Month: July 2007
An Uncivic Biology
The Scopes trial is often depicted as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of light (scientific Darwinists) and the forces of darkness (benighted citizens of Tennessee who didn’t want Darwinism taught to their children). Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1950s play “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized account of the Scopes trail, portrays the trial as a struggle between scientific enlightenment and ignorant fundamentalism and has become a staple of high school English classes. Yet the Scopes trial wasn’t, as a matter of law, just about teaching Darwinism in an abstract sense. Scopes violated the Tennessee law by teaching from a textbook — George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914). In a recent essay in the weekly Read More ›
Misinformation Left Unchecked at the Des Moines Register
The Des Moines Register is continuing the rewriting of history regarding Guillermo Gonzalez. Last week the Des Moines Register published an article by Lisa Rossi which misrepresented the accomplishments of Guillermo Gonzalez and vastly understated his grant funding. In response, I submitted the following letter-to-the-editor to the Des Moines Register, but they would not run the letter because it didn’t “add anything new to the dialogue.” It seems the Des Moines Register doesn’t regard positive information about Guillermo Gonzalez as adding anything new to the discussion. Regardless, as my letter concluded, “Rossi’s fuzzy math and selective presentation of ISU’s tenure policies obfuscate the obvious fact that Gonzalez’s tenure denial was due to intolerance of intelligent design.” I reprint the letter Read More ›
Michael Behe, Darwin Slayer
This week’s WORLD Magazine features an interview (available here to subscribers) with biochemist Michael Behe, “Darwin Slayer” and author of this year’s The Edge of Evolution, his first book since the groundbreaking Darwin’s Black Box back in 1996. As Marvin Olasky writes, “[A] book once every decade or so is about as much as Darwinians can take. Behe’s new work shows that Darwinism’s random mutation and natural selection explain little about how one species has led to another.”
Is Darwin’s Theory Essential to . . . Mathematical Statistics?
My Darwinist interlocutor Orac, the surgical oncologist who blogs anonymously to hide his professional identity, but who takes umbrage at my observation that his posts are sometimes unprofessional, repeated his claim recently that Darwin’s theory is essential to medicine. That’s an odd assertion, even at first glance, given that Darwin’s theory isn’t taught in medical school and there are no specific requirements that pre-medical students have any grounding in the theory. There are lots of things that medical school admissions and curriculum committees recognize as indispensable to medical practice and research–calculus, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology and pathophysiology, to name a few–but Darwin’s fundamental assertion — that all natural functional biological complexity arose by non-teleological variation and natural Read More ›
Richard Gallagher Frames Intelligent Design Proponents While Rewriting the History of Junk-DNA (Part 2)
In part 1, I explained that The Scientist‘s editor Richard Ghallager wrote a politically charged article to avoid acknowledging that ID proponents have long-predicted the death of junk-DNA. But have ID proponents made these predictions? In a previous post, I gave about 4 or 5 examples of predictions from pro-ID or ID-sympathetic scientists from 1994 to the near-present who were predicting the end of the junk-DNA mindset. But does ID logically predict that we should find more and more function for “junk”-DNA? In a post that Telic Thoughts called, “A Dubious “Opportunity” for IDers,” it was recounted that one evolutionary biologist challenged ID proponents to “Specify the basis” for predicting function for junk DNA. I’ve done this multiple times here, Read More ›