Culture

Folks, it’s Darwin Day, when we are told by Darwinians to celebrate “intellectual bravery.” Very well, here is some: Dissent from Darwinism, the vid: What do you give a great scientist for his birthday when he’s already got everything? He’s got absolutely all the scientists behind his theory. All the media. All the Officially Smart People, as Jay Richards calls them. Well, today is Darwin’s Day, the birthday of the venerated Charles Darwin, whose theory is a fact beyond question. Right? The journal Nature assures its readers, “Scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact.” Or as philosopher Michael Ruse wonderfully put it, “Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!” The insistence on this point encourages Read More ›

In American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine, Science,  we read, In the grand scheme of evolution, mutations serve only to break structures and degrade functions, Behe argues. He allows that mutation and natural selection can explain species- and genus-level diversification, but only through the degradation of genes. Something else, he insists, is required for meaningful innovation. Here, Behe invokes a “purposeful design” by an “intelligent agent.” There are indeed many examples of loss-of-function mutations that are advantageous, but Behe is selective in his examples. He dedicates the better part of chapter 7 to discussing a 65,000-generation Escherichia coli experiment, emphasizing the many mutations that arose that degraded function—an expected mode of adaptation to a simple laboratory environment, by the Read More ›

In time for Darwin’s birthday February 12: The Dissent statement represents a splash of cold water on the great man. It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions. They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is Read More ›

Vox Day (actually Theodore Beale, a science fiction writer and video game designer) has been critiquing Darwinian evolution (which he calls TENS – Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection) of late: Here, he talks about recent findings that bird beaks don’t necessarily change to adapt to environmental conditions (as was thought to be the case with Darwin’s iconic finches in the Galapagos): Notice that the evolutionary skeptic’s position has consistently proven to be more reliably scientifically post-predictive than the mainstream evolutionist position: … I’m not even remotely surprised by this, although I am certainly amused given the central importance of bird beaks to the history of TENS. The more that biological science advances, particularly on the genetic front, the weaker, Read More ›

Some of us try not to wade into theology as such very much for the same reasons as we try to avoid taking a whack at the tarbaby. Where theology is directly relevant – for example if someone claims that there is an “artistic license to lie” about traditional religious ideas about the universe, well, we don’t have much choice, do we? Just recently, a troubling statement emerged: A notion of theology that suggests it is somehow counter-real or anti-real. A priest explains, in a post mainly devoted to issues in the Vatican’s media office: But on the communications front, 2018 demonstrated amply that it is not the supposed “enemies” of the pope who cause the Holy Father the most Read More ›

A zoologist asks why we need to see Neanderthal man as dumb: Talking about a recent paper discussing differences in skull shape, he notes, In the Pleistocene world of rapidly changing ecological scenarios luck had everything to do with success or failure. It was all about being in the right place at the right time, something that natural selection – with its restriction of acting in the present on templates from the past – could not respond to fast enough. And so we have consistently mistaken survival and extinction with biological superiority or inferiority. That is why we have incessantly sought differences to explain our observations. We are here and they are not and so we must seek differences to Read More ›