Whereas you, like, don’t, m’kay?

This from Curtis Brainerd at Columbia Journalism Review (December 4, 2008)

CNN is not the only television network that has been slashing science jobs. According to The Washington Post, “NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel [last week], axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s ‘Green Week,’ as well as several on-camera meteorologists.” Gannett has eliminated roughly 1,800 jobs this week at newspapers around the country, though it’s unclear which beats have been most affected. And Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine recently nixed its bureau in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where NASA launches its rockets and shuttles. Cowing, at NASAWatch, says that he is simply shocked “that at a time when science and technology should be on everybody’s lips, this expertise is suddenly not in demand.”

Remember this, folks, when they tell you that they support Darwinism because they “believe in” science.

If local charities believed in the poor the way these people believe in science, Toronto’s poor would be a bunch of skeletons lining the sidewalks … not a bunch of people with caps out in the street.

Well, at least we can still hear Wolf Blitzer freaking out about supposed apocalypses. My cup runneth over, but not with anything I want to drink.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›

Recently, I interviewed Walt Ruloff, the Canadian producer who put serious money into Expelled, a documentary about the ID guys, which I first learned about, perhaps accidentally, in August 2007.*

Any design hypothesis attracts hordes of trolls. So I asked Walt the obvious question, “Would you guys have made the film if you knew how much trouble it was going to be?”

His reply was, “Yes, and we would have done it differently.”

No doubt he would. The Darwinists have all the pop science journalists on auto dial. They need only ring them up and bitch. Indeed, that is precisely what Richard Dawkins did. One might have expected a professor of the public understanding of science (Dawkins’s most recent job) to prefer a life in science rather than in soap opera, but people do what they can, not what they can’t.

For me, the big question is, why didn’t Walt Ruloff know all this? Why didn’t he talk to anyone who could tell him what everyone knows: Legacy media simply cannot give a fair hearing to the question of whether design is part of the makeup of our universe.

Hundreds of sniffy film critics had to enter the fray against his film, no matter what it was like. . They don’t know anything at all about the science, but they do know that there is no design in the universe. It was interesting and instructive to note that many critics made use of anti-Expelled resources supplied by the Darwin lobby. Showing the flag, I guess.

In later posts, I will comment in more detail on the role of legacy media in preventing informed discussion, but for now briefly: The dying establishment media were not always the red ink-a-sauruses we see today. They were once young and vibrant. Of course, they grew up with and imbibed materialism, often the crass know-nothing materialism that underlies pop science media articles like this one, the target of much well-justified criticism. But the people who honestly believe the worldview that underlies such articles know that they are justified in asking no questions, and assuming that Ruloff and Ben Stein “must” be lying. And plenty of boozy wakes for dead ideas await them.

So, of course, Ruloff’s film – while it did reasonably well in sales (#5 in political documentaries and #6 in DVD documentaries as I write this, 8:48 am EST) – was trashed by “cool” critics, including many Christian ones. Read More ›

I recently watched a PowerPoint presentation that neurosurgeon Michael Egnor gave at Birmingham, Alabama last month on “why we got eugenics.” He said pretty clearly something that I have been driving at for some time:

Evolutionary explanations are merely stories appended to the proximate (scientific) explanations. They contribute nothing to the scientific understanding of the disease beyond the contribution of the proximate explanations.

Evolutionary stories are ad-hoc and generally untestable guesses, and offer no meaningful framework for science. The proximate explanations (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, microbiology, etc.) are the framework for science.

Strategies for disease treatment and prevention depend on data from the relevant medical sciences, not on speculative stories about origins.

Darwinian medicine is scientifically vacuous, and the Darwinian theory of human origins is the antithesis of human exceptionalism and human dignity.

Of course. The whole concept of evolutionary medicine is a waste of time for a very simple reason: Read More ›

A mechanic was removing a cylinder head from the motor of a motorcycle when he spotted a well known heart surgeon in his shop. The surgeon was there waiting for the service manager to come take a look at his bike. The mechanic shouted across the garage,

“Hey Doc, can I ask you a question?”

The surgeon, a bit surprised, walked over to the mechanic working on the motorcycle. The mechanic straightened up, wiped his hands on a rag and asked,

“So, Doc, look at this engine. I open its heart, take valves out, fix ’em, put ’em back in and when I finish, it works just like new. So how come I get such a small salary and you get the really big bucks, when you and I are doing basically the same work?”

The surgeon paused, smiled and leaned over and whispered to the mechanic …

“Try doing it with the engine running!”

So why can’t the patient’s system just be shut down the way a machine is turned off? Doctors can indeed place a person’s body on bypass, in a technical state of death, but they must in reality keep it alive. Once the cells die, the hope of recovery ends – and that is especially significant for brain cells. So the body cannot really just be shut off, the way a machine can.

From the pseudonymous Mike Gene’s The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues: Read More ›

Some people who support ID doggedly hold that life on the planet earth requires a supernatural agency to make it happen. Others who don’t support ID also doggedly hold that ID requires a supernatural agency. I’ve asked, many times, what is it about the construction of organic life on this planet that requires supernatural intelligence to make it happen? What laws of physics or chemistry must be violated to produce any aspect of any living organism thus far examined? I admit that the origination and diversification of organic life on the earth seems best explained by participation at some point or points by an intelligent agency but I don’t see where a supernatural intelligent agency able to bend or break Read More ›