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There have been a few limited skirmishes in Virginia over ID in the universities. Up until now the public school issue has been quiet. But are things set to change?

Ed Brayton brought this article to my attention: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

How were the oceans, puppies and human beings formed? Was it through evolution, creationism or something in between?

It’s a heavy topic that’s generated debate for years. That discourse landed in Chesterfield School Board members’ laps…

Intelligent design proponents urged the School Board to include that theory in the school system’s science curriculum so students can consider differing viewpoints in the classroom. But, federal law requires school systems to remain neutral on the topic, making it illegal for teachers to prompt discussions involving intelligent design or creationism.

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In a review of David Sloan Wilson’s book for popular audiences: Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, gives an unwitting slam of Darwinism. The review was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Selling Evolution

we discover that 54% of adults in the United States prefer to believe that humans did not evolve from some earlier species. What makes this figure surprising is that it is up from 46% in 1994.

The number of non-Darwinists is rising! Pagel then asks this rhetorical question, “Where have the evolutionists gone wrong?”
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Not one, but two book parties with the authors of the latest ID books! Tuesday, June 5th from 5:30 to 7 p.m.Darwin Strikes Back by Tom Woodward Wednesday, June 13th from 5:30 to 7 p.m.Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe The parties will be held at the Discovery Institute’s Washington DC office, located at 1015 Fifteenth Street, NW Suite 900. RSVP to Logan Gage at lgage@discovery.org, (202) 558-7085.

Last month I pointed out the unwitting admission by some Darwinists that Darwinism is useless to modern medicine (and for that matter modern science). [see: Darwin dissed by doctors, and a design revolution continues at MIT]. This month I’m pleased that world’s most prestigious scientific journal, Nature, has published a letter from a biophysicist who has (perhaps unwittingly) shown that the design revolution continues, and Darwinism is slipping into total irrelevance. Look at biological systems through an engineer’s eyes Physiologists have successfully analysed a large range of biological systems using this ‘device-oriented’ approach. For more than a century, medical students have used it to learn that the kidneys filter blood to make urine; the lungs transport oxygen from air to Read More ›

One of my favorite ID proponents, Frank Tipler, was recently interviewed on the Sci Phi show. To hear the 28-minute interview, visit: Frank Tipler on Sci Phi show. Some of Tipler’s ID-related work has appeared in prestigious journals like Nature. One of Tipler’s recent ID-related papers appeared in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics in 2005. Tipler lays out the physics in that technical article which he describes for the layman in his new book The Physics of Christianity. In addition, Tipler published some of his ID-related work on the Arxiv server. His most recent article is Intelligent Life in Cosmology [March 2007]. Here are some quotes: Teleology has been completely rejected by evolutionary biologists. This rejection is unfortunate, Read More ›

Charles Townes was the co-inventor of the laser and winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics. Jason Rennie of the SciPhi Show had an absolutely marvelous interview with Townes recently. This interview had many quotable gems from Townes.

Here is the link:

Charles Townes

Do you have CD player or other optical device which uses a laser? You can credit Townes for that!
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One of New York’s foremost brain surgeons, Dr. Michael Egnor, has repeatedly pointed out why Darwinism is irrelevant to modern medicine. See: Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?.

And it turns out, Michael Egnor’s claims are being supported by an uncomfortable admission by Catriona J. MacCallum, the Senior Editor at PLoS Biology. In the recent editorial Does Medicine without Evolution Make Sense? MacCallum writes:

Charles Darwin, perhaps medicine’s most famous dropout, provided the impetus for a subject that figures so rarely in medical education. Indeed, even the iconic textbook example of evolution “antibiotic resistance” is rarely described as “evolution” in relevant papers published in medical journals. Despite potentially valid reasons for this oversight (e.g., that authors of papers in medical journals would regard the term as too general), it propagates into the popular press when those papers are reported on, feeding the wider perception of evolution’s irrelevance in general, and to medicine in particular

Darwinists claim how important Darwinism is to science, but MacCallum’s editorial makes an embarrassing admission of Darwinism’s irrelevance to medicine. She also reports on the protests from medical students who find themselves forced to study Darwinism for no good reason. In reading the excerpt below, ask yourself, “why is it that a campaign has to be waged to teach Darwinism in science classes.” Do we need campaigns to teach the theory of gravitation or the periodic table?:
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Discovery Institute and FRC present: Washington DC Event – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea The Disturbing Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade. There is live video available for those who wish to see the event remotely. Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute shows the connection between Darwin’s ideas and America’s Eugenics Crusade.

