Last night, a few of us from Discovery Institute attended the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club meetup discussion on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” I’ve never met so many thoughtful and open-minded ID critics! One atheist gentleman even said that he would have to abandon one of the arguments he’s been using against ID and research the ID position more thoroughly. He came to realize that, although dismissing ID out of hand as ‘unscientific’ offered an easy way to reject ID without careful consideration and analysis of its claims, the assertion that ID isn’t science is a very difficult position to defend philosophically. When we adequately addressed objections, our detractors would concede the point. Why can’t all ID-critics be like that? Some Read More ›

Lynn Margulis’s son, Dorion Sagan, co-author of Margulis’s well-known book Acquiring Genomes, has written a book dedicated to his mother’s life and work. The book description on Amazon reads, Tireless, controversial, and hugely inspirational to those who knew her or encountered her work, Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth. When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis’s son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of Read More ›

Come along this evening (7-9pm) to the Lake Hills Library in Seattle for a discussion hosted by the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” Casey Luskin, myself (Jonathan M.) and Josh Youngkin from Discovery Institute will be there. Go here for details!

The twentieth century’s eugenics movement was eventually discarded, but eugenics did not go away entirely. Today eugenics continues, but it is a much more diverse and technologically sophisticated. There are the so-called eugenic abortions where the unborn with higher disease risks are “terminated.” And today’s technology allows for specific embryos, and even genes, to be selected. There seems to be, as Nathaniel Comfort observed this month, a eugenic impulse that drives us to seek a better human race. Underlying such health concerns, however, are the usual less benevolent motivations. In addition to the promised health benefits, Comfort explains that eugenics offers an intellectual thrill, and the profits of genetic biomedicine. Such lures are, explains Comfort, “too great for us to do Read More ›

Nature is, as Tennyson lamented, red in tooth and claw, but Darwinism turned death and bloodshed into a virtue. It is evolution’s natural selection that makes way for the more fit by killing off the less fit. Natural selection did not, indeed it cannot, induce better mutations. But when by chance they luckily arise, then they propagate at the cost of the lesser designs. Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted, is more optimistic sounding but no less telling. With evolution, death is the engine of progress. Or as Matt Ridley explained today, … Read more

A new paper has just been published in the journal Genome Biology by John Rinn and David Kelley, identifying a role for transposable elements in gene regulation in stem cells. Science Daily reports on the paper: Over a decade after sequencing the human genome, it has now become clear that the genome is not mostly ‘junk’ as previously thought. In fact, the ENCODE project consortium of dozens of labs and petabytes of data have determined that these ‘noncoding’ regions house everything from disease trait loci to important regulatory signals, all the way through to new types of RNA-based genes. Yet over 70 years ago, it was first proclaimed that all this junk wasn’t so junky. Barbara McClintock discovered the first utility of all Read More ›

In my previous two posts (see here and here) on feminist atheist Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog, I critiqued her embrace of evolutionary naturalism, and her rejection of the view that the cosmos was designed by an Intelligent Being. I then exposed the deficiencies in her ethical views, which have led her to conclude that human beings do not become persons until the moment of birth, and that abortion should be a woman’s legal right at any time before her baby is born. In my final post, I’m going to address the factual claims that Libby Anne makes in a post that subsequently went viral, entitled, How I lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her opening paragraph immediately grabs Read More ›

Here is a must see video that is well worth the five minutes of your time. It will have you asking, with evolutionist Ed Scholes, “Why?”  Read more

Evolutionary thought holds that the universe, the quasars, the galaxies, the solar systems, the planets and moons arose spontaneously by chance events and natural law. How that occurred is uncertain and under scientific investigation. That it occurred is not uncertain, it is a fact. These two different departments of evolutionary thought are disjoint. The fact of evolution does not derive from the particular theories of how it could have happened. It must be that way because there is substantial uncertainty of how it could have happened. Theories of the Solar system evolution, for instance, fall into two broad categories. In the monistic theories, the planets and Sun arise from the same process, such as in Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis. In dualistic Read More ›

A culture’s creation narrative is foundational, for it forms the template for everything else. One of the consequences of evolution—the belief that the world spontaneously arose by itself—is that it underwrites moral relativism, which is not to say there is no right and wrong but rather that right and wrong is something that we decide. And since evolution is true, it is to evolution that we go for our rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution there is no such endowment, for there is Read More ›

It’s another rags-to-riches evolutionary story, this time with epigenetics going from dog house to white house. First evolutionists denied epigenetics, then they said epigenetics are inconsequential and now they say epigenetics may be instrumental in, err, the origin of the human brain. That’s quite a turn around. When (i) leading evolutionists such as Jerry Coyneare saying epigenetic characters are not usually inherited past one or two generations and so are not “going to change our concept of evolution,” while (ii) research papers are concluding that epigenetic changes, coordinated with genetic changes, “could play a role in the evolution of the primate brain,” then you know something is wrong. Evolutionists are having to rewrite their story at an ever increasing rate to try to Read More ›

Ideas have consequences. Over the past century evolutionary thought has become dominant in much more than just the historical sciences. Other branches of science as well as education, law, history, public policy and media have increasingly been influenced by the idea that the world arose spontaneously. This tremendous influence of evolutionary thought has consequences that are largely misunderstood. The misconception is that, while there have been some missteps along the way such as in the twentieth century’s eugenics movement, those were both minor and largely behind us now and the greater and lasting consequences of evolution have been positive. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Read more

This morning, I ran across a news item on the “undiscovery” of Sandy Island off Australia: Most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, but a team of Australian scientists have done the exact opposite. They have found an island that doesn’t exist. (vid at the linked) This led me to think about the institution of an award for exposing scientific fraud and a NewScientist interview with Shi-min Fang, its first recipient: What prompted you to start challenging dubious pseudoscientific claims in China? In 1998, after eight years studying in the US, I returned to China and was shocked to see it was deluged with pseudosciences, superstitions and scientific misconduct. . . . (This one is disturbing, NS even speaks of Read More ›

The video below documents, in detail, three separate chapters in the story of the treatment my Applied Mathematics Letters article has received in the last two years. It is a story about how the scientific consensus can be maintained on controversial issues, even when it is bad science. After seeing this, Tom Woodward, during a recent interview with me on his radio program, said “It is almost like we are in the midst of a Soviet-run propaganda system, where anything that does not line up with the party doctrine is squashed.” [youtube ZFMXR6PqGtg]