectable in nature, and that design detection is not merely a theological gloss upon the scientific facts, but is actually an activity appropriate for science. I further understand you to be saying that design detection in itself is neutral regarding the way that the design found its way into nature. Thus, if the bacterial flagellum is designed, it *could* be that God took a regular bacterium and miraculously "tweaked" it, or it *could* be that God "front-loaded" the evolutionary development of the bacterial flagellum, in a manner similar to that suggested by, say, Michael Denton. Design detection as a science cannot rule on these things; all that it can show is that Darwinian mechanisms, all by themselves, could not have produced integrated structures such as the flagellum. If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning ("front-loading"), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today. Have I got your current position correct?
Me: Yes, that's exactly right.
Q: Then there is the question whether your views have changed over the years. Someone I know claims that in your early writings and early conference appearances, you said directly, or gave the strong impression, that some things (A, B, C ...) were brought about by wholly natural processes, whereas other things (X, Y, Z ...) were brought about by design (the implication being that "designed" in your early thought was opposed to "natural"). My acquaintance’s picture of Behean evolution would then be something like this: evolution in the early oceans chugs along on its own, via neo-Darwinian and other stochastic processes, as various sorts of marine worms and sponges and so on develop. But then, during the Cambrian Explosion, God takes a direct hand and literally reshapes marine worms into 30 or so new phyla, after which things go on by natural means again, until the next limit is reached, and God has to disrupt the normal flow of nature again (maybe to create land animals, or mammals, or birds, or man). Thus, there would be a jerky, stop-and-start sort of evolution, with chance/natural law causes alternating with fits of miracles. So, looking at any given creature, science would have to say things like: "Human lungs -- evolved by blind mechanisms from primitive air bladder; human camera eye -- required special intervention from intelligent designer; bacterial cell walls -- evolved by blind chemical mechanisms; bacterial flagellum -- was made by a bolt of divine lightning." Etc. Given this understanding of your views, one can see why my acquaintance or other TEs would characterize ID as "God of the gaps" reasoning. My question is: Was it *ever* your view that ID *required* such a jerky view of evolution, and more generally that it required miraculous intervention (breaking the causal nexus, violating the laws of nature)? Or was it always the case that your view *allowed for* jerky, stop-and-start evolution, and *allowed for* miraculous intervention, but did not *require* these things?
Continue reading "God, Design, and Contingency in Nature" »
There's a narrative that should be familiar to most of us by now: a man is considered the great hero of the faith, a sign of hope for every true believer as he advances its claims, but secretly he struggles with his doubts about what he's preaching.
This time, there's a twist to the old story: the faith the man espoused publicly was Darwin's theory, and the man was the brilliant Stephen Jay Gould.
In Suzan Mazur's fascinating new book, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry, Richard Milner describes Gould as "a popular articulator of Darwinian evolution to a new generation, while privately, his creative and rebellious mind sought to move beyond it." (emphasis added) A personal friend of Gould's, as well as his editor at Natural History magazine, Milner goes on to explain that "Gould took issue with those who used natural selection carelessly as a mantra, as in the evidence-free 'just-so stories' concocted out of thin air by mentally lazy adaptationists."
So here we have a picture of a man committed to his creed ("The universe is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be") who was nonetheless unhappy with the easy answers of reductionists such as Richard Dawkins.
Continue reading "Even Evolution's Priests May Doubt" »
Scientists sometimes find themselves wishing things were different. In one sense that’s a thoroughly unremarkable observation. After all, scientists are human, and humans have always found themselves wishing things were different.
But what if some of the things scientists wish were different are the very things they have devoted themselves to studying? In other words, forget about salaries, teaching loads, and grant funding. What if some scientists want the brute facts of their own field of study to be other than what they really are?
As odd as it may seem, particularly to non-scientists, that tension between preference and reality has always been a part of doing science. Like everyone else, scientists don’t just have ideas—they favor them… even promote them. And for scientists, as for everyone else, sometimes those cherished ideas are just plain wrong.
Continue reading "The Science of Denial" »
The first review of my book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, has appeared. Larry Arnhart, professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, author of Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, posted a perceptive review to his blogsite.
He provides a good summary of the book, and then offers the following remarks:
The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the ‘leadership principle,’ eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence. Proponents of Darwinian ethics--like myself--should be honest in recognizing the impressive evidence that Weikart marshalls from Hitler's writings and speeches to show how Hitler's thought and actions were driven by a coherent view of Darwinian ethics.
Continue reading "Richard Weikart Responds to Larry Arnhart’s Review of Hitler’s Ethic" »
Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that "we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s "Mangler of Theology" Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant.
Armstrong:
Continue reading "Dawkins vs. Armstrong" »
The world is awash with charities. Most are quite worthwhile. For pennies a day, you can send a child in an impoverished country to school, and kindle a lifetime of learning. But there remain many unmet needs.
What about people living in ideological poverty?
We’ve all heard the stories. Materialist philosophers of the mind who deny that the mind exists. Full professors of evolutionary biology who misunderstand demonstrations of the existence of God that are routinely mastered by teenagers in Introductory Philosophy courses. Atheist authors of letters to Christian nations who excoriate religion and ignore the unparalleled atrocities of atheism. Unrepentant Trotskyites who scold Christians for adherence to a messianic ideology.
Some of our fellow men live in intellectual squalor.
Continue reading "A Mind, Even if It’s Just a Couple of Pounds of Meat, Is a Terrible Thing to Waste" »
How many intellectuals and media conveyers will defend free speech and the importance of an unfettered debate of ideas? Fewer and fewer. We are witnessing in America a kind of academic French Revolution, where leading opinion is fratricidal, enraged, fanatical — and then overthrown to make room for a newer fanaticism.
Continue reading " "Bloggingheads" Faces the Guillotine" »
Sean Carroll is one of those open-minded science types who are always generously offering the rest of us lectures on the importance of intellectual freedom and open inquiry--at least when the subject of discussion is buried in the annals of history. When it comes to people debating issues today, however, there are other things which must be taken into consideration.
Like whether Carroll agrees with them.
He is particularly upset about Bloggingheads.tv running a dialogue between John McWhorter and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe, a professional scientist. "Unfortunately," he says, "I won’t be appearing on Bloggingheads.tv any more."
So there.
Bloggingheads.tv is a site that bills itself as "a place where great minds don't think alike," a slogan that sounds suspiciously like a description of a place where great minds don't actually think alike. Carroll's problem with the site is that it included a dialogue with someone he doesn't think like--namely, Michael Behe--and he doesn't think this is something that a site designed for discussion between people who don't agree should do.
Continue reading "One Flew Over the Darwinists' Nest" »
I’ve just been through the weirdest book-related experience I’ve had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title “Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV” from a senior editor at that site:
Hi, Michael–
I’d like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site.
Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, David Frum, Richard Wrangham, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Michael Kinsley.
Here is one of our recent shows, a dialogue between Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, and Ron Numbers, of Wisconsin-Madison:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21107
I’m hoping that you might be interested in participating, as well. First-time participants often report how refreshingly unconstrained they find the format—how it lets them present their views with a depth and subtlety not possible on TV or radio. We’d love to have you join us.
If you’re available, please let me know, and we can see about arranging a taping. Thank you for your time.
He seemed like such a nice fellow, so after a couple days I emailed him back to say, sure, I’d be glad to. The editor responded, okay, sometime next week, your discussion partner will be John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute. I had never heard of McWhorter before, so googled his name, and saw that he’s a linguist who often writes on race matters. I didn’t know what to expect because I know some conservatives (which he seemed to be from his bio) don’t like ID one bit.
Everything was arranged for the taping Tuesday afternoon. When the interview started, I was surprised and delighted to learn that McWhorter was actually a fan of mine. He said (I’m paraphrasing here) he loved The Edge of Evolution and wanted the book to become better known. He said that this was one of the few times that he initiated an interview at Bloggingheads. He said he was familiar with criticisms of the book and found them unpersuasive. He said that Darwinism just didn’t seem to him to be able to cut the mustard in explaining life, and he had yet to read a good, detailed explanation for a large evolutionary change. He also said that he had never believed in God, but that EOE got him thinking. In return I summarized my arguments from EOE, talked about protein structure, addressed his objections that intelligent design is “boring” and a scientific dead-end, and so on. At the end of the taping I thought, gee, those folks at Bloggingheads TV are a real nice bunch.
Continue reading "Bloggingheads TV and Me" »
Much of the debate about evolution turns on language, and there is much misrepresentation, mostly on one side of the debate. Darwinists assert that "evolution is a fact," when what they really mean is that "Darwinism is a fact," but they don't want to assert that explicitly. They misrepresent their narrow theory of evolutionary change as synonymous with evolutionary change understood more broadly. They do so for several reasons, including the unfavorable connotations of Darwinism and the paucity of evidence and logic to support Darwin's radical assertion.
Continue reading "Ontology Recapitulates Philology" »
Last December, I wrote a post about a book titled Life on Other Planets, aimed at junior-high-aged kids. I found it at a local library. The book promoted materialist science fiction about the origin of life on earth.
More recently, the Seattle Public Library system had its annual booksale, and I loaded up. One now-former library book I bought was Journey from the Dawn: Life with the World’s First Family, by Donald Johansen and Kevin O’Farrell (Villard, 1990). I liked this book far better than Life on Other Planets, but instead of promoting materialist science fiction to kids on the origin of life, this one promoted science fiction to kids regarding paleoanthropology and the origin of humans.
Continue reading "Materialist Science Fiction on Human Evolution Promoted to Kids at Local Public Libraries" »
Before you head to the beach this summer, don't forget to grab a few good books. Over at ID the Future, I've attempted to aid you by interviewing a number of authors with new books out this month. You can listen to these authors discuss their books and judge for yourself what is most interesting:
First, I interviewed J. Budziszewski on his latest book on natural law theory, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction.
Second, see my interview with Benjamin Wiker on his new biography The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.
Third, check out this interview with John Mark Reynolds on his new introduction to classical and Christian thought, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought.
(Cue music.) Or, rather, a lemur. Almost every TV channel it seems ran a commercial announcing a documentary about the fossil find of the century, The Link, which will be encored on the History Channel tonight. “Ida,” as the female holotype of Darwinius masillae has been playfully dubbed, is the prehistoric prosimian that is the focus of attention. The story of her discovery is the stuff of every good science-fiction B-movie from the 1950s : A “secret study” conducted by an “international team of scientists,” has led to earth-shattering results that can only now be revealed to the world. Think Creature from the Black Lagoon (because of the fossil find) meets When Worlds Collide (because of the impact that will be felt on your everyday life) and you’ll be close to the stated importance of the program. All that’s missing are some Tesla coils, a hidden lair in a dead volcano, the fallout from an atomic explosion, and a UFO landing on the National Mall. Presumably such extra features, along with more specifics about the significance of her all too brief life — “a child when she died, but she’ll change history forever” — can be gathered from the just-released book, The Link.
