Ken Miller Confuses Weak Assertions of Common Ancestry With Darwinian Evolution of Blood Clotting Cascade (Updated)

Update 8/7/13: Since this response to Ken Miller was posted, even stronger evidence of function for the beta-globin pseudogene has been reported in the scientific literature, further refuting Miller’s argument. See Dover Revisited: With Beta-Globin Pseudogene Now Found to Be Functional, an Icon of the “Junk DNA” Argument Bites the Dust. In his book Only a Theory, one of Dr. Kenneth Miller’s main response to Michael Behe’s arguments for the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade is that sequence similarities between various blood clotting factors demonstrates that they share a common ancestry. Indeed, in his response to me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade, Miller again conflates evidence for common ancestry with evidence for Darwinian evolution. Read More ›

Genesis and the Scandal of Jewish Indifference

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from an editor at a Jewish publication soliciting from me an article “related to creationism.” He asked that it be pegged to the coming Sabbath when Jews across the spectrum of Judaism begin a new cycle of Torah readings. That cycle begins with the account of creation in Genesis. The editor seemingly wasn’t aware that I’m not a creationist (i.e., a naïve Biblical literalist), or he didn’t know what the word means, or who knows what. Anyway, I wrote and sent off to him the piece he seemed to urgently want, suspecting even as I did so that it would never run in this particular publication. The Jewish religious world — Read More ›

Scopes v. State: A Lawsuit from a Bygone Era Where Evolutionists were the Persecuted, Not the Persecutors

Introduction: Scopes v. State is probably the most famous court case in the history of the evolution controversy. It’s most well known because a play, Inherit the Wind, was turned into a movie based loosely upon the trial, and has been shown in countless college and high school classrooms promoting a stereotype that Darwin-skeptics are ignorant, close-minded, intolerant ignoramuses. Ironically, today it’s the evolutionists who behave like the fundamentalists in the Scopes trial, holding all the power and banning viewpoints they don’t like. 1. Summary In 1925, teacher John T. Scopes was convicted under the recently adopted Tennessee “Monkey Law” that had criminalized the teaching of evolution.10 In Scopes’s defense, attorneys working with the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) argued Read More ›

Luskin: “Evolutionary Elite Choose Censorship over Scientific Debate”

Over at CNSNews.com, Casey Luskin has an opinion piece about the controversy surrounding the California Science Center’s caving in to pressure from the Smithsonian and cancelling a scheduled screening of Darwin’s Dilemma. There are two ways that modern evolutionists approach the Cambrian explosion, or what has been called “Darwin’s dilemma”: A. Some freely acknowledge that the Cambrian fossil evidence essentially shows the opposite of what was expected under neo-Darwinian evolution. B. Others deal with the Cambrian explosion by sweeping its problems under the rug and trying to change the subject. Succumbing to pressure from Darwinian elites, the California Science Center chose option B. Read the rest here.

Jonathan Wells Hits an Evolutionary Nerve

When intelligent design (ID) proponents press neo-Darwinian evolutionists on the inability of Darwinian evolution to produce new functional genetic information, a common response from evolutionists is that they get angry and engage in name calling. That’s what happened when Michael Egnor asked How does evolution produce new functional genetic information?, and it again seems to be the case now after Jonathan Wells bravely observed that “duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.” Mathematician and ID-critic Jeffrey Shallit responded by calling Wells a “buffoon.” Dr. Shallit then proceeded to offer an irrelevant definition of information which supposedly showed that Wells was wrong. William Dembski has responded to Shallit here, but Shallit’s Read More ›