Who said that? Phillip Johnson? Mike Behe? Nope. Materialist atheists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, in What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. xxii: … we’ve been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Audio: Rabbi who knows science better than atheists
Historically, not a rare event. Here Rabbi Moshe Averick does an interview with host Ken R. Unger,a “true Renaissance Man”, who notes Atheists sound real smart until they come up against someone who knows science better than they do. Today’s guest, Rabbi Moshe Averick, is just that kinda guy. His book Nonsense a High Order: Read More…
Quote mining: Quoting someone saying something that proves inconvenient to a would-be authority
In the face of charges from a frantic Darwinist, Paul Nelson points out that he is not “quote mining” when he quotes Lewis “Six Impossible Things” Wolpert making the same argument as himself:
Is intelligent design science? Here’s an answer you didn’t expect from an atheist prof
Bradley Monton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, offers: So does intelligent design count as science? I maintain that it is a mistake to put too much weight on that question. Larry Laudan got the answer right: If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we Read More…
ID theorists are “evil and adulterous generation”?
[If so, give your UD news staff a chance to duck before you tell their wives … Like, we just report, okay … ] Apparently worried by a recent trend toward critical thinking, the evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Covalence has republished a 2002 article by Christian Darwin stalwart George Murphy on what’s wrong with Read More…
Natural selection proves a harsh mistress anyway
Paul Nelson has fun at Evolution News and Views with diagrams and “ontogenetic depth”: Understanding Ontogenetic Depth, Part I: Naming Versus MeasuringI was supposed to do this a year ago — well, long before that, too — but a glacier passed me on the interstate, and then I ran out of gas, got so depressed Read More…
He said it: Science needs to fail to advance?
At National Public Radio, Marcelo Gleiser asks (April 6, 2011), “Can Scientists Overreach?”.Glieser, a theoretical physicist, offers an appreciation of Marilynne Robinson’s Yale lectures, offering: For science to advance it needs to fail. The truths of today will not be the truths of tomorrow. For example, … Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were Read More…
Darwinism and popular culture: PayPal co-founder on Darwin’s effect
At TechCrunch (Apr 10, 2011), Sarah Lacy catches Peter Thiel in a politically incorrect moment in “We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.”: the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is Read More…
Stasis for a half billion years …
File under this one under: If it ain’t broke … In Current Biology (Volume 21, Issue 7, 612-616, 24 March 2011), we read that A 525 million year old fossil hemichordate with preserved soft tissues is the earliest and largest fossil hemichordate zooid and offers unmatched insight into the fossil anatomy and evolution of the Read More…
They said it: Why did two materialist atheists write a book against Darwinism?
“A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.” You might reasonably wonder whether writing a critique of the classical Darwinist programme is worth the effort at this late date. Good friends in ‘wet’ biology tell us that none of them is Read More…
He said it: ID means that divine and human are comparable
University of Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller has commented The Guardian (3 May 2010): The most basic formulation of ID is that biology is divine technology. In other words, God is no less – and possibly no more – than an infinitely better version of the ideal Homo sapiens, whose distinctive species calling card is art, Read More…
Bio-Complexity paper: Similarity of enzyme structure does not guarantee ease of interconversion
Doug Axe and Ann Gauger have a new peer-reviewed paper up at BIO-Complexity which provides a quantifiable measure of how many mutations are required for a relatively simple biological innovation – the functional conversion of one enzyme to that of its closest structural neighbor. The authors argue that their results show that similarity of structure Read More…
No, it’s not just ID; it’s pervasive
Debra J. Saunders (“Academic Mission or UCLA Speech Code?”, April 12, 2011) reports, If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom.
She said it: Journalist Suzan Mazur on Darwinist politics
“But why has the discourse become so frat house – animal house?” – Suzan Mazur, The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, North Atlantic Books, 2010, p. 235. Thoughts?
Darwin’s natural selection explains why we don’t see space aliens
Mark Buchanan suggests (08 April 2011) at New Scientist that the “Aliens who hide, survive”. Attempting to explain why, if there are really so many space aliens, none of them have ever contacted us to pick up their legacies or their mail, he offers that – as always – natural selection is the answer: In Read More…