Culture

Ever since Voltaire mythologized the Galileo Affair, Hume’s Philo demolished Cleanthes, and Gibbon blamed pretty much everything on the Christians, evolutionary thinking has had an unbeatable template: The Warfare Thesis. Anyone who opposes or even questions evolution is automatically branded as having religious motives. Religion is at war with science. That claim has failed the test of historiography over and over, but so what? Who cares about history? Certainly not journalists, policy makers, federal judges, textbook authors, and anyone else who matters. But now there is an entirely different, empirical, falsification of the Warfare Thesis, and evolutionists are in full-panic.  Read more

Your Excellency, I humbly ask you to strike a blow for academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom, by publicly forbidding Marquette University from calling itself a Catholic university henceforth, and by revoking the mandate of theology teachers at Marquette University to teach theology. In this letter, I’d like to explain why I believe these drastic measures are necessary and justifiable. Before I go on, I’d better introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m an Australian Catholic layman (now residing in Japan), with a Ph.D. in philosophy and several other degrees. Thanks to my years of study in an open academic environment where people were free to defend any and every point of view, I have a firm Read More ›

Says psychologist Oliver James at the Guardian: Low intelligence and high rates of mental illness are more common in poor people. Geneticists maintain that genes play a major role in causing both. But if they were right there would be an inexorable logic that suggests inferior DNA caused poor people to sink to the bottom of the gene pool. In the light of the findings of the human genome project, however, that idea is no longer defensible – as the leading psychologist Ken Richardson recently pointed out in the house magazine of the psychology profession. On the contrary, the implication of the unimportance of genes is that if we changed society in the right ways, we could virtually eradicate not Read More ›

Indoctrination provided painlessly through media and schools: From Salvo: Just as a fish doesn’t “notice” water unless the creek dries up, we often do not notice the catechism underlying the news stories, which forestalls our asking critical questions. Consider the story from late last summer that announced that chimpanzees and monkeys “have entered” the Stone Age (BBC News, August 18, 2015). The basis of the claim is that primates smash things with stones, even choosing the stones best suited to the task at hand. But then, so do some birds. More. No matter. Because we are the 98%-99% chimpanzee, there is a sure and certain hope that chimpanzees are entering the Stone Age. Evidence? No evidence would change anything anyway. Read More ›

From Zach Risdon at The Rebel: We generally think that those who push politically correct agendas on campus congregate in the social sciences. These people are annoying, but surely they have little influence on society as a whole, or more specifically, within medicine and science — fields focused on creating, discovering and building technology for the betterment of human existence, right? Well, I hate to break it to you, but the answer is an emphatic “no!” For example, the University of Calgary Department of Anthropology offers a course entitled “Sex and Gender.” As a student in that same department and college, my experience there has been almost always positive. However, this course is an exception. Here is the course outline Read More ›

From the New York Times, we learn: Ancestors of Modern Humans Interbred With Extinct Hominins, Study Finds The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science. The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded. “This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study. The new study expands on a series of findings Read More ›

From New Scientist: … That brings to the fore areas that are not part of the canon of evolutionary theory: epigenetics, for example, which studies how organisms are affected by changes in the ways in which genes are expressed, rather than in the genes themselves. Attempts to incorporate such elements into evolutionary theory have not always been welcomed, however. That is understandable, given how successful the theory has been without them. Occam’s razor applies: do not add complications unless they are absolutely necessary. But another motivating factor is undoubtedly the fear that if scientists themselves are seen to suggest that even small details of the theory of evolution could be improved upon, its detractors will seize upon them with avidity. Read More ›

A reader writes, to share this brief remembrance of Dr. Hughes  in Infection, Genetics and Evolution. Here’s a reminiscence from a friend as well: No one was exempt from his devastating critiques—friends, scientists, religious leaders. Jerry Coyne twice had the splendid misfortune of addressing topics better understood by Hughes, and from a conflicting point of view, resulting in chains of blogs, columns, and book reviews (for example, see “Faith, Fact, and False Dichotomies“). However, erroneous claims only seemed to bother him when tied to some metaphysical agenda, such as Coyne’s atheism. Conflict on other matters, such as hostile reviews of his work overturning well-accepted bird phylogenies, prompted easy resignation: “Oh well, I tried.” When it came to outlandish claims about evolution, Hughes Read More ›

