Darwinism

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Last month, Wikipedia removed the entry on German insect paleontologist Günter Bechly, seemingly due to his position on intelligent design (ID), the scientific movement considering evidence for design behind nature — a movement opposed to Darwinian evolution. While editors claimed Bechly was not “notable” enough to warrant an entry, others with fewer career accomplishments have long pages on Wikipedia, and Bechly has a distinguished career. … When Wikipedia editors discussed deleting Bechly’s page, the scientist posted his own credentials. He provided links to press, TV, and radio segments mentioning his work, exhibitions he designed, and a few articles from the BBC and Scientific American. “Add to that three described new insect orders, more than Read More ›

Reader Edward Sisson writes to tell us of his encounter with the Who–Whom of science, in connection with the recent Armitage soft dinosaur tissue case:  It reminds me of an idea I had in about 2003, when I was at Arnold & Porter representing (pro bono, with firm authorization) ID organizations and people, for a study and book based on the study, working title “Who Controls Whom in Science.” The basic idea was to research and chart the individuals in power-relationships within academic science — editors of journals, persons on tenure committees, persons who have mentored PhD candidates, persons who sit on PhD thesis defense committees, etc. The research would be updated and published annually. This identifies the individuals in Read More ›

So do they think that we humans will evolve into separate species as a result of migration and founder effects? If not, what does “evolution” mean? From David Warmflash at the Genetic Literacy Project: The goblin shark, duck-billed platypus, lungfish, tadpole shrimp, cockroach, coelacanths and the horseshoe crab — these creatures are famous in the world of biology, because they look as though they stopped evolving long ago. To use a term introduced by Charles Darwin in 1859, they are “living fossils”. And to their ranks, some have added humans, based on the idea that technology and modern medicine has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated natural selection by allowing most infants to live to reproductive age and pass on their Read More ›

From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, What modern Darwinism is asking us to admire is a husk of something once living, but with its vital core drained away as we have poked and prodded with our naughty thumbs until we are left with nothing but the beautiful shell. In short, the science of life has become disenchanted with life itself. That is the looming crisis I described in the Preface. (Kindle Locations 4263-4266). Sometimes, hope floats along on hidden reservoirs of the best tradition of classical liberalism, as in Stephen Jay Gould’s quiet supervision of a young Earth creationist, Kurt Wise, for his doctoral degree in Read More ›

Jerry Fodor was one of the Altenberg 16* and author of What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Correction: Jerry Fodor was interviewed in the book “The Altenberg 16” by Suzan Mazur  (Chapter 3)  but is not one of the 16 scientists that met at Altenberg in 2008. Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Fodor’s page at Rutgers University doesn’t mention What Darwin Got Wrong, co-authored with Massimo Piattelli Palmarini. There is, however, a link to the pdf of a paper, “Against Darwinism,” identified as forthcoming: This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before.  But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was Read More ›

Most people mistakenly think that Intelligