Entrenched Science Departments Call for Censorship at Southern Methodist University

DALLAS–Darwinists at Southern Methodist University issued a demand this week that the university withdraw permission for a scientific conference about intelligent design to be held on campus. Discovery Institute and the SMU Christian Legal Society obtained permission to rent McFarlin Auditorium for a two-day conference on “Darwin vs. Design,” featuring presentations by the nation’s leading intelligent design scientists. The Departments of Anthropology, Biological Sciences, and Geological Sciences reacted with a letter objecting to the university’s agreement to host the conference. The Institute described the letter as an effort to censor scientists and stifle debate.

Darwin and Eugenics: Happy Birthday, Karl Pearson

On Friday, March 23, 2007, the Royal Statistical Society, the British Society for the History of Mathematics, and the British Society for the History of Science will sponsor the Karl Pearson Sesquicentenary Conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of the founders of mathematical statistics. The papers to be presented are a cornucopia of praise. The abstracts describe Pearson as a “Renaissance man” who created “the modern world view.” Yet several of Pearson’s most important contributions to the modern world view get no notice at the conference.

Ken Miller Rewrites his Textbooks, then Rewrites History: Miller’s Evolving Position on Haeckel and Evolution

Last year I wrote about some memory lapses that Brown University biologist and textbook author Ken Miller apparently had while testifying during the Kitzmiller trial regarding his own textbooks. Ken Miller has authored many biology textbooks, and his first textbooks (from the early 1990’s) used Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings and blatantly promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. To his credit, Miller fixed later editions of his textbooks — he took out Haeckel’s drawings and replaced them with real embryo photographs, and he also stopped promoting recapitulation theory. Like many Darwinists, however, Miller then tried to rewrite history and pretend that these mistakes had not been promoted by biologists for many decades. First, read what Miller & Levine’s 1994 version Read More ›

Ken Miller Twists William Dembski’s Methods for Inferring Intelligent Design

A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title “A War on Science.” In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity in the bacterial flagellum by citing the type 3 secretory apparatus, giving his usual misrepresentation of irreducible complexity. But it gets incredibly worse. Miller egregiously twists the basic arguments of leading ID theorist, mathematician William Dembski. To paraphrase Miller’s argument (Miller’s exact words are given ***below), when cards are dealt out in a game of poker, the hand you get is unlikely. But obviously that hand wasn’t intelligently designed. Therefore, unlikely and non-designed things happen all the time, so evolution can happen even if it’s unlikely, and we should Read More ›

Quick, Nurse, Give the Patient a Tautology!

Is Darwinism essential to understanding bacterial resistance to antibiotics? Consider the following conversation, at the bedside of a patient with a serious antibiotic-resistant infection: Nurse: Nothing’s working, Doctor!Doctor: I know. All of our antibiotics have failed. Penicillin, Cipro, Tetracycline. Nothing is working.Nurse: Let’s ask the Darwinists for help!Doctor: (Slaps forehead) Of course! Darwinism is the foundation of our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Quick, Nurse, give the patient a tautology! Darwinists claim that Darwin’s theory, which is the theory that all biological complexity arose by random variation and natural selection, is essential to our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. What exactly does Darwinism teach us about antibiotic resistance?