It’s just a jump to the left…
Of the cladogram, I mean. There is one clade of primates called the Strepsirrhini (“wet noses”) that includes the lemurs, the dwarf and mouse-lemurs, the Aye-aye, the lorisids, and the galagos. Ida falls within this suborder according to one hypothesis.
With your hands on your hips…
You will kindly note the other clade of primates termed the Haplorrhini, the sister group of the strepsirrhines. This taxon of the “dry noses” contains the apes, monkeys, and tarsiers. An alternative phylogenetic hypothesis would place Darwinius at the base of this assemblage.
All the brouhaha thus boils down to whether Ida had a wet nose or a dry nose that — given her status as a transitional form — was occasionally runny. The theme of The Link is that the latter is a sure bet. For myself, regarding these two alternative evolutionary scenarios, I say…Let’s do the Time Warp again…
Continue reading ""The Link," or Science Fiction Double Feature: Dr. X Builds a Creature…" »
In a recent blog post titled "Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down," University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne firmly and publicly rejects the attempts by Darwin-lobbying organizations like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to convince the American public that Darwinism and Christian faith are compatible. In case these organizations really want to know my opinion, I'm on Jerry's side.
Except that I'm only mostly on his side. You see Jerry is spot on when he writes
But any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates precisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the appearance of design by a purely materialistic process — no deity required. In a letter to his mentor Charles Lyell, Darwin explicitly decried the idea of divine intervention in evolution:
I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement’, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
But his other over-generalizations about Science and Religion being incompatible are, of course, extremely over-simplified. If only Science (capital S) and Religion (capital R) actually existed as such abstractions, Jerry would have the beginnings of an argument.
In all this, I am left ambivalent. On one hand, Coyne seems to refuse to mislead the public simply to advance a cause that he cares about. And this is a rather virtuous thing. On the other hand, one gets the sense Coyne doesn't want to mislead the public not so much because he loves science but because he wants to see materialism thrive in America. And this keeps people like me from getting too excited about the virtuous stance of Dr. Coyne.
Timothy Sandefur is an atheist legal commentator who believes that it is unconstitutional to teach the weaknesses, along with the strengths, of evolutionary theory in schools. His reason: he believes that evolutionary theory has no weaknesses:
...to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan—and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract—or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true...[t]he Establishment Clause forbids the government from declaring any religious viewpoint to be true. [emphasis mine]
Sandefur is particularly upset by the participation of Christians in the public square. His view of the Establishment clause is, even by his own admission, “extreme”:
I believe tax exemptions for churches are unconstitutional violations of the Establishment Clause—a well-respected position in First Amendment law, although not one the Supreme Court has endorsed. I believe “In God We Trust” on the currency is an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause—a position shared by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and many respected First Amendment scholars, and one the Supreme Court chickened out of addressing. Presidents invoking God in speeches is troubling from a First Amendment perspective, but it’s widely understood that they’re speaking only of their own religious views, something a President, like any other citizen, has a right to do. I believe military chaplains are also a violation of the First Amendment—an extreme position, but one I’m proud to say James Madison himself, author of the First Amendment, also held. And if it were true that “atheist ideology” were being taught in government schools, that too would be unconstitutional. It happens not to be true.[Emphasis mine]
Mr. Sandefur’s assertion that “military chaplains are also a violation of the First Amendment” is noteworthy. He presumably would allow our soldiers in Fallujah to pay their chaplains with bake sales, on their own time.
Mr. Sandefur is an atheist fundamentalist. He advocates the expulsion of Christianity from the public square, and he demands judicially enforced censorship of scrutiny of Darwinism in public schools. There is a totalitarian streak in atheism.
Continue reading "Censorship in Freespace" »
Atheist constitutional commentator and attorney Timothy Sandefur and I have exchanged blog ripostes about his bizarre assertion that teaching public school students that the theory of evolution has weaknesses as well as strengths is a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Mr. Sandefur asserted:
…to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan—and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract—or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true...To teach a religious viewpoint—such as that God created life—in government classrooms, taught by government employees, is to put the government’s imprimatur on that religious viewpoint and in violation of the Establishment Clause.
Mr. Sandefur believes that the weaknesses of evolutionary theory are non-existent, and to teach the weaknesses (as well as the strengths) of evolutionary theory is to teach a religious viewpoint.
!
I replied that evolutionary theory obviously has weaknesses, as all scientific theories do, and that is not a religious viewpoint. It's a scientific viewpoint. All theories in science have strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses of scientific theories are the basis for scientific research. The weaknesses of evolutionary theory are the basis for evolutionary research. It's just as constitutional to use public funds to teach students about those scientific weaknesses as it is to use public funds to conduct scientific research on those scientific weaknesses. It’s just good science.
Continue reading "Why Is Censorship of Scrutiny so Much a Part of Evolutionary Science?" »
Timothy Sandefur, a Panda’s Thumb contributor and an atheist, is a leader in the Darwinist crusade to censor balanced discussion of evolutionary theory in science classrooms. Mr Sandefur responded to my open letter to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Darwinist organization that lobbies for censorship of discussion of the weaknesses of evolution in public schools and has boycotted the citizens of Louisiana because they recently passed legislation protecting academic freedom in public schools.
Mr. Sandefur begins his post with a sneer: With the possible exception of Casey Luskin, no Discovery Institute fellow seems more eager to embarrass himself in public than Michael Egnor… I always strive to be more embarrassing than Casey, but now it seems I’ll have to try harder. Here goes.
Mr. Sandefur asserts: The problem with creationism is precisely that creationists like Dr. Egnor want their religion to be taught in government classrooms. Mr. Sandefur misrepresents my views, which I have explained at length on this blog for several years and will now explain again.
This is my viewpoint on evolution:
I am a Christian and I believe that God created man and the universe. The Bible isn’t a science textbook, although it does offer insight into truth about the natural world. Reason, one form of which is science, can lead us to important truths about nature. I believe that faith and reason cannot ultimately be in conflict, because God is the source of both.
I believe that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Universal common ancestry is a reasonable inference from the evidence, and life evolved over several billion years. Some aspects of life arose by random variation and natural selection, and some aspects of life (e.g. the genetic code, molecular nanotechnology) show evidence for design by intelligent agency.
Continue reading "My Reply to Timothy Sandefur: The teaching of only the strengths of Darwinism in public schools is inherently the propagation of atheist belief." »
P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.
Myers replies:
Continue reading "P.Z. Myers: Americans Who Fund Scientific Research Are an "Ignorant Mob"" »
In his essay for Forbes.com, Jerry Coyne takes me to task for my dissent from Darwinism. According to Coyne, “The tenets of evolutionary theory are simple: Life evolved, largely under the influence of natural selection; this evolution took a rather long time; and species alive and dead can be organized on the basis of shared similarities into a tree whose branching pattern implies that every pair of living species has a common ancestor. Among genuine scientists, there is not the slightest doubt about the truth of these ideas.”
Coyne writes that I am “decades out of date” and show “no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century.” Indeed, “there is so much evidence" for Darwinism that “one would have to be either willfully ignorant or blinded by faith” to doubt it.
Am I really “decades out of date” and “either willfully ignorant or blinded by faith”?
As evidence for Darwinism, Coyne cites the fossil record. But the fossil record lacks the innumerable transitional forms predicted by Darwin’s theory. And shared similarities among species have not produced a consistent branching tree pattern. Evolutionary trees based on anatomical features conflict with trees based on molecular evidence, and trees based on one molecule conflict with trees based on other molecules. The recent scientific literature is full of such examples.
Coyne cites the existence of “dead genes” as evidence for Darwin’s unguided process and evidence against intelligent design. But data from the genome projects show that most—perhaps all—of what was previously thought to be “junk DNA” is in fact functional. Following Coyne’s logic, the recent scientific literature actually provides evidence against Darwinism and for intelligent design.
Continue reading "My Reply to Jerry Coyne: Why Darwinism is False" »
Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article "Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail," quotes the National Academy of Sciences on the reconciliation of religion and science. The NAS statement is worth a post on its own.
Dr. Coyne notes:
The National Academy of Sciences, America's most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:
“Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.”
Science and religion don’t address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth. There are no separate magesteria, despite Stephen J. Gould’s spin. If God made the world, then intelligent design is true, assuming that the artifacts of His designing intelligence can be recognized as such. If there is no God, and the world just came to be, then Darwinism is true, because ID and Darwinism are just the affirmative and the negative answer to the same question: is there evidence for design in biology?
This is clear: metaphysical truth determines scientific truth. If there is a designer (metaphysical truth), then intelligent design is true (scientific truth). If there is no designer (metaphysical truth), then Darwinism is true (scientific truth).
Continue reading "Reviewing Jerry Coyne, Part 3: The National Academy of Sciences Statement on Religion and Science." »
Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail”, asks if religion and science can be reconciled. He notes:
…[T]here are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.
Dr. Coyne' s description of the beliefs of many Christians of the literal truth of the Bible as "the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities" is a perplexing slur. I disagree with young-earth creationists on the time-frame of history and biology, but I don't believe that their beliefs are "primitive." They understand Christianity differently than I do, but on the really important question — 'is there teleology in biology and in the natural world' — they are exactly right, in my view. I reserve the appellation "primitive" for the utterly unsubstantiated Darwinist belief that human beings arose literally from mud by a random process of 'survival of survivors.' Unlike Darwinists, young-earth creationists get the important part — the obvious evidence for design in life — right.
That aside, Dr. Coyne’s sloppy use of the terms ‘religion’ ‘faith,’ ‘science,’ and ‘revelation’ muddle the real issues.
Continue reading "Reviewing Jerry Coyne, Part 2: Faith and Science." »
I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science. Any critique of materialist dogma in science from a design or immaterial perspective is derided as a 'God of the Gaps' argument. But the real issue is the gaps, which are plentiful and very wide.
Dr. Novella is fond of the God of the Gaps sneer, in the form of "Dualism of the Gaps." I have not met a materialist as supremely confident of the complete explanatory power of materialism as he is. It’s ironic, as Dr. Novella claims the appellation “skeptic,” yet he shows no skepticism for his own materialist dogma. Profound skepticism for the views of opponents, combined with complacent credulity for one’s own views, is the stuff of ideological advocacy, not skepticism.
