A few years ago, Intelligent Design researcher Professor Michael Behe wrote a thought-provoking book entitled The Edge of Evolution, which argued that design was much more pervasive in Nature than commonly thought. Professor Behe argued that each and every class of living things, and quite probably each and every family, had been intentionally designed. Now, a recent paper by Dr. Branko Kozulic, a biochemist who serves on the editorial board of the Intelligent Design journal Bio-Complexity, argues that each and every species of living things was intelligently designed, and that the biological concept of a species can best be defined in terms of the unique proteins and genes that characterize it. In a nutshell, Dr. Kozulic’s argument is that there Read More ›

From ENV  — even as Dr Eugenie Scott of NCSE retires (having championed the ID is Creationism in a cheap tuxedo smear for years and years in the teeth of all correction . . . ) — we see a development, courtesy a whistle-blowing Law School student: The latest attempt to insert creationism into the classroom is what is known as the Theory of Intelligent Design. The theory is that all of the complex natural phenomena could not have happened randomly; there had to be a design and a designer. Since the concept of the designer does not require a biblical interpretation, its advocates believe that it could possibly pass constitutional muster. Some states have proposed that science standards be Read More ›

The NCSE has announced that their director Dr. Eugenie Scott will be retiring by the end of this year. I wonder who will be chosen to replace her? NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott announced on May 6, 2013, that she was planning to retire by the end of the year, after more than twenty-six years at NCSE’s helm. “It’s a good time to retire, with our new climate change initiative off to a strong start and with the staff energized and excited by the new challenges ahead,” she commented. “The person who replaces me will find a strong staff, a strong set of programs, and a strong board of directors.” During Scott’s time at NCSE, she was honored with Read More ›

Duane Gish passed away a few weeks ago, and even though I’m late in reporting it, I felt it important to offer a small tribute to him since he fought Darwinism for much of his life. I didn’t always agree with him, but before the ID movement, he was one of the few sufficiently competent voices in the world that articulated the case for intelligent design (albeit in a creationist context). From the NCSE website: The young-earth creationist Duane T. Gish died on March 5, 2013, at the age of 92, according to Answers in Genesis’s obituary. Born on February 17, 1921, in White City, Kansas, he served in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1946 in the Pacific Theater Read More ›

Contrary to what some scientists have asserted previously (see here and here), there’s no good evidence that humans were responsible for the extinctions of around 90 giant animal species that once roamed Australia – including the Diprotodon pictured above, a hippopotamus-sized giant wombat that roamed Australia until 46,000 years ago. In fact, most of these species had already disappeared by the time people arrived. That’s the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists in a major review of the available evidence, and published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract here). The study concludes that climate change, rather than overhunting by the first human beings to settle in Australia, was what brought about the demise Read More ›

Slate.com is all upset that repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008 was was rejected yet again in a 3-2 vote in the State Senate. 19 year old Rice University Student Zack Kopplin has been leading the charge to get this “outrage” done away with once and for all, with help from the usual suspects. What’s interesting to note is the reason that one Senator, Elbert Guillory, D-Obelousas, who essentially cast the deciding vote, gave for his vote against repeal. Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could “lock the door on being able Read More ›

Could proteins have developed naturally on Earth, without any intelligent guidance? The late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) thought not, and one can immediately grasp why, just by looking at the picture above, which shows the protein hexokinase, with much smaller molecules of ATP and the simplest sugar, glucose, shown in the top right corner for comparison (image courtesy of Tim Vickers and Wikipedia). Briefly, Hoyle argued that since a protein is typically made up of at least 100 or so amino acids, of which there are 20 kinds, the number of possible amino acid sequences of length 100 is astronomically large. Among these, the proportion that are able to fold up and perform a biologically useful task as proteins Read More ›

In recent decades biologists have discovered that organisms possess a variety of adaptation mechanisms far more sophisticated than ever imagined. Some of these mechanisms are regulatory in that they influence which genes are used at a given time. Other mechanisms change the genes themselves by mutating the DNA sequences. These adaptive mutations respond to the current environmental challenge and such findings contradict contemporary evolution’s view that mutations are blind to need and are preserved only by the action of natural selection. Now, new research suggests yet another adaptive mutation mechanism.  Read more

The following excerpt is taken from an Associated Press report by Melinda Deslatte, which was published in thetowntalk.com on May 1, 2013: A Louisiana law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms will remain on the books, despite criticism that it’s a back-door way to teach creationism. The Senate Education Committee voted 3-2 Wednesday against the proposal by Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, in what has become an annual debate before the panel. House Bill 26, which was sponsored by Senator Karen Peterson, was an attempt to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act. By deferring the legislation, the senators effectively killed it in committee. The Read More ›

For decades, physicists have been struggling to reconcile two very different pictures of the world: the classical view, which sees the world as being made up of discrete, well-defined objects; and the quantum view, in which things don’t have sharp boundaries but are blurred in space and time. Now, Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, suggests that the attempt to reconcile the two pictures within a unified theory may be a futile quest. Both pictures of reality, he believes, are true within their own respective domains. There’s an upside to this duality: “The classical universe and the quantum universe could then live together in peaceful coexistence,” writes Dyson, in a short essay Read More ›

When nineteenth century evolutionist Andrew Dickson White constructed a false history of science, casting evolutionists as the latest in a long history of heroic truth seekers who faced religious intolerance and opposition at every turn, he set in motion a powerful genre that would be difficult to stop. From White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom to the mythical Inherit the Wind, a fictional account of the famous 1925 Monkey Trial that evolutionists use to indoctrinate students such as Judge Jones, to today’s pundits and even President Obama, the false Warfare Thesis, which pits religion against science, is too powerful and alluring to allow the truth to get in the way. And so it is no surprise that with all the Read More ›

If you look at the news headlines over at Science Daily for May 3, 2013, you’ll immediately see that their top story is: “Monkey Math: Baboons Understand Numbers.” Which, to put it quite bluntly, is pure poppycock. The full title of the story linked to reads: Monkey Math: Baboons Show Brain’s Ability to Understand Numbers, which is equally misleading. The Science Daily news story is reprinted from a press release provided by the University of Rochester, a private research university in Rochester, New York, USA. The story’s opening paragraph makes the sensationalistic claim that olive baboons possess “the ability to understand numbers”: Opposing thumbs, expressive faces, complex social systems: it’s hard to miss the similarities between apes and humans. Now Read More ›

Sixty years have passed since Watson and Crick unveiled the structure of the DNA double helix and tentatively explained how it encodes hereditary information. The Central Dogma of genetics soon followed: that “DNA makes RNA makes protein” makes cells and organisms. Once this “River out of Eden” was flowing, the story of life was deemed to be essentially understood. Genes were considered to provide the blueprint of life and the task of filling in the details had begun. The blueprint motif was prominent in media coverage of the Human Genome project – any who questioned its veracity were regarded as subverting science. But is the consensus position robust? At least one commentator (Philip Ball in Nature) is prepared to say Read More ›

An 11.9 million-year-old ape fossil discovered in Catalonia, Spain, in 2002, and subsequently given the name Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, lived around the time when the great apes first appeared, according to Dr. Ashley Hammond, a University of Missouri anatomical expert who examined the creature’s pelvis and co-authored a recent study describing its morphology. Science Daily has a report on the study by Hammond et al., which is entitled, Middle Miocene Pierolapithecus provides a first glimpse into early hominid pelvic morphology, and which is due for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution later this year. Non-scientist readers who would like to know more about the fossil ape might like to read Victoria Woollaston’s report in The Daily Mail, here: it’s refreshingly Read More ›