Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Beyond a joke

Remember the amazing story on Uncommon Descent a few days ago, about the private school science textbook which teaches that the Loch Ness Monster is real? Believe it or not, the story is true. It’s also three years old: way back in 2009, an article exposing the school program that publishes the textbook, Accelerated Christian Education (A.C.E.) (a publisher of home schooling texts, founded in Texas in 1970), appeared in an article by Michael Shaw (31 July 2009) in the Times Educational Supplement (TES), a British publication for teachers. Shaw was alerted to the deficiencies in the A.C.E. curriculum by one Jonny Scaramanga (more about him below). In fact, it turns out that the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum has been Read More ›

Evolution Professor: “The Tree is All Wrong”

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859 there were many scientific problems with the idea. Today, a century and a half later, we know of a great many more empirical challenges to the idea that the species arose spontaneously. The latest falsified expectation is that microRNAs, discovered only a few decades ago, when compared between different species do not align with the evolutionary tree. Evolutionist Kevin Peterson and colleagues are pursuing this research. “I’ve looked at thousands of microRNA genes,” explains Peterson, “and I can’t find a single example that would support the traditional tree.”  Read more

This Paper Will Be Cited As Showing How Those Complex Ion Channels Evolved

If you thought that Harold Zakon’sblunder in the very first sentence of his new PNAS paper, on the evolution of voltage-gated sodium channels, was merely the obligatory secret handshake and that thereafter Zakon would get down to business with some real science, well, think again. After his rather shaky start you’ll find that the second sentence is even worse than the first:  Read more

Science and Religion at the Portsmouth Institute

Some months back I was invited to speak at this summer’s Portsmouth Institute, which took place last weekend (June 22-24). The title of this summer’s symposium was “Modern Science/Ancient Faith.” See here for the schedule of talks. The speakers included Michael Ruse of Florida State University (keynote), Kenneth Miller of Brown University, John Haught of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, Abbot James Wiseman of St. Anselm’s Abbey and the Catholic University, Joe Semmes of the True North Medical Clinic, the Reverend Nicanor G. P. Austriaco of Providence College, and me, representing Discovery Institute. Anyone who knows anything about the science-religion dialogue will realize, simply from scanning these names, that I was the odd man out. When I was Read More ›