The following story, based largely on my interview with the local reporter on the Dover case (Lauri Lebo), doesn’t get an A for coherence or nuance, but I’m glad she got this point right: Dembski wrote, “In the words of Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? Design theorists aren’t at all bashful about answering this question: The ground rules of science have to be changed.” Dembski said the remarks should be taken in historical context. “Science does not spring from Zeus’ head like Athena,” he said. He defends the movement to change the definition of science because the scientific method, which limits research to the natural world, has evolved in the past and will likely change in the future. Read More ›

The October issue of the WEB-ZINE “Anti TRIZ-journal” has been posted at http://www3.sympatico.ca/karasik. The issue is mostly devoted to the patterns of technological evolution as well as to Mr. Dembski’s challenge. Actually, you’ll do better to see my challenge met by looking at the comments/contest entries under https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/341.

Go to http://idea.berkeley.edu for the new website for UC Berkeley’s IDEA Club (IDEA = Intelligent Design & Evolution Awareness): For too long the students have been dogmatically told that ID is just pseudo-scientific religious dogma. This website will offer Berkeley students accurate information on what ID is and is not. When students realize that ID does have scientific content behind the unfortunate politics, they will realize that the critics of ID on this campus are just arguing against themselves based on strawmen arguments. Their characterization of ID as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” will only work if the students don’t read the ID material for themselves. It seems that incredulously asserting that ID theorists are bad scientists also works well Read More ›

To Debate or Not to Debate Intelligent Design?
By Gerald Graff

When I heard that advocates of “Intelligent Design” were urging schools to “teach the controversy” between their view and Darwinian evolution, I was dismayed.

About 20 years ago, I coined the phrase “teach the controversy” when I argued that schools and colleges should respond to the then-emerging culture wars over education by bringing their disputes into academic courses themselves. . . . Read More ›

The Wars Over Evolution By Richard C. Lewontin New York Review of Books Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005 The Evolution-Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95 Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363 “… Maybe God is lurking out there somewhere but He doesn’t leave any residue in our test tube, so we will be tempted to assume He doesn’t exist. This is a philosopher’s worry that does not, as far as I can tell, correspond to the way people really acquire their views of reality. Some may have had mountaintop conversions at some point in Read More ›

… I leaned across to the head of the laboratory of development[al] neurobiology at one of the important American universities, and said: “Quite a line-up of scientists supporting ID, isn’t there?”

The reply was furious, and the conclusion came out with venom: anyone who considers ID “is not a scientist.” Read More ›