Dr. Novella responded recently to my post in which I clarified my views on the mind-brain problem. He accuses me of using a ‘Dualism of the Gaps’ argument. I’ve merely pointed out that the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically. Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.
Continue reading "Materialism of the Gaps" »
Atheist/materialist ‘Skeptico’ (why are these guys/ladies so afraid to have their names associated with their ideas?) has announced the “Golden Woo” awards, which he-she has decided to bestow on people who have expressed views incompatible with Skeptico’s personal ideology. Skeptico explains:
I decided I would start some of my own – The Golden Woo Awards for outstanding work in the promotion of Woo in the previous year. It’s a bit like the Golden Globes, only for, er, Woo.
What is “Woo”? Skeptico explains:
Now, some of you might notice that the award titles look similar to Randi’s Pigasus Awards, with just the words “paranormal,” “occult” etc. replaced with Woo, and might think I’ve just run out of ideas for posts and purloined Randi’s idea as my own. (Cough.) Clearly that isn’t true as I have at least one extra category that Randi doesn’t have. However, if you were to view this post as my Golden Globes in advance of Randi’s Oscars... then you could. Perhaps the great man might even read this and get some ideas for April 1st?...OK so here goes – the Golden Woos for 2008. I hope you’ll find them entertaining.
Skeptico, who emulates atheist/materialist magician “The Amazing Randi,” has decided to give out awards to other people that he believes are devoted to silly ideas. And the first Golden Woo Award recipient is…your humble neurosurgeon and atheism/materialism ‘denialist’:
The scientist or academic who said or did the silliest thing related to Woo…Michael Egnor for his tireless support of Intelligent Design Creationism, and especially his many recent assaults on materialism.
Skeptico, who believes that all life, including the genetic code and intricate nanotechnology inside living cells, arose from primeval mud by a process of chance and tautology (random heritable variation and natural selection), is certainly well-situated to recognize Woo. So what exactly is it about my scientific and philosophical views that Skeptico finds so…Wooful?
Continue reading "I Win a “Golden Woo Award” -- But Where’s My Stipend, Because I’d Like to Send a Gift…" »
In previous posts in this brief series, we’ve been looking at the relationship between Marx and Darwin, who developed parallel theories of historical or natural law. In a religious context, law is perceived as static and eternal: God’s law, higher than any man, worthy of judging kings and tyrants by its light. Marxism and Darwinism, as materialist philosophies, believe they have succeeded in obviating the need for God, or metaphysics generally. For them, there is no such thing as a static, eternal moral law.
Thus in the Descent of Man, Darwin describes the process by which morals evolve, just like animal bodies. He finds nothing absolute or God-given even in a seemingly fundamental moral instinct like that against incest: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.” The place of God is taken, instead, by a law of movement. History is a tide that moves the development of nature or society along with it according to an impersonal, unguided, yet scientifically describable law. Evolution and revolution are really the same dynamic, looked at respectively from a natural and a social perspective. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote of Darwin and Marx, “If one considers, not the actual achievement, but the basic philosophies of both men, it turns out that ultimately the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same.”
Continue reading "Darwinism & Communism, Part III" »
In 1891 in Gori, Georgia, a 13-year-old choirboy with dreams of becoming a priest, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was discovered by his mother at dawn, having stayed awake through the night reading Darwin’s Origin of Species.
“I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading,” he explained. He later told a friend that God “doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived.”
“How can you say such a thing?” the friend exclaimed, to which the boy, the future Joseph Stalin, replied by handing him a copy of Darwin.
In this little series, we are asking, among other things, what came from Stalin’s precocious appreciation of evolutionary theory? Hitler and Stalin alike sought to create a new race of supermen. Where did they both happen to get this idea? From Darwinian theory, in the broad sense, of course.
Continue reading "Darwinism & Communism, Part II" »
Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one?
Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view. He’s been having a good run with his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — that is, apart from being taken to task by a number of reviewers for applying a Darwinian framework to understanding market forces. In the current New York Review of Books, economist Robert Skidelsky chides Ferguson for purveying “false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection....These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naïve.”
Ferguson describes the “creative destruction” that comes about when financial institutions can’t cut it in the marketplace and so fail and disappear, to be replaced with better adapted competitors. Darwinian capitalism?
Continue reading "Darwinism & Communism, Part I" »
Darwinist and University of Toronto biochemistry professor, Larry Moran, who has called publicly for the expulsion of Christian college students who, despite passing all exams, don’t personally believe in atheism and materialism, has commented on my recent post on qualia in the mind-body problem. I had used a famous traditional philosophical argument on the mind-body problem called the ‘knowledge argument.’ The knowledge argument, first articulated explicitly by Frank Jackson in his ‘Mary’s Room’ thought problem in 1982, highlights the hard problem of consciousness, which is the problem of subjectivity. Why is it that we have subjective first-person experience, whereas all that we know about the brain is objective third person knowledge? The knowledge argument points out that there are things about mental states — subjective experience called ‘qualia’ — that are knowledge that is not material. The denouement of the knowledge argument is that materialist monism is an incomplete description of the mind because it is inadequate to explain subjective experience. Some sort of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the mind.
The knowledge argument is a profound problem for strict materialism, and materialist philosophers of the mind such as Daniel Dennett have devoted considerable effort to refuting it. The primary materialist recourse has been to deny the reality of subjective mental states. Most philosophers — and most other people — find such denial hard to take seriously.
I formulated a question for Dr. Steven Novella, who is a materialist with a dogmatic approach to the mind-body problem, that is based on the knowledge argument. My question is this:
Continue reading "Dr. Larry Moran Flunks Philosophy" »
 Dr. Novella, the dogmatic neurologist from Yale who can’t fathom why his materialist ideology isn’t accepted as truth by all, concludes his latest mind-brain problem post (after calling me intellectually dishonest, a creationist, etc.) with this rhetorical flourish:
Dr. Egnor’s three pillars of neuroscience denial - dualism of the gaps; denying the inferences from brain-mind correlation; and confusing the question of how the brain causes mind with the question of does the brain cause mind - have all been shattered.
My ‘"three pillars of neuroscience denial have been shattered"?
!
Well, it’s time for me to unshatter them.
Continue reading "It’s Time for Me to Unshatter My "Three Pillars of Neuroscience Denial"…" »
In a recent post, I pointed out the obvious — that traditional allopathic medical practice is capable of causing considerable harm to patients, and I appealed to some of the particularly nasty critics of alternative medicine to back off with the venom directed against practitioners and ordinary people who have experienced benefit from alternative medicine or who are concerned about the risks associated with vaccinations. We doctors have our hands full protecting patients from our own mistakes, without spending our time excoriating accupuncturists. A little perspective is in order.
So why are these particular bloggers so obsessed with hatred for people who question medical or scientific orthodoxy? Most of these arrogant critics are atheist/materialist physicians, and their anger is fueled by the refusal of the public and many other scientists and physicians to accede to their orthodoxy. Their issue is ideological, not medical or scientific. Scientism is a materialist religion — a metaphysical stance — and its priests don’t suffer questions lightly.
My view on the debate between allopathic medicine and alternative medicine is straightforward: follow the evidence wherever it leads, and do so with professionalism and respect. It is based on the evidence that I doubt the efficacy of many of the claims made by proponents of alternative medicine, and it's based on the evidence that I support intelligent design theory and the viewpoint that the mind is not merely the brain. In that sense, I’m very much a denialist. I deny many of the claims of proponents of alternative medicine, I deny some of the claims made by proponents of allopathic medicine, and I deny Darwinism as an adequate explanation for life and I deny materialism as adequate for the mind. I'm interested in evidence, not doctrinal purity or ideological bullying.
For my temerity, I got ‘smackdowned.’ One PalMD from ‘Denialism blog’ thumped his anonymous chest:
Continue reading "What is PalMD Ashamed Of?" »
Dr. Steven Novela believes that the brain (matter) entirely explains the mind. I challenge him to answer the question raised by this thought problem:
Imagine a tutor who specializes in teaching children about color. He’s a materialist, named…Steve. He knows all that is known about color. He knows the physics, the optics, the chemistry, the neurobiology, everything. A family retains him to teach their child, a prodigy, all that can be known about color.
Continue reading "My Challenge to Dr. Novella: The Materialist Color Tutor’s Dilemma." »
Steven Novella has a recent post on SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Like many of us, Dr. Novella is fascinated by the prospect of finding evidence for intelligent alien life in outer space. Dr. Novella:
I am a strong supporter of SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To me this is a fascinating scientific endeavor with a potentially huge payoff...
Dr. Novella defends SETI against the claims by some that it is not real science:
Continue reading "SICI: The Search for Intracellular Intelligence" »
There is an internet cottage industry of physicians and scientists who regularly excoriate alternative medicine and other non-traditional or even fringe approaches to health or to scientific understanding. Steven Novella, Orac, and a host of other faux "defenders of science" decry the danger to the public from vaccine "denial," homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, among others. Now, I agree with my medical colleagues that the scientific basis for most of these practices or viewpoints is missing or minimal. I don’t believe that the scientific evidence supports the view that vaccines cause autism. I am not a supporter of "alternative medicine," and I objected when an effort was made some years ago to expand alternative medicine here at Stony Brook. Alternative medicine, like traditional medicine, must be subjected to strict standards of evidence for safety and efficacy. Most types of alternative medicine fail to meet those standards, and therefore should not be endorsed by the medical profession.
Yet there is an irony in the efforts of "defenders of science" to protect the public from treatments and theories that are outside of the mainstream of medical practice. The greatest iatrogenic danger to patients isn’t chiropractors or homeopaths or vaccine "deniers." It’s the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel working in the traditional medical paradigm.
Continue reading "Advice to an Arrogant Medical Priesthood: Wash Your Hands" »
Dr. Steven Novella has post entitled “More Neuroscience Denial,” and of course it’s about me.
Dr. Michael Egnor has written two more posts reiterating his neuroscience denial over at the Discovery institute. This reinforces the impression that neuroscience denial is the “new creationism” - the new battleground against materialism as a basis for modern science.
Continue reading "My “Neuroscience Denial”?" »
Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer.
He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph:
…I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic discourse, but I would like to see a public retraction and apology appear on your site. [emphasis mine]
I'm the "someone" he's referring to. I have of course corrected the error, and have set out to review Mr. Dunford’s “basic standards of academic discourse.”
