Darwinism

Here Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib tells us that the gene that codes for colour in the Darwin textbook icon, the peppered moth, has been located (“The peppered moth’s dark genetic past revealed: Researchers find that a single ancestor is responsible for the ‘best example’ of natural selection.”).

The sacred story is recounted in a muted form, which is as much acknowledgement as Nature News (April 14, 2011) could accord to the considerable body of evidence that it is more aptly called the peppered myth: Read More ›

Here Darwin stalwart Nick Matzke gamely attempts to defend Barbara Forrest in the Beckwith Synthese affair, by pretending that there is some important discrepancy as to Beckwith’s unsympathetic views re intelligent design theory. Some background here.

Matzke must hope that everyone will overlook the fact that it was Forrest’s responsibility to get her facts right before she attempted a character assassination on Beckwith, and she signally failed to do so. Why Matzke and others can’t just accept that and move on remains a mystery.

Beckwith has always maintained a principle that may be difficult for some  to grasp: Read More ›

ID community reb Moshe Averick does not see the point of “Rabbis Without God (?!)”, as his punctuation would seem to suggest. (Algemeiner , April 14, 2011) He describes Rabbi Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, is a “humanist rabbi, ordained by the International Institute for Humanistic Judaism.” He graciously informs the interviewer that “he’s not out to poach souls [for atheism] from the nearby Hillel House, the Catholic Newman Center, or any of the other august religious institutions…on the campus of the country’s most prestigious university.” What he doesn’t tell us is the obvious reason why he’s not out to poach souls; as an atheist he does not believe in the existence of the soul. In the Read More ›

Just recently, it came out that some Darwin lobbyists are attempting to get redress for the fact that the journal Synthese was forced to disclaim an unscholarly attack by one of their number on Baylor philosophy professor Frank Beckwith in one of Synthese’s guest-edited issues.

Indeed!

I can shed a bit of light on the affair. Read More ›

At Religion Dispatches, Laurie “Devil in Dover” Lebo reports, “Anti-Science Bill Passes Tennessee House”: The bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, would require teachers to be helped “to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.” It also says that teachers may not be prohibited from “helping students understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.”Those “controversial” theories would include, “Biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” Sources say that many educrats prefer that none of these topics, nor any others that they may from time to time propose, be treated Read More ›

Richard Weikart’s essay, “A History of the Impact of Darwinism on Bioethics”* appears in 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact of Contemporary Thought and Culture, showing the way that Darwinism has impacted discourse on eugenics, infanticide, euthanasia, etc.: In November 2009, scholars representing academic disciplines from across the globe gathered at San Diego State University to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Out of this event now comes 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact on Contemporary Thought and Culture. Edited by Mark Richard Wheeler with the assistance of William A. Nericcio, this compelling, interdisciplinary anthology features studies of interest to diehard Darwin Read More ›

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: Read More ›

Here, Barry Arrington notes that MatthGrrl seems to think that specified complexity is a meaningful term if Leslie Orgel uses it to mean A, but not if Bill Dembski uses it to mean A.

This reminded me of something, couldn’t think what it was for a while, then remembered…

For a while, one heard the claim that ID advocates invented the Marx-Freud-Darwin triad of materialist influences evident in your Sunday Fishwrap.

That was an unlikely scenario in my experience because, in order to communicate with a broad audience from a minority position (which they apparently do if you believe the frantic screeds of the Darwin lobby), they must riff off an accepted cultural link.

Well, they did. Here it is, in a textbook written a person who, to the best of my knowledge was a thoroughgoing Darwin advocate at the time, Read More ›

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 that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.[ … ] But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to Read More ›

“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 ‘that kind” of Darwinist any more; no one in structural biology is a bona fide adaptationist. … We are pleased to hear of these realignments, but we doubt that they are typical of biology at large (consider, for example, ongoing research on mathematical models of optimal natural selection). They are certainly not typical of informed opinion in fields that either of us has worked in including Read More ›

Jerry Coyne, DN*, disses Lynn Margulis, NAS**, over her recent Discover magazine interview, here:

round 1970, biologist Lynn Margulis achieved renown for suggesting, and then showing, that eukaryotic cells originated by a symbiotic union of early prokaryotes, with some engulfing others and then the engulfed bacteria evolving into at least two of the cell’s vital organelles: mitochondria and (in plants) chloroplasts. Although others had suggested this before, Margulis gets the credit for pushing the theory forward, supporting it with biochemical and microbiological data, and recognizing its implications. Later work on DNA sequencing supported her completely.

But, alas, in his view, Read More ›

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 does not guarantee ease of interconversion, and that that goes to the root of all Darwinian trees based on such similarity.

Here’s the abstract: Read More ›

“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?

The National Center for Science Education (= Darwinism) provides a helpful summary of academic freedom bills regarding Darwinism and tax-funded compulsory education: This has been a busy year for creationists. Since January, anti-science legislators in seven states have proposed nine bills attacking evolution and evolution education. Many are so-called “academic freedom” bills, like Tennessee’s HB 368, which allows teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.” (For general background on academic freedom acts, go here.But that’s not all. Some of these bills also target such “controversial” theories as global warming, the chemical origins of life, and human cloning. Given Read More ›

… how they came to doubt Darwinism. As if doubting Darwinism were yet illegal … Well, I tell them, stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. If doubt is a problem for you now, you are your own prison. And just think what you saved the Darwinian State by not doubting openly.