Today, Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West, provided a  helpful Q & A write-up on Evolution News and Views.  The article, entitled Clarifying the Issues at Ball State: Some Questions and Answers addresses the most salient points about the recent letter sent to Ball State’s President, Dr. Joanne Gora, which I wrote about here on UD yesterday.  Today’s article from Dr. West clarifies the issues and makes clear that the aim is to support academic freedom for all professors – both those who oppose ID and those who advocate it; both those who advocate atheism, and those who do not.  However, as Dr. West’s article also makes clear, if BSU opts to continue to enforce this new policy, then it must Read More ›

Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. This is so true that I rarely post here anymore. Why bother? Darwinism is beat up everyday by its adherents doing experiments. Here’s another one. The team investigated the validity of Haldane’s predictions for the probability of fixation of a beneficial allele. They used C. elegans because it reproduces asexually, thus ensuring “genetic identity” from one generation to the next. While validating Haldane’s predictions for the initial introduction of both deleterious and beneficial alleles to a population, they found this: If its [i.e., the allele’s] frequency was higher than 5% (when more than five different individuals in a population of 100 individuals), the allele was perceived as deleterious and it started to be Read More ›

We, the undersigned atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other non-believers, hereby condemn Richard Dawkins’ continued comments trivializing what he termed ‘mild’ sexual abuse of children. Dr. Dawkins is seen by many as a representative of the atheist community — but when it comes to his dismissive comments on the incredibly serious topic of sexual abuse, the atheist community emphatically does not stand with him. Dr. Dawkins has publicly compared childhood sexual abuse favorably to teaching children about Hell since at least the publication of The God Delusion. He has extrapolated from his relatively trauma-free experience with sexual abuse to make general comments about the experiences of other victims. These comments have received serious criticism from victim advocates as misrepresenting the Read More ›

Trinidadian Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last WTC 9/11 survivor to be pulled from the rubble of the collapsed towers, has a story of miraculous survival, complete with her angel, Paul, who held her hand as she awaited rescue. In summary: [Genelle] was a Port Authority worker, working on the 64th floor of one of the WTC towers, on September 11, 2001 when she felt the building shake and heard the noise of the first impact. A look out the window showed papers floating in the sky, but it was not clear what had happened until she saw news reports on a TV in a conference room. Strange as it seems today, she and her co-workers were instructed to stay in the Read More ›

First gear discovered With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mph—quite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long. This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect Read More ›

By now, I’m sure most of you have heard about the academic freedom controversy surrounding Ball State University and the investigation of physics professor, Eric Hedin (pronounced he-deen).  Discovery Institute’s Evolution News and Views has published several stories over the past few weeks, most notably this, this, this and this.  (Articles on the entire saga can be found here.) Today, the DI launched a new web-page so you can help get the message of academic freedom to the BSU Board of Trustees.  If you believe in academic freedom, like I do, then please take a look at the page and add your voice.  The kind of treatment foisted upon Prof. Hedin is what you might expect in a totalitarian regime, Read More ›

While having lunch at ICC 2013 with biologist and genetic engineer Robert Carter and the unnamed evolutionary biologist who got laughed off stage (let us call him Erik), I raised a question which the evolutionary biologist and other Darwinists (including Michael Lynch) have not provided satisfactory answers for, namely, “what is the evolutionary simulation that will resolve problems of speed limits of evolution, cost of substitution, rate of substitution, neutral evolution, Haldane’s dilemma, Muller’s ratchet, Haldane’s ratchet, Kondrashov’s question, mutational meltdown, etc?” John Sanford, Walter ReMine, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Robert Carter, others created Mendel’s Accountant. Erik kept lambasting the program, “did you model recombination, do you model variable population sizes, do you model linkage, synergistic epistasis, truncation Read More ›

Tania Lombrozo has a great piece up at NPR on why, more importantly than common ground, is charitable ground.
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