Here are examples of Mr. Dunford’s own “standards of academic discourse,” culled from his blog posts from the last couple of years. Keep in mind that Mr. Dunford is a trained scientist:
From Mr. Dunford’s post on 12/9/08:
Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit…based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he's not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor. ….I'm simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying…I don't know if Dr. Egnor's dishonesty is substantial enough that I would have gotten him expelled from school, but I do know that any student I caught pulling a stunt like that would flunk.
Continue reading "Darwinist Mike Dunford’s “Standards of Academic Discourse”" »
When I was a resident in neurosurgery I had a professor who had the annoying habit of claiming credit for quite a few advances in neurosurgery to which, by the record, he had made no contribution. He would frequently confide to me, in the operating room, "Mike, ya know that operation that we just did. I really developed it, back in the 50’s." Invariably, the actual record of the development of the operation had nothing to do with my narcissistic professor.
Claiming credit for advances that to the uninitiated seems credible is common in medicine and science. Darwinists have an annoying habit of attributing all sorts of advances in medicine and biology to Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have asserted that genetics, molecular genetics, taxonomy, microbiology, population genetics, and many other fields of medicine and biology would have been impossible had it not been for Darwin’s insight (‘survivors survive’). Even a cursory look at many of these fields (e.g. molecular genetics) reveals that Darwinism obviously had nothing to do them; the elucidation of the structure and function of DNA didn’t have a damn thing to do with ‘natural selection’ (except that Watson and Crick practiced ‘survival of the fittest’ in their competition with Linus Pauling and their treatment of Rosalind Franklin). The discovery of the genetic code had everything to do with biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology. Nineteenth century fairy tales about the origin of species may have provided some comic relief. It had nothing to do with the science.
In a recent post I observed that Darwinism, while essential to eugenics, contributes nothing of value to medicine.
Darwinist blogger Elf M. Sternberg took the bait. Elf started with the usual sneers, calling me a "creationist," accusing me of of "rejecting the germ theory of disease" and of attributing disease to "demonic influences," and then he points out my "absolutely insane 'graf'"from my essay:
I had written:
Fairy tales about the origin of illnesses and adaptations are worthless to medicine. The materialistic philosophical basis for Darwinism and the inference that humans evolved by natural selection have been catastrophic to medicine. Any genuine insight claimed by Darwinists, such as the dynamics of antibiotic resistance or of heterozygote advantage in such diseases as sickle cell anemia and malaria, is really gained by the relevant basic sciences.
Elf sees my fatal stumble. He replies:
Continue reading "Elf Meets Aristotle" »
Steven Novella recently replied to my post in which I pointed out six properties of the mind that were not properties of matter. Strict materialistic theories of the mind restrict themselves to purely materialistic explanations. The difficulty is that the salient properties of the mind — intentionality, qualia, continuity of self through time, restricted access of thoughts, incorrigibility of mental states, and free will — are not known to be properties of matter, including brain matter. The important things that characterize the mind are not material. How then can the mind be explained completely by materialism?
I’ll review the first property (intentionality) here, and the other five in subsequent posts. I’ll first give my original observation about it, then Dr. Novella’s reply, then my reply to Dr. Novella.
My original observation:
Intentionality is the “aboutness” or meaning of a mental state, the ability of a mental state to refer to something outside of itself. Ink on paper has no meaning unless it is conferred by a mind, which wrote it or read it. Matter may have intentionality only secondarily (”derived intentionality”). The problem of intentionality is believed by many philosophers of the mind to be the most serious challenge to materialism. “Meaning” is imparted to matter by a mind; matter isn’t the source of meaning. Therefore matter (brain tissue) can’t be the entire cause of the mind.
Dr. Novella’s reply:
Continue reading "My Reply to Dr. Novella’s Critique of Intentionality as a Property of the Mind" »
In his recent post on Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the "breakthrough" in our understanding of human evolution that has emerged from an analysis of the genes in humans and apes that code for salivary amylase, an enzyme in spit that helps digest carbohydrates. For unfathomable reasons, this research, led by Nathaniel Dominy and George Perry, has captured quite a bit of attention in the scientific community and even in the press.
Concurrent with publication of their paper in Nature Genetics last year, Dominy and colleagues put out a press release entitled: “Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans' mouths water.” Dominy bizarrely credits mutations in salivary amylase with the evolution of the human brain:
Continue reading "Oh…No…No…No…This Is Important Spit!" »
Dr. Steven Novella has taken exception to my recent post suggesting that the materialist theory of the mind has characteristics of a superstition. In the recent past, the Yale neurologist has been so confident of the truth of his materialistic ideology on the mind-brain problem that he has asserted that
“The materialist hypothesis- that the brain causes consciousness- has made a number of predictions, and every single prediction has been validated.”
Leaving aside the hubris (has any reputable scientist ever claimed that ‘every single prediction’ of his pet theory has been validated?), one of Dr. Novella’s implicit predictions seems to have frustratingly failed to materialize. In his latest post, Dr Novella seems to have been certain that, following his pronouncement on the resolution of the mind-brain problem, everyone would defer to his decision:
[Egnor] fails to recognize that this battle has already been fought and lost within the scientific arena…[a]s our knowledge of brain function increases, it is squeezing out any role for a non-material ghost in the machine. A non-material cause of mind is…unnecessary…
Continue reading "If Neuroscience Is a Victory for Materialism, What Would Defeat Look Like?" »
Recently I used the analogy of a genetic disease (spinal bifida) that kept afflicted men out of the army in WWI to point out the vacuousness of "evolutionary" explanations for disease. The "evolutionary adaptation" provided by the handicap may have led to a transient increased prevalence of men with spina bifida in England, but from the standpoint of medicine, the evolutionary vignette was of no tangible value. Medicine needs more than stories about differential survival, which is the only unique thing that evolutionary biology offers to medicine. The genuine accomplishments of medical science and practice, for which Darwinists persistently claim credit, such as the understanding of bacterial antibiotic resistance or heterozygote advantage in the protection from disease (such as the protection from malaria conferred on people with sickle cell trait), have come about because of superb work by medical scientists in molecular biology, microbiology, genetics, and epidemiology. They didn’t place phone calls to their colleagues in evolutionary biology to do their work. Darwinian fairy tales, such as "X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage," added nothing to the important research already going on in medicine.
Darwinists were not pleased with my observations, and Mike Dunford seems to have drawn the "respond to Egnor" short straw. He responded first with the requisite personal sneers:
Continue reading "Mike Dunford: "Alleles That Survive, Survive"" »
I recently pointed out that Darwinian stories about the evolution of diseases were of no tangible use to medical science. Few physicians and medical scientists and educators with genuine experience with medical education, research, and practice, and who are not ideologically committed to the materialist-atheist metaphysics for which Darwinism is the creation myth, honestly believe that evolutionary biology is important to medicine. There are many important disciplines in medicine today, such as microbiology, epidemiology, molecular and population genetics, and mathematical biology, that deal with the real science for which evolutionary biologists routinely claim credit, and these genuine medical disciplines, unlike evolutionary biology, are very important to medicine. We've done very well for more than half a century without Darwinian medicine. The recent drive to introduce Darwinian Medicine 2.0 into medical education was initiated by Darwinists. They weren't invited.
Continue reading "Darwinian Medicine 2.0" »
Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote:
Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight…Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft. (1)
Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay and book review on the Weekly Standard Online entitled, “Biomorality: The uses and abuses of science in political life.” Lenzer opens:
Continue reading "Biomorality, Scientism, and "the Meddlesome Interference of an Arrogant Scientific Priestcraft"" »
David Chalmers has a thoughtful blog post about the growing importance of the problem of consciousness in the debate over intelligent design. Chalmers, a leading philosopher of the mind, is a particularly clear and honest thinker, and his elaboration of "the hard problem of consciousness" alone warrants much gratitude from those of us who are trying to formulate a vocabulary for the thoughtful discussion of the problem of consciousness.
Chalmers is not a theist, but he believes that consciousness is a fundamental property in the universe, in the same way that matter and natural laws are properties in the universe. In that sense, he is a dualist. He does not, however, believe that the necessity for an immaterial explanation for the mind poses a problem for Darwinism:
The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism. In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length… [b]ut it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.
Chalmers explains:
Continue reading "Consciousness and Intelligent Design" »
All natural functional biological complexity arose through the mechanism of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection.
That's the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, in a nut-shell, and it's the cornerstone of biology.
The Neo-Darwinian synthesis may be divided into two professions, so to speak, the union of which constitutes the orthodoxy. Jacques Monod called them "chance" and "necessity," and it's a useful shorthand.
Monod's "chance" means absence of design. Chance means random in the sense of lacking teleology. There is no purpose in the raw material of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that doesn't mean that the "random heritable variation" generator doesn't obey natural laws. It does, like everything else, but it has no foresight. It’s random like flipping a coin is random. The coin obeys all the laws of physics, yet the outcome of the flip is random, in the sense that there's no design to the result. If there is design, then the flip is dishonest, and not random at all.
Of course, most biological events that happened are invisible in the mists of deep time. Randomness is difficult to ascertain in modern casinos, and randomness is damned difficult to ascertain in the Precambrian. This not to say that we can't draw reasonable inferences from the available evidence, but drawing self-evident inferences from helical blueprints and purposeful arrangements of parts "isn't science," so the Neo-Darwinian inference to chance is confessional, not empirical.
Monod's "necessity" means survival; more rigorously, it means relative reproductive advantage. Natural selection. Whatever got here won the "relative reproductive advantage" death match. That's what "survived" means. It got here.
So here's the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, colloquially:
Continue reading "Bayesian Selection. Trouble Brews." »
Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction.
Where Does Your Information Come From?
The second page of the first chapter of Life on Other Planets, in large letters, reads:
Continue reading "Materialist Science Fiction Promoted to Students at a Local Public Library" »
P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine "theories":
'Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins' or 'We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing' or 'X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.'
As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as "silly":
No, none of those very silly talks were given.
And he's right. What he fails to note, however, is that these theories differ little in substance from the ephemeral corpus of Darwinian just-so stories. These silly stories are merely the application of silly mainstream Darwinian reasoning to medical practice. Perhaps it's the application of this nonsense to something as tangible as medicine that makes the banality so obvious. The straight-faced assertion "polar bears evolved into whales by the mechanism of random genetic variation and natural selection," a sort of ursine-baleen "chance and necessity," doesn’t have the same risible punch as the "evolution" of childhood aversion to broccoli.
