After recently reporting about Niall Shanks’s rising star on this blog (here), I ran across this article about his new position at Wichita State University: go here for the article. For all my disagreements with him, he’s a nice guy and I wish him well in his new post. In the article, note the reference to the exchange on NPR’s Justice Talking between him and Paul Nelson. For the details about that exchange, go here.
Dressing down for Darwin: Forum takes on father of evolutionBy KELLY DAVISAnderson Independent-MailJuly 22, 2005 Named “Uncommon Dissent Forum: Scientists Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing,” the three-day event Aug. 4 through Aug. 6 at the Palmetto Expo Center is to consist of a panel of nine individuals, six of them scientists, all of them prominent in the cultural debate raging about the origins of life. He offers a $30 discount to the $145 registration fee to students and teachers. Supported by the Discovery Institute, he plans up to 15 similar conferences around the nation over the next five years if the Greenville event draws enough interest. Mr. Young’s desire to set up the forum was kindled last November after reading several Read More ›
Below are two emails forwarded to me from a friend of mine along with his commentary. To protect my friend, I’ve given all the individuals here pseudonyms. My friend here is “Kevin Nichols.” He’s a Ph.D. high school biology teacher who supports ID. His principal is “Lauren Long.” And the parent opposing ID is “Serge Abrams” (with son “Ryan”). Read More ›
Kenneth Miller, Francisco Ayala, and Lawrence Krauss have decided to go to the top, asking Pope Benedict XVI to clarify his views on evolution and design. Read More ›
It’s gratifying to see that ID is helping people make careers and bring home the bacon. Robert Pennock is happily ensconced at Michigan State University for criticizing ID. Barbara Forrest was promoted to full professor at South Eastern Louisiana State University for her work debunking ID. And most recently Niall Shanks moved from East Tennessee State University to an endowed chair at Wichita State University so that he can provide a counterblast to ID in Kansas (go here for the announcement of Shanks’s appointment — I understand that this appointment involved a hefty pay increase). Meanwhile, ID supporters are not just having a hard time getting academic jobs but even getting their PhDs (e.g., the case of Bryan Leonard).
The Protein Society’s upcoming big annual meeting (July 30 to August 3, 2005) has a session that should give proponents of unintelligent evolution pause and proponents of intelligent design courage: Read More ›
Ahmed K. Sultan Salem’s “The Non-Science of Intelligent Design” is probably the most ambivalent article about ID that I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample: Read More ›
Signs of Intelligence?
What the neo-Darwinists don’t understand about theories of Intelligent Design
by Isaac Constantine
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The charge is often made that ID constitutes an argument from ignorance (a charge I’ve shown to be false here). But a case can be made that conventional evolutionary theory, insofar as it tries to explain macroevolutionary changes, itself constitutes an argument from ignorance. In Gary Jason’s book Critical Thinking (p. 133), he characterizes the argument from ignorance as follows: Read More ›
Just when you thought the soap opera that is Baylor was in its last season, here they come up with some priceless new material. The following piece of investigative reporting appeared today on the front page of the Waco Trib. I’d like to nominate it for a Pulitzer Prize. Also, I’m awaiting further investigation to reveal that I’m the “rich and powerful” client who hired the private investigator in question: Read More ›
Yes, Roger Ebert, the movie reviewer, has now weighed in on ID — and in a review of The War of the Worlds, no less: Read More ›
On May 21st, I wrote an item on this blog titled “Sorry, kids, but you’re just too stupid” (go here), which described one rationale by Darwinists to exclude the teaching of intelligent design in the public schools, namely, kids are too stupid to understand the issues raised by evolutionary theory so that bringing up intelligent design will only confuse them further. I find this argument outrageous because (1) evolution, with regard to its basic mechanisms, is not rocket science — it is readily grasped; (2) kids rise to the occasion when they are challenged– the problem with so much of contemporary education is that it is dummied down and boring. Read More ›
My good friend and colleague Jeffrey Schwartz (along with Mario Beauregard and Henry Stapp) has just published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that challenges the materialism endemic to so much of contemporary neuroscience. By contrast, it argues for the irreducibility of mind (and therefore intelligence) to material mechanisms. Read More ›
