Below is the Preface for my new, unpublished, manuscript, Common Sense in Christian Theology: Supplement to “In the Beginning…” . The manuscript can be viewed here : My 2010 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design is a collection of short articles on Intelligent Design (ID) and related topics. That book dealt with the evidence supporting the conclusion that we are designed, and, with the exception of the “Epilogue,” which is repeated here as Chapter 13, it was an entirely scientific book, even if it reached conclusions with obvious theological implications. I have now written a Supplement to that book which deals with the question of what this Designer is like, from a non-fundamentalist Read More ›

Deadly years ago, your usual news writer fended off critics of her housekeeping who wanted to know why she did not kill spiders. Well, the only explanation she could think of was the obvious one, they kill a bunch of stuff we don’t appreciate particularly, so we don’t have to. Here’s how:

A few days ago, UD News posted a comment on a scare mongering story in a British popular science magazine, on how “Creationists” in Texas were allegedly tainting textbooks through the buying power of that state. By comments 3 and 4 we read: 3 wd400October 7, 2013 at 2:05 pm First, how do they know? I dunno, why don’t we ask… News at uncommon descent 4 Alan FoxOctober 7, 2013 at 2:09 pm *Applauds* Hilarious, wd400! This seems to be a part of a recent wave of comments that target the UD News desk. It pivots on the ASSUMPTION that “Creationists” are tainting textbooks in Texas, and therefore the purchasing power of Texas spreads that taint far and wide. But Read More ›

So they say here: “Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified. In particular, it has been uncertain how ants—the world’s most successful social insects—are related to bees and wasps,” Ward said. “We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera.” That suggest that “most” classifications are a mess. But why?

Here: The findings, say the authors, show that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of a scientific publication: they rarely agree on the importance of a particular paper and are strongly influenced by where the paper is published, over-rating science published in high-profile scientific journals. Furthermore, the authors show that the number of times a paper is subsequently referred to by other scientists bears little relation to the underlying merit of the science.