Continue reading "Who Would Connect "the Legacy of Darwin," Medicine, and Eugenics?" »
Several Darwinist bloggers have taken exception to my observation that Darwinian stories about the origin of diseases contribute little of significance to medical education, research, or practice. Orac responds:
…that creationist neurosurgeon with a penchant for laying down hunks o' hunks o' burnin' stupid on a regular basis, that Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, Dr. Michael Egnor has spouted off on evolution again in a way that got my attention. It came in response to a post by PZ about a conference he attended entitled Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin, which served as a launching pad for Dr. Egnor to go right down the rabbit hole…The stupid, it burns. It sears. My neurons are crying out in pain. Once again, Dr. Egnor trots out the tired old "Darwin inevitably leads to eugenics" coupled with his usual claims evolution has contributed nothing--or, as Dr. Egnor says it, nothing!--to medicine. Only Dr. Egnor could come up with something so utterly devoid of understanding, so scientifically ignorant, so full of the arrogance of ignorance...
Having gotten that off his chest, Orac, a surgical oncologist who doesn't post under his real name, continues:
Continue reading "Darwinian Medicine and Military History " »
Materialism
Philosophy. The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
Superstition
1 a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary
Mind
(in a human or other conscious being) The element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges.
Materialists have taken note of the growing efforts by non-materialist neuroscientists to point out the deep problems with the inference that the brain is entirely the cause of the mind. Materialist neuroscience, like materialist evolutionary biology, is a vacuous orthodoxy, and its proponents resent threats to their dogma. Darwinian explanations for functional biological complexity are nonsense, but some familiarity with the relevant science is necessary to understand that it is nonsense. Materialist explanations for the mind are transparent nonsense.
Consider the six characteristics of the mind, generally accepted by materialist and non-materialist scientists and philosophers. Each of the six poses enormous problems for a materialistic explanation:
Continue reading "The Mind and Materialist Superstition" »
Re: P.Z. Myers' recent post:
I'll be spending my day at this symposium, "Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin", most of today. It's about to start, so I'm not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you're in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room G17 (which we have since learned is the famous old surgical demonstration auditorium), and listen in. I'll report later on the contents of the talks.
I’m having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn’t I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is Darwin’s only legacy to medicine.
Continue reading "Is P.Z. Myers Attending a Conference on Eugenics?" »
"Predicting is very difficult, especially when it is about the future," Yogi Berra is reported to have said. Phillip Johnson, writing in May's Touchstone, says
I think of the great Yogi’s maxim whenever I hear theistic evolutionists warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Their point is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion.
But why think that these "gaps" will ever be filled? As Johnson muses, "I presume that even the most advanced science of the future will not discover things that do not exist, provided that science remains open to the free expression of dissent and criticism." In other words, this sort of Darwin-of-the-Gaps argument depends more upon commitment to naturalism (even a theological naturalism, as Cornelius George Hunter would remind us).
Johnson goes on to wonder why many Christian theistic evolutionists think God is a poor designer if he has to get his hands dirty and do something directly. See the rest of his article here. But for a thoughtful and more in-depth treatment of "God-of-the-gaps" reasoning, see physicist David Snoke's "In Favor of God-of-the-Gaps Reasoning."
Prof. Thomas Nagel, a self-declared atheist who earned his PhD. in philosophy at Harvard 45 years ago, who has been a professor at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton, and the last 28 years at New York University, and who has published ten books and more than 60 articles, has published an important essay, "Public Education and Intelligent Design," in the Wiley InterScience Journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 36, issue 2, on-line at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118493933/home (fee for access US $29.95).
Prof. Nagel's paper is a significant and substantial opening, at America's highest intellectual level, that encourages all intelligent, educated, informed individuals — particularly those whose interest in this issue derives from intellectual curiosity, not the emotional advocacy excitement for any side — that it is legitimate as a matter of data, science, and logic, divorced from all religious texts and doctrines, to consider that intelligent design may be a valid scientific approach to understanding how DNA and the complex chemical systems of life came to attain their present form. Prof. Nagel's article is well worth the price to put it in the library of any inquiring mind.
Continue reading "Prominent Atheist Professor of Law and Philosophy Thomas Nagel Calls Intelligent Design Scientific and Constitutional to "Mention" in Science Classes" »
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.
In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book burning, as some might suppose, but rather a learned critique of toxic ideas floating in our cultural water. Wiker plays the role of EPA in the "Great Books" world, covering Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx/Engels, Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Sanger, Hitler, Freud, Mead, Kinsey, and Friedan.
10 Books's two main virtues consist in exposing our often blind worship of "Science" and revealing the central mistake of the past several centuries of intellectual thought: the attempt to destroy and replace the West's traditional understanding of the human person and his place in the world.
If there is one truth our children need before college, perhaps it is...
Read the rest here.
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:
Continue reading "Larry Moran and "Nice, Friendly, Ignored, and Denigrated Atheists"" »
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 of controversial social, political, and scientific issues. It thus seems fitting that South Park would inspire me to blog about the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). In fact, the only truly appropriate way to respond to something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to invoke something as brilliantly absurd as the comedy of South Park.
Continue reading "The Proper Rebuttal to the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Cartoon Satire on South Park" »
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 complex cases to the public more effectively. These are laudable goals.
The crux of the matter, of course, is this: what are the facts in the Schiavo case, and, more generally, what are the real issues involved in the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state (PVS)?
Continue reading "Terri Schiavo, Persistent Vegetative State, and Materialist Neuroscience" »
The Chronicle of Higher Education shows courage in publishing a non-P.C. article by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars that describes the real, as opposed to the putative, obstacles to increasing the number of American-born and educated scientists. Anti-intellectualism is a big part of it.
There is a problem, however, that Peter Woods overlooks, either because it doesn't occur to him or because he doesn't wish to spur the science establishment to even more outrage by mentioning it. That problem is the contemporary hostility that many committed Christian young people, and perhaps other religious youth, encounter in the sciences these days. Even those who have not experienced it become alert to it and, in turn, may be discouraged.
Darwinists can deny that this is the case, but a serious study, I submit, would show that it is so. Asked in private, when their words can't be twisted and asked in a neutral manner, many religious students report a classroom environment that demeans religious belief and demeans religious people. If it is known that they do not accept Darwinian accounts of the rise and development of life, or even the development of universe before life arose on Earth, students know that they could be graded down in some classes (a certain University of Minnesota biology class comes to mind, but it is unusual only in the professor's lack of subtlety). If they decide to seek an advanced degree the opposition will be stronger and they normally dare not express their convictions. If they somehow get a doctorate, they cannot expect a teaching position, or recommendations, once any serious dissent from Darwinism is detected. And if they secure a job they will not get tenure if word leaks out (see Expelled). Even after they have tenure they can still be maligned and harassed and even effectively demoted.
Continue reading "Gutsy Article on Science Students Still Avoids Problem of Anti-Religious Prejudice" »
When scientists decide they know what the right answer is, despite what the scientific evidence may indicate, then bad things can happen. This was the theme of my recent book Science's Blind Spot, where I explored the history and consequences of the mandate for naturalism in science. For about two hundred years before Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution, theologians, philosophers and scientific investigators promoted a series of religious and philosophical arguments that mandated purely naturalistic explanations for the history of the world.
Darwin's book, where he used a plethora of these metaphysical arguments for his otherwise scientifically weak theory of evolution, was something of a capstone for the movement. The foundation was in place, and as one historian put it, Darwin (and Wallace) did not conclude that evolution was true after discovering a mechanism, but rather first believed evolution was true and then searched for a mechanism. 1
The problem with science today is not that the naturalistic approach might occasionally be inadequate. The problem is that science would never know any better. This is science's blind spot. When scientific problems arise, it is always assumed that the correct naturalistic explanation has not yet been found. Scientists may not be able to explain love very well, but they are sure there must be a way.
Continue reading "Science's Blind Spot Is Still There" »
[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]
This past week The New York Times ran a new article on the Vast Intelligent Design Conspiracy. The article was titled, "Opponents of Evolution are Adopting a New Strategy" and attempts to expose the creationist plot to take over America's schools.
The Times article documents the efforts of opponents of intelligent design in Texas. One of these groups, of course, is the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), always vigilant in its efforts to stamp out the dangerous cultural virus of academic freedom before it spreads.
"Very often over the last 10 years," says Glenn Branch, "we've seen antievolution policies in sheep's clothing." Branch is part of the NCSE pack and he takes great care to bleat his remarks convincingly. Groups like NCSE are concerned about Texas because of the sway the state has over the textbook industry. Texas, like California, is a big market for publishers. They are worried that if objectivity in textbooks takes hold in Texas, it could spread to the rest of the nation.
Continue reading "None Dare Call it Journalism" »
I am often asked what to make of Christoph Cardinal Schonborn's new book Chance or Purpose?
Luckily, I can now point people to Denyse O'Leary's spot-on review.
Among the many highlights, O'Leary notes that
Continue reading "O'Leary Reviews Cardinal Schonborn's Chance or Purpose?" »
There is an interesting new education project under construction at Binghamton University. According to The New York Times:
Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.
Now, we’re all for combining the sciences with the humanities. Clearly we should be developing well-rounded students. But what I fear is
Continue reading "Uniting the Sciences and Humanities" »
[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]
I have always admired G. K. Chesterton's dictum that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly, but I never appreciated the full scope of its application until reading John Derbyshire's recent review of Ben Stein's "Expelled" at National Review Online.
"What on earth has happened to Ben Stein?" asks Derbyshire. "He and I go a long way back." Are the two close? Are they old pals who have been through a lot together? "No," he says, "I've never met the guy."
But wait. How can this be? How can Derbyshire have forged this bond of friendship with Stein without actually knowing him? "Though I've never met him," he explains, "I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him."
Got it.
In fact, Derbyshire displays an amazing ability, far beyond that of the rest of us, to engage with people and things even though he has had no direct contact with them. Take "Expelled" for example. "So what's going on here with this stupid 'Expelled' movie?" he asks — a question which could have been answered by the simple expedient of actually watching it. A man with Derbyshire's special talent, however, is not hampered by such constraints:
Continue reading "John Derbyshire on "Expelled," or How to Review a Movie without Really Trying" »
Much the way Marxist determinism was marshaled in the past to explain practically everything, an "evolutionary advantage" is now sought. Endless grant money seems to be available and journalists are eager to report the research speculations as "science." I am collecting a file of such stories.
So here I am trying to figure out how a study might be concocted to explain this moving account of a sports team that showed great conscience and panache. Surely someone can get a government grant to find a Darwinian answer to replace the common sense one.
There are people who apparently have a deep-seated need to believe that Intelligent Design proponents are really creationists in disguise, and that once they have control over the nation's schools, they're going to rip off their clever scientist disguises to reveal men in short sleeve dress shirts and horn-rimmed glasses who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Acting on a preordained set of instructions, this view seems to suggest, they will proceed to outlaw any mention of evolution in schools, and will execute plans that involve, among other things, taking students on weekly field trips to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
It is a frightening vision of the future: a flood of creationism let loose on the nation's schools. The end of science is near, and to ride out the crisis, ID critics are building themselves a rhetorical ark and bringing the fallacies aboard two by two.
The charge that ID is part of some creationist conspiracy was recently reiterated by Larry Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism. Arnhart, a professor at Northern Illinois University, writes in a recent post about the "Rhetorical Blunder in Ben Stein's 'Expelled'," a blunder which has to do, he thinks, with what is really behind Intelligent Design.
Continue reading "Intelligent Design: It's a Creationist Plot" »
Richard Dawkins has got himself in a bit of a pickle and, in an effort to wash off the brine, now appears to be in a bit of a lather. In an op-ed this morning in the L.A. Times (see here), he is at pains to distance himself from remarks he made in the newly released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Toward the end of the film, in an interview with Ben Stein at the British Museum, Dawkins confesses he has no idea how life originated on earth — nor does anyone, he admits — but, as Nobel laureate Francis Crick once theorized, it could well be explained by having been seeded here by an alien intelligence. Of course, he demurs with great gravity, this alien race would itself have evolved elsewhere in the universe by Darwinian means.
In other words, Dawkins recognizes that blind evolutionary processes seem an insufficient explanation for how life originated on earth — no one knows how it could have happened and intelligent design is a real possibility — but miraculously enough, he asserts, elsewhere in the universe under conditions we have no access to and can’t really imagine, blind evolutionary forces are completely sufficient to the task! After all, we have to terminate the regress somehow and we can’t possibly terminate it with God.
Read the rest here.
[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]
I saw "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," the controversial new documentary film by Ben Stein on the intelligent design debate, at one of the private screenings that was part of the grassroots marketing for the film, and I was disappointed. That's right. Here I made a trip all the way to Louisville, Kentucky from my home in Danville (almost 2 hours away), I go get a big bag of popcorn and a drink, climb the steps in the stadium seating at the Tinseltown Theater for the private screening and, as it turns out, not a single, solitary Darwinist tried to sneak past the big, scary looking octogenarian security guards to try to get in.
So I watched the movie instead, which was excellent. Now I know why the Darwinists are having such a fit--and spending so much time and effort throwing it: This is a powerful expose of academic intolerance. If this one gets wide exposure, they get a well deserved black eye.
"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is effective in its presentation of its views. It is by turns funny, ominous, clever, illuminating, and entertaining, which is more than you can say about some of the reviews of this movie which are merely hostile. Apparently their strategy is to convince people that the movie is not very good, something they have spilled a lot of ink trying to do.
There are several things the critics are saying to accomplish this apparent objective, some of which have nothing to do with the quality of the movie at all.
Continue reading "Expelled Critics: So Bored They Can't See Straight" »
[Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Discovery Blog]
Schools are in recess this time of year, so busloads of girls using "like" as a verbal crutch and wise cracking, baggy pants boys are wending their way through the cherry blossoms of America's capital. In these security-conscious times it is harder than ever to get a tour of the White House or Capitol, so parents and chaperones are quick to steer the young to the Mall.
 A traditional favorite is the National Museum of Natural History, where for several years now Darwinian fairytales have been presented in an exhibit on mammals that encourages our offspring to have a family reunion with their "relatives", including chimps, dogs, and mice. Here are strange just-so stories proposed as fact, telling the gullible, for example, how the giraffe evolved its neck. Presto-change-o. At the core of the exhibit is a tiny rodent whom the adorable, if naïve, teens are supposed to venerate as their direct ancestor. It cost a lot of money to bamboozle the folks this way. And you taxpayers paid for it.
Continue reading "Springtime for Darwin" »
I have theorized elsewhere about the Darwinists' diminishing status in the gene pool, but there is new and even more alarming evidence of the deterioration of the Darwinist subspecies--further proof that those who believe in the survival of the fittest are less fit for survival. It is becoming increasingly evident that there is a serious lack of creativity among a few Darwinists that could threaten their station on the evolutionary tree.
These days I get most of my news via my Google Reader, and about half of it over the last week seems to be about an attempt by biologist P. Z. Myers to sneak into a private viewing of the new movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," Ben Stein's expose of Darwinist thought control in our institutions of higher learning. Myer's attempt to get into the private screening (which was invitation only) was foiled when he was recognized and told that the private screening was, well, private.
From the indignation with which this incident has been received by the anti-ID crowd, one would think that he was beaten with truncheons by big men in steel-toed boots and physically dragged away from the theater. But, alas, it is not so. Turns out he was just standing there dumbly in line waiting to get in to see the movie, was recognized, and was then asked by theater security to go away, which he did, according to reports, without a struggle.
Such is the state of the Darwinist mindset these days that so unimpressive a performance is considered the stuff of heroism. But P. Z. thought it was something, and he has recounted several times now how he bravely endured his confrontation with theater security (and we know their reputation). I mean, what was he supposed to do? They had badges.
Continue reading "Why P. Z. Myers should be wearing the short pants and sneakers" »
The good news is that concern for society's lack of intellectualism continues. The bad news is this concern continues to lack intellectualism. This unfortunate irony is so common it seems to have become a tradition, and the latest contribution is Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason. Jacoby is a long-time critic of intelligent design who, like most critics, propagates more strawmen renditions and Inherit the Wind stereotypes, than thoughtful or fresh ideas.
In this tradition, one is either a Darwinist or a religious fanatic. Darwinism is the ideal of science while ID is creationism in disguise, hostile to reason and knowledge. Doubt evolution and you are a throwback to the days before the Enlightenment. This use of false dichotomies and strawmen renditions to ridicule and marginalize opponents must make for great sport, but it certainly does not help bolster intellectualism.
Continue reading "Defending Intellectualism?" »
The January 2008 issue of Christianity Today contained a letter from Randy Isaac titled “Providence and Evolution.” In his critique of Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? [“The CT Review,” November], Logan Paul Gage fails to distinguish between scientific randomness and metaphysical randomness. By insisting that these two concepts are inextricably linked, Gage concludes that McGrath (and Francis Collins) maintain a position that precludes divine providence. Evolution is not a purely random process, Ahem: something I never denied. But I interrupt.
Continue reading "Of Providence and Evolution: A Reply to ASA President Randy Isaac" »
 At festive Winter Solstice Luncheons across the country, determined atheists are gathering to celebrate one of the oldest and most superstitious holidays of human history. As speakers present lectures on the history of Solstice celebrations, participants give and receive Winter Solstice Cards. These vary little from the general theme of my favorite card, which depicts Charles Darwin as Santa Claus on the front. Apparently, Darwin is the Patron Saint of Solstice. Inside, it reads simply:
evolve your beliefs.
CELEBRATE WINTER SOLSTICE
Continue reading "Devolve Your Beliefs" »
Judge John E. Jones, a former trial attorney and State Liquor Control Board member who now is a federal judge for central Pennsylvania, is also a new phenomenon on the federal bench: a judge who, having made a ruling (e.g., the Dover case), goes on speaking tours and television shows to promote himself, his ruling and — yesterday — a PBS documentary on his ruling. Yesterday morning he was on the Today Show. Soon we will be asked to consider his views on the Iraq War or the writers' strike in Hollywood. Maybe he should retire and start a talk show for Air America (where he also has appeared).
There must have been others who have broken from the long-standing customary reluctance of the federal judiciary to risk the dignity of the court by lending themselves out as celebrity promoters. I can't think of any that were comparable. Had he ruled differently on the Dover Case, would his self-promotion efforts have been rewarded — or would they have been fiercely condemned?
Want a different legal take on Judge Jones' ruling? Listen in to the interview with Phillip Johnson, who clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law, emeritus at University of California, Berkeley.
The furor over Dr. James Watson's comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people—resulting from evolution—caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist's speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.
Continue reading "Should Dr. James Watson Enjoy Free Speech?" »
I’ve already commented on the paper by Eugene Koonin and the Darwinists' concern that it might show that there is a serious controversy over the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life at all, let alone in a gradual step-by-step process over eons of time.
Koonin challenges the standard Darwinian view of the tree of life. His research shows that it lacks the ability to explain life's complexity, but he hasn’t been fired from the National Center for Biotechnology or lost his funding from the National Institute’s of Health (yet).
Like Koonin, Michael Behe in his latest book The Edge of Evolution shows what evolution can do and what it can’t. Professor Robert Marks at Baylor uses the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Lab to showcase some of the limits of Darwinian evolution. Both have suffered serious repercussions. But not Koonin (yet).
Continue reading "Lucky for Koonin, he doesn't teach at Baylor" »
“The fact is materialism is stalled. It neither has any useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences nor comes close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored.” (xiv)
 Canadian neuroscientist Mario Beauregard notes at the beginning of his book The Spiritual Brain, co-authored with journalist Denyse O’Leary, that he belongs to a small minority of nonmaterialist neuroscientists. He is upfront about the fact that he “went into neuroscience in part because [he] knew experientially that such things [religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSME)] can indeed happen.” Driven by his curiosity about what is happening to the brain during RSME, Beauregard and his colleague studied the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns, coming to the conclusion that it is more likely that these mystics are directly experiencing a reality outside of themselves.
Continue reading "The Spiritual Brain: An Argument Against Materialism" »
Iowa State atheist professor of religion Hector Avalos (yes, the same Professor Avalos who harassed Guillermo Gonzalez about astrobiology) seems to now consider himself an expert in modern European History as well.
Avalos recently challenged (see: "Creationists for Geoncide") the work of California State University, Stanislaus professor of history Richard Weikart. Weikart is author of the acclaimed From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany.
Weikart recently responded to Avalos’s charges in a comment left at Panda’s Thumb. I’ve pasted it below for wider distribution:
Continue reading "Weikart Responds to Avalos" »
The Seattle Weekly is one of those free newsprint advertisers that you find in bins on street corners in most major U. S. cities. Their editorial boards usually consist of people too far to the left even for the establishment media, and as sources of news they’re probably about as reliable as Minju Choson, the official organ of the Democratic People's Republic of [North] Korea. But homeless people make good use of them.
The August 29, 2007 issue of The Seattle Weekly features an article quoting Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Despite its name, the NCSE is not about teaching science but indoctrinating students at public expense in Darwinism, the creation myth of modern secularism. Whenever critics of Darwinism raise their heads, the NCSE rushes in to bop ‘em, kind of like a carnival game. Except that when the NCSE bops someone on the head it usually means the end of that person’s career in science teaching.
Continue reading "Darwinist or Darwinian, They're One and the Same" »
Materialists predict they will create "artificial life" in a test tube in the next 3 to 10 years. I have a counter-prediction: They will succeed only by re-defining "artificial" and "life." For example, "artificial" will cover any human manipulation of an existing organism -- so replacing a few genes or enzymes in an already-living cell will count as creating "artificial life." And "life" will be anything that can undergo "Darwinian evolution" -- such as an artificially engineered system of molecules -- even though it can be sustained only in a carefully controlled laboratory environment.
But a free-living cell? I don't think so. We are still many years and many discoveries away from understanding the nature of life even in prokaryotes. And Darwinists -- with their attitude that they already know all the important things there are to know about life -- will not be the ones to
make the necessary discoveries.
That's my prediction.
Have you ever spent time pondering the intellectual pedigree of scientism—say, of the Dawkins variety? It would be nice if folly really were an orphan, but unfortunately he is not. And Herbert Spencer was only one link, though an important one, in a long chain of Western scientism.
Consider this Spencerian quote from Steven Shapin’s recent New Yorker article “Man with a Plan: Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Everything”:
Continue reading "Scientism's Forefathers" »
The voices in Mike Dunford’s head have been awfully worried lately. Dunford, a zoology graduate student from Hawaii who ‘"studies evolution," put up a bizarre post on Panda’s Thumb recently. Dunford is convinced that there are conspiracies going on.
He began his post with lucidity, sensibly acknowledging the truth of Denyse O’Leary’s observation that intelligent design theory is not creationism. Intelligent design is the theory that some aspects of living things are more reasonably explained as the product of intelligent design rather than as the product of random variation. It’s a scientific inference, open to evidence, and it might be right or wrong. Creationism is the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, particularly in the Book of Genesis. It’s a religious inference, and creationists believe it cannot be wrong. Dunford acknowledges the honesty of creationists (as if that were in dispute), but then denies the honesty of those of us who support intelligent design theory. Dunford writes:
Continue reading "Dunford, Darwinism, and the Paranoid Style" »
Dear Chicago Sun-Times Editor:
Thank you for running Steven Pinker’s "In defense of dangerous ideas" (July 15) which recognized the need for the scientific community to embrace its scientific taboos—such as whether the state of the environment has actually improved in the last 50 years or whether men and women may have different innate aptitudes.
Would that Pinker truly supported academic freedom for all scientists. While he is even willing to ask if men have an innate tendency to rape, apparently asking if nature exhibits deliberate design is beyond the pale.
Continue reading "To Chicago Sun-Times: Thanks for Pinker's Change of Heart" »
 [Editor’s Note: This post was written by a Discovery Institute legal intern, Guillermo Dekat. Mr. Dekat is a law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Air Force Academy.]
A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
By: Cornelius G. Hunter (Brazos Press, 2007)
In law, one who sells a product in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user is held strictly liable for the physical harm to the injured party. One way for the injured party to win a case is to successfully argue that there is a design defect in the product. Put another way, the plaintiff is entitled to damages because there is something wrong with the blueprints for the product. At this point, expert witnesses are found to testify to the design’s integrity or its defectiveness.
Continue reading "Is The Design of Modern Science Defective?: A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism" »
One of the key expert witnesses for the ACLU in the Dover trial was Barbara Forrest, a Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. She recently authored a paper entitled "Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals," (May 2007) in which a major theme is that, since nearly all of the leading intelligent design proponents are Christians who have expressed a preference for a Christian influenced culture, their scientific efforts cannot be trusted as bona fide science. Forrest's claim, echoing a common theme of Darwinists, is that since the vast majority of intelligent design promoters are Christians, their scientific work must necessarily be so biased by their religious beliefs as to be compromised. On this basis, Forrest essentially argues that anything Christian proponents of intelligent design say about science must be rejected as real science.
Forrest focuses exclusively on the alleged religious biases and motives of Christian proponents of intelligent design. This isn't surprising, given Forrest's role as one of the ACLU's hired guns in the Dover trial. It is Forrest's status as an ACLU hired gun that should cause us to question the objectivety of her own academic work.
Continue reading "A More Sensible Solution to Religious Bias in Science" »
Perhaps the most striking feature of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is its lack of science. I had thought that this was an anomaly, but Dawkins’ New York Times review (out Sunday) of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is the same patchwork of fallacies devoid of science as The God Delusion.
Let me count the ways…
Continue reading "Dawkins Attacks Behe in New York Times, But Where's the Science?" »
Over at the First Things blog On the Square, Francis Beckwith carefully shows how even Professor Dawkins cannot escape the common sense perception that the world is filled with agency, and those agents have a proper function. To get at all this, Beckwith describes Dawkins' lambasting of Kurt Wise, the young-earth creationist who did doctoral work under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard.
Dawkins writes:
Continue reading "Beckwith: Dawkins Unwittingly Endorses Purpose in Nature" »
Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a "creationist," meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.
Continue reading "Design and Common Ancestry" »
The American Enterprise Institute will hold a conference on Thursday, May 3 (9:00--11:30 a.m.) titled "Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?" (go here to register)
Speakers include Discovery Institute Senior Fellows Dr. John West and George Gilder. And opposing them with the thesis that Darwinism and Conservatism are compatible will be National Review's John Derbyshire and Larry Arnhart, political theorist of Northern Illinois University.
Shortly after the event occurs, a video webcast will be available on the AEI site here.
From the Event Description:
Continue reading "AEI hosts Debate on Darwinism & Conservatism" »
Political scientist and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Dr. John West has been asked to lecture at Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. on Monday, April 30th at 11a.m. Dr. West's lecture will be "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America's Eugenics Crusade."
For those outside the D.C. area, the lecture will be audiocast live from www.frc.org (click on "Events")
From the Lecture Summary:
Continue reading "John West to Lecture on Eugenics in D.C." »
Recently I shared my reading of David Brooks' recent colum "The Age of Darwin." The whole thing read like parody to me. I thought for sure that Brooks could not seriously write that, while we are generally post-modern people who are skeptical of metanarratives, we have and should abandon this view because Darwinism is the true metanarrative of life. I thought he was just pointing out the contradiction in academia between postmodern and Darwinian thought.
With thanks to one ENV reader named Oleg, I stand corrected. I had forgotten that Mr. Brooks shared his views on Darwinism in The New Republic in 2005:
Continue reading "I stand corrected on David Brooks" »
It is a rare day that I would dispute Bruce Chapman’s reading of anything. But today is one such day. Disagreeing with Ambassador Chapman's and Richard Kirk’s interpretations of David Brooks’ recent column “The Age of Darwin,” I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Brooks was pointing out the irony of our supposedly post-modern intellectual culture which waxes eloquently about having no grand, unifying metanarrative and at the same time bows down to the Darwinian fairytale, to borrow David Stove’s phrase.
Writes Brooks:
Continue reading "What does David Brooks really think about Darwinism?" »
Metal mousetrap parts
Okay, so one day a guy walks up to you and says irreducible complexity is no problem for a random, Darwinian-like evolutionary process. In fact, he can explain how a mousetrap could be made step by step. That’s great, you reply, tell me. Easy, says he. He has just finished a detailed analysis of the standard mechanical mousetrap and discovered that, except for the wooden base, all the parts are made of metal! What’s more, he’s even looked at non-standard mechanical traps, and their pieces are all made of metal, too! Also, after much sleuthing he’s noticed that the mousetrap spring has a lot in common with the spring inside his ballpoint pen — both are made of metal, and both are curled into spirals.
Fascinating, you reply, please go on. Go on? What, are you blind? Don’t you see? asks he. The mousetrap spring must have arisen from something like the pen’s spring, to make the beginning of the mousetrap. Then the spring duplicated to form the other metal parts, which were added one by one to make the trap we see today. What more could a reasonable person ask for?
Continue reading "DARWINISM GONE WILD: Neither sequence similarity nor common descent address a claim of Intelligent Design" »
This last weekend, I attended Timberlake Wertenbaker's play "After Darwin" at D.C.'s Church Street Theater.
Continue reading "Morality "After Darwin"" »
I recently found myself in a conversation with two college undergraduates, both of them seniors in the natural sciences (physics and biochemistry, respectively). At one point we were discussing alchemy, which they knew as a pre-modern attempt to transmute lead into gold. I asked them whether they could name any famous alchemists. They could not, though one of them dimly recalled hearing of “someone whose name began with A.”
I then predicted that Darwinian evolution would eventually fade into the same obscurity that now shrouds alchemy. Although I knew from previous conversations that my young friends were skeptical of Darwinian theory, they expressed considerable surprise at my prediction, if only because Darwinism is presently held in such high esteem by their professors.
So I proceeded to explain the basis for my prediction.
Continue reading "Alchemy, Marxism, and the future of Darwinism" »
If you have not seen it already, you will enjoy playing with this random mutation generator. You will see how wonderful the Darwinian process is at taking your text and moving on to ever-greater levels of complexity.
Many ENV readers may recall Richard Dawkins’s now famous blunder
Continue reading "Random Mutation Generator" »
Recently Francis Collins, the renowned scientist and harmonizer of Darwin and faith, lectured before a packed auditorium at George Mason University in Virginia. One attendee and avid ENV reader, unimpressed with the harmonization, sent me this report:
Continue reading "Francis Collins on Square Circles" »
National Geographic's pro-evolution articles sometimes come off like advertisements for Darwin (for an analysis of a prior ad, see here). Its November, 2006 issue has an article, "From Fins to Wings," by Carl Zimmer which quotes Harvard microbiologist Howard Berg saying "The basic idea of evolution is so elegant, so beautiful, so simple." With such a ringing endorsement, I expected the article to urge me to buy evolution at the local grocery store! Zimmer's article, however, was better than many past evolution-endorsements in National Geographic. Past articles used icons like Haeckel's false "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" concept and antibiotic resistance to sell evolution. While Zimmer's present article retains the fallacious "the human eye was poorly designed" icon, it improves the treatment of embryology, discusses extreme conservation of developmental genes, and even tackles the biological complexity. In short, it discusses much evidence which ID-proponents legitimately claim challenges Neo-Darwinism or supports ID.