Albert de Roos is a long time participant at International Society of Complexity Information and Design and Access Research Network. de Roos is not formally an advocate of intelligent design theory but has been a friendly and valuable supporter of the dialogue. His papers argue that in order for evolution to proceed, evolution must proceed by applying software design principles such as “design-by-contract”.

His accepted papers are:

Conserved intron positions in ancient protein modules Biology Direct 2:7

Recently, it was reasoned based on the engineering paradigm design-by-contract, that exon concatenation of modular exonic sequences was the basis of eukaryotic genome formation

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I’m pleased to point out one of the advertising sponsors of the Uncommon Descent website, Roddy Bullock, is also author of the pro-ID novel The Cave Painting

If you ever wished for a fun way to learn about intelligent design, here it is . . . Written for readers of all ages, the updated second edition of The Cave Painting is particularly suitable for high school and college students desiring to understand the truth about evolution and intelligent design.
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Renowned DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz wrote in One Believer’s Junk Is Another Believer’s Treasure; Quest for Predictive Scientific Theories on the Function of ‘junkDNA’

The national debate about Darwinism (D) contra Intelligent Design/Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ID/ET) centers on the nature of predictive and thus refutable scientific theories.

Most Darwinists erroneously predicted that 98.7% of the DNA was devoid of function (“junk”), while the ID/ET theory correctly predicted some yet to be decoded function of junkDNA.

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Has Barbara Forrest ever accepted Bill Dembski’s debate invitation? [See The Vise Strategy Revisited and Barbara Forrest: Will The Real Coward Please Stand Up] Apparently not. Now it seems the Darwinists at Southern Methodist University (SMU) are trying pull off their own Barbara Forrest imitation. See: Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us? Speaking of SMU, here are some events of interest: The Intelligent Design Controversy Thursday, April 12, William Dembski will be the featured speaker at the Dallas Christian Leadership luncheon at Southern Methodist University, to talk about the Intelligent Design Controversy. Thursday, April 12, 200712:15pm – 1:30pmSMU Umphrey Lee CenterBallroom (3rd Floor)Reservation Deadline: Noon Monday April 9 Ticket are $20 each, and for SMU Faculty/Staff $14 each, and Read More ›

From God’s Numbers:

Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. …Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific [sic] theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view.
….
Just 3 percent of the public self-identifies as atheist.

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I was nicknamed “Gas.”

Charles Darwin
Autobiography

Is evolution of antibiotic resistance by bacteria an example of Darwinism? Such a claim is very suspicious since Darwinism deals mainly with the origin of species.

Evolution of antibiotic resistance is an example of survival of the fittest within a species, not an origin of species. This phenomenon ought more properly to be credited to the ideas of Edward Blyth rather than Charles “Gas” Darwin.

Loren Eiseley, Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania correctly argues:

the leading tenets of Darwin’s work — the struggle for existence, variation, natural selection and sexual selection — are all fully expressed in Blyth’s paper of 1835.

[For more details, read Was Blyth the true scientist and Darwin merely a plagiarist and charlatan?]

Despite this, Panda’s Thumb author Tara Smith continues her usual equivocations about evolution here. If by “evolution”, one means change, then everyone is an evolutionist, even creationists like Blyth.
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[Event announcement] One hundred years ago on March 9, Indiana passed the world’s first forced sterilization law. Two years later, Washington State enacted a similar measure. Both laws were part of a crusade to breed better humans known as “eugenics.” Promoted by evolutionary biologists in the name of Darwinian natural selection, eugenics led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans against their will, many of whom would not be considered mentally handicapped today. Why did America’s leading scientists and scientific organizations embrace eugenics for so long? Was eugenics a logical application of Darwin’s theory, or a terrible misuse of it? What are the lessons we can learn from eugenics for today’s controversies over science and public policy? In Read More ›