Who are the real proponents of hate speech on campus?

Supporters of Darwin’s theory continue to distinguish themselves on America’s college campuses—not for their reason and logic, but for their incredible ill manners and an almost pathological inability to engage in civil discussion. Last week, a factually-challenged attack on intelligent design was published in The Nevada Sagebrush, the student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno. Nothing new in that; I see ill-informed articles on intelligent design all the time. But after my colleague Rob Crowther posted a short comment suggesting that readers might actually want to hear from intelligent design proponents themselves (imagine that!), the Darwinist thought-police came out in force. One writer who is so courageous that he hides behind the pseudonym “bobxxxx” fulminated: Robert Crowther… and the Read More ›

Darwinists Launch Cyber Attack Against Intelligent Design Website

A Colorado group is the target of malicious computer hackers in what appears to be a coordinated attempt to suppress information about an upcoming conference on Darwin and intelligent design in Colorado. Earlier this month the Shepherd Project Ministries website was breached using a “brute force attack” to break the password. The hackers then deleted webpages containing information about an upcoming conference featuring Discovery Institute speakers Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and John West. “No question whatsoever about they were targeting,” said Shepherd Project Executive Director Craig Smith. “That was brazen. We were a little stunned, to be perfectly honest. We had seen some hostile language about the conference, but honestly we just assumed it was cyber-flaming. We didn’t Read More ›

Berlinski, Wells & ID Take Los Angeles

After having the premier of Darwin’s Dilemma canceled by the California Science Center, Avi Davis’s American Freedom Alliance really pulled things together in heroic fashion in Los Angeles. The AFA found a new venue, hardly inferior, where academic freedom may be less endangered: the University of Southern California. The sizable crowd on Sunday night of about 230 people was appreciative and intelligent. There were university students representing both sides of the Darwin debate, high school students from a church school in Santa Monica on a field trip, and a mix of other folks from the community. The film is a powerful document. The word that came to my mind watching it was “spooky.” Besides very lucidly and compellingly laying out Read More ›

Severe Limits to Darwinian Evolution: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the third of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post. Now back to Thornton’s first point, the role of neutral mutations (which he sometimes labels “permissive” mutations). At several places in his post Thornton implies I’m unaware of the possibilities opened up by genetic drift: Behe’s discussion of our 2009 paper in Nature is a gross misreading because it ignores the importance of neutral pathways in protein evolution…. Behe’s first error is to ignore the fact that adaptive combinations of mutations can and do evolve by pathways Read More ›

Not So Many Pathways: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton

The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the second of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post.Now to Professor Thornton’s reply. He writes at length but makes just two substantive points: 1) that neutral mutations occur and can serendipitously help a protein evolve some function (“[Behe] ignores the key role of genetic drift in evolution”); and 2) that just because a protein may not be able to evolve a particular function one way does not mean that it, or some other kind of protein, can’t evolve the function another way (“nothing in our results Read More ›