Continue reading "National Geographic Evolution Article Discusses Evidence that Supports Intelligent Design (Part I)" »
I find myself in yet another odd alliance. I guess NRO’s John Derbyshire would side with me over Leon Kass (whom, once again, I greatly respect for the solid anti-reductionist arguments he has made). Scientific observation can and should affect one’s view of what it is to be human. (Derbyshire and I simply disagree about the strength of Darwinian claims.) He lists “Biology” as one of the major things shaping his view of “the human condition.” He writes:
Continue reading "Derbyshire: Science Is Not Metaphysically Neutral" »
This past Thursday, October 26, Dr. Leon Kass, learned intellectual and former Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, presented a paper before an excellent group of intellectuals at the American Enterprise Institute (Stephen Barr, Eric Cohen, Joseph Bottum, Charles Murray, and Marcello Pera, among others). Dr. Kass had many good things to say about the false nature of scientific reductionism and how it goes against everything we know about reality from everyday life. He also denied that random mutations and natural selection were the whole story to life’s evolution. That said, I took umbrage with one major point Kass made.
Continue reading "Contra Kass, Not All Scientific Claims About Origins Are Metaphysically Neutral" »
This past Tuesday, Richard Dawkins spoke at DC's famous Politics & Prose bookstore, reading from his new book "The God Delusion." One philosophically astute questioner, American Enterprise Institute's Joe Manzari, had the following exchange with Dr. Dawkins:
Continue reading "Who wrote Richard Dawkins's new book?" »
Kudos to Richard Gallagher & Alison McCook from The Scientist for being gutsy enough to do an even-handed piece on President Bush’s record on science, and for asking the question in Gallagher’s editorial, “Is Bush Science’s Nemesis?” in more than the conventional rhetorical fashion. McCook’s piece “Sizing Up Bush on Science" answers with a resounding “no,” or at least no more than past presidents, including Bill Clinton.
Continue reading "Q: Is Bush Science’s Nemesis? A: No" »
By Joe Manzari and Casey Luskin
John Derbyshire claims that modern biology is built on evolution. He says that “Creationists seem not to be aware of how central evolution is to modern biology. Without it, nothing makes sense… Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied.” However, in 2001, A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, made it clear that “evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.”
Apparently Derbyshire sees things differently from Wilkins, claiming that evolution is vital for "such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops." Yet Wilkins' sentiment was re-affirmed in 2005 by Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who when commenting on Wilkins statement wrote “I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.”
Keeping the Baby, Throwing Out the Bathwater
But Derbyshire misrepresents the view of ID-proponents, implying that they reject all of evolution, including the useful stuff about how insects can become resistant to pesticides or bacteria resistant to antibiotics. He insinuates that ID proponents "say to biologists: 'Look, I want you to drop all this nonsense about evolution and listen to me,'" and compares their view to "walking into a room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers and telling them that classical aerodynamics is all hogwash." This false comparison misrepresents the views of ID proponents, who accept much of modern evolutionary theory. ID proponents fully recognize that natural selection can produce many small-scale changes but simply question if evidence for such changes can be extrapolated to account for all of life's complexity. Did Derbyshire misrepresent the nature of the ID-argument?
Overblown Claims of Human Origins
Derbyshire makes some grand claims about the alleged evidence for human evolution. Derbyshire writes:
Continue reading "Derbyshire Attacks Gilder Part II: Overblown Claims for Evolution" »
What happened in the Kansas school board primaries earlier this week, where supporters of the current science standards apparently lost control of the board, is something that lots of people are asking. It's not a difficult question to answer. Darwinists mounted a massive, and effective, misinformation campaign.
They fed to the media and public three false facts. First, that the Kansas science standards include intelligent design. They do not. Second, that the Kansas board redefined science to include the supernatural. It did not. And third, that the Kansas standards do not teach students the consensus view of science and include criticisms of evolution rejected by mainstream science. Also not true. We answered these false claims many times, but most succinctly here.
David Klinghoffer spells out perfectly what happened in his article at National Review Online today, "What's The Matter With Kansas?"
Continue reading "What Did Happen In Kansas?" »
There is a concerted effort underway in Kansas to censor science and undermine the strong science standards adopted there last year. In 2005 the Kansas state board of education (KSBOE) courageously voted to adopt science standards that require students to learn all about evolution, including both the scientific evidence and for and against the theory. That's it. The Board didn't require any alternative theories be taught, just the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution.
However there are a number of groups both inside and outside of Kansas that are seeking to stifle discussion in Kansas classrooms of anything critical of Darwinian evolution. Chief among them is "Kansas Citizens for Science" (KCFS). Not content with simply complaining about the Kansas science standards, KCFS is now belligerently telling schools and teachers to disobey the state-sanctioned standards. Officials of KCFS are waging a campaign of misinformation and scare tactics in an effort to make sure that Kansas students never hear about any of the serious scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution.
Here are a few of the phony reasons why KCFS encourages local school districts to adopt its own recommended standards rather than the official state-approved standards: • Kansas students should be taught science that corresponds to the consensus view of the community of scientists. They should not be taught assertions from the creationist anti-evolutionists that are held by the scientific community to be incorrect. Contrary to this misinformation put out by KCFS, the official Kansas science standards do call for students to be "taught science that corresponds to the consensus view" of scientists. But the standards also require students to learn about continuing scientific controversies over Darwinian theory's key claims--scientific controversies that many evolutionists themselves acknowledge when writing to each other in their science journals. If scientists can debate about such issues as the "Cambrian Explosion" in their peer-reviewed journals, why can't students learn about these debates in their science classes? • Kansas schools should not be used to promote one particular view of religion. Presenting religious arguments in the guise of science does harm not only to our students, but also to religious communities. Contrary to this misinformation put out by KCFS, no one is suggesting that any religious views be presented. The Kansas science standards call for students to learn about scientific challenges to biological and chemical evolution straight out of mainstream science literature. The standards have nothing to say about religion and do not call for the teaching of any religiously-based information. • Kansas science teachers are already under pressure to teach bad science or to omit "controversial" science. School districts need to send their teachers a clear message that they support the teaching of mainstream science. Now this is irony. This claim comes from KCFS, the organization that is aggressively waging a campaign to censor science, to stifle any dissent from Darwinian evolution. These are the people who want students to be taught only some of the information about evolution. It is the KCFS and their partners who are trying to "omit" material from the curriculum. Their idea of good standards would severely limit the amount of science teachers would be allowed to present in the classroom.• Districts using the state standards may leave themselves open to costly lawsuits, such as the one in Dover, Pennsylvania. The lawsuit over their Intelligent Design-inspired standards cost the Dover district over a million dollars. Should such a lawsuit occur in Kansas, it is not the state that will be sued – it is the local district that will be sued. KCFS officials are trying to frighten school districts with the ominous specter of a lawsuit over intelligent design. What they fail to mention is that the Kansas state science standards don't have anything to say about intelligent design. What is it about this sentence that the KCFS doesn't get? "We also emphasize that the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design" -- quoted straight from the KSBOE's own rationale for adoption of the state science standards.
It's time for people to stand up for science, stand up to Darwinist censors and bullies, and defend good science standards such as those in Kansas.
Fortunately, Kansas is not alone. Just last month South Carolina followed Kansas' lead and adopted similar standards that require students to learn the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. New Mexico, Minnesota and Pennsylvania also have such standards already in place. So, there are other states besides Kansas that are standing up for "full disclosure" when it comes to teaching Darwin's theory.
For a clear and succinct summary of what the Kansas state science standards do and do not call for download this FAQ.
Dear editor,
In “The Collapse of Reason,” Cathy Young agrees with leading liberal intellectual Todd Gitlin who believes “the academic left is making itself irrelevant by embracing ideological extremism and trying to purge its ranks of those who are not politically correct.” It’s a shame, then, that Young herself characterizes those who see evidence for intelligent design as religiously motivated right wing nuts, and in her own collapse of reason, provides no evidence for her position.
Continue reading "Letter to Boston Globe: "The Collapse of Reason" Evident in Critique of Intelligent Design" »
One day after an elected Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science urged the Ohio State Board of Education (OSBE) to keep its evolution lesson plan that presents some of the scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution, a member of the National Academy of Sciences also encouraged the board to retain the lesson plan. The plan has recently come under attack from dogmatic Darwinists seeking to dumb down the teaching of evolution in Ohio.
Philip S. Skell, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Evan Pugh Professor (Emeritus) of Chemistry at Penn State University, sent a letter to the OSBE stating: “I am writing—as a member of the National Academy of Sciences—to voice my strong support for the idea that students should be able to study scientific criticisms of the evidence for modern evolutionary theory along with the evidence favoring the theory. … Encouraging students to carefully examine the evidence for and against neo-Darwinism will help prepare students not only to understand current scientific arguments, but also to do good scientific research.”
Continue reading "National Academy of Sciences Member Tells Ohio To Continue Teaching Strengths and Weaknesses of Evolution" »
In the debate over intelligent design one of the more annoying problems is the media's predilection to misdefine ID, and to avoid reporting the positive case scientists make for the theory based on scientific evidence. Stephen Meyer, CSC Director, this weekend penned a clear and concise description of the theory that everyone --especially journalists-- should read and remember.
Over at ID The Future Meyer writes: But lost in the controversy over the legality of teaching about intelligent design has been any serious discussion of the scientific merit of the theory itself. According to media reports and the judge in Pennsylvania, the theory is just a "faith-based" alternative to evolution, based solely on religion rather than scientific evidence.
But is this accurate? As one of the architects of the theory, I know it's not.
Contrary to media reports, intelligent design is not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins – one that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution. Meyer goes on to explain two critical pieces of scientific evidence for intelligent design that scientists point to -- the bacterial flagellum found in certain cells, and the digital information encoded in DNA.
Using these examples and explaining how based upon our experience of cause and effect, in every instance we know of the cause that produces irreducibly complex systems is intelligence. Meyer concludes: Thus, contrary to media reports, the theory of intelligent design is not based on ignorance or religion, but instead on recent scientific discoveries and on our uniform experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning. Read the entire piece at ID The Future.
In the November-December edition of Harvard Magazine in an article titled “Forum: Intelligent Evolution” E.O. Wilson recites the long debunked mantra of Darwinists accusing ID of merely being “God-of-the-Gaps”. In Wilson’s own words:
Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: There are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (and most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work.
This statement is pretty ironic given the prefatory statement to the piece which said:
At a moment when discussion of evolution and “intelligent design” preoccupies American political discourse to a surprising degree, shedding more heat than light on the nature of life and life science, Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.
Continue reading "E.O. Wilson’s Argument From Ignorance" »
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