But then we would need to replace a lot of science journalists. From Michael Schulson at Pacific Standard: Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America’s most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. “Our original story was based on what was known at the time,” host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. “Obviously the facts have changed.” It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don’t say that “facts change”; it is a journalist’s job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has Read More ›

My verdict: The debate would have been a better one without Krauss, who generally behaved like a boor, and who engaged in deliberate dishonesty (see below). Meyer and Lamoureux had a lively but amicable exchange of views. Meyer displayed admirable fortitude in soldiering on, even though he had a splitting headache. Introduction Host Karen Stiller introduces the debate, which is sponsored by Wycliffe College, in partnership with Faith Today, Power to Change, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and the Network of Christian Scholars. Professor Lawrence Krauss will speak first, followed by Dr. Stephen Meyer and finally, Dr. Denis Lamoureux. Professor Lawrence Krauss’s talk Professor Krauss begins by announcing that he wants to clear up a misconception. 3:52 Krauss declares: “The Discovery Read More ›

With your coffee … what to make of this comment by “Charley Horse” on Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016), comment appended to his review, Cashing in on the Oogity Boogity: Clother….you are not one of those militant Muslims that Denton’s fellow propagandists at the Discovery Institute kowtow to are you? For the record….the DI isn’t the only young earth creationist organization in the USA that has given aid and comfort to the militant Muslims…especially in Turkey. Les often quotes from one militant Muslim…..Adnan Oktar, also known as Harun Yahya. Wow. If Charley Horse has genuine information about “militants,” why doesn’t he go to the police? This is a long way from agnostic Denton or anything he can Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer, editor of Evolution News & Views: on the Toronto debate between Steve Meyer, Lawrence Krauss, and Denis Lamoureux It was not the ideal of a clash between ID and Lawrence Krauss’s atheism that one would hope for. However, the event was something else, in a way, of no less interest. It was a dramatic test and acting out of character. Almost as if it had been intelligently designed that way. Meyer’s courageous performance, while not his most articulate, was in a moral sense heroic. When all was said and done, Meyer with a migraine offered a whole lot more substance than either of his interlocutors. In addition, he was a gentleman throughout. His argument was about science Read More ›

Organisms have remarkable adaptation capabilities and evolutionists, ever since Darwin, have insisted that is powerful evidence of evolution. This is a blatant misrepresentation of science—when a heater turns on to warm the room do you think it must have therefore evolved?—and it is being revealed in the findings of epigenetics and directed adaptation. As I recently explained (The New Epigenetic Lie), rather than acknowledge and reckon with these findings, evolutionists have resorted to a two-prong canard: (i) claim that evolution knew it all along and (ii) claim that directed adaptation is simply a mode of evolutionary change. In other words, after resisting and rejecting directed adaptation for a century—and holding back science in the process—evolutionists are now claiming it as Read More ›

In tonight’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe,” debate, the topic of protein evolution induced a long sequence of blunders. Lawrence Krauss attempted to compare a protein to a snowflake. If snowflakes spontaneously arise, then why not protein-coding genes? When Stephen Meyer called him on his absurdity, Krauss doubled down, making the ludicrous claim that there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake, and that Shannon’s information theorem would tell you that.  Read more

Pro ID Steve Meyer. No ID Larry Krauss. As noted here, and live streamed: A discussion of Evolution, Intelligent Design and Creation, featuring Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer and Denis Lamoureux. Live at Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto. Sponsored by Wycliffe College in partnership with Faith Today, Power to Change, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and the Network of Christian Scholars. Questions like these will be posed to the panel: How did the universe originate? Does God play any role in the cosmos? What is the relationship between science and religion? Readers have probably heard of Steve Meyer and Larry Krauss. More. Lamoureux is a Canadian U Alberta religion and science prof, and this story gives some sense of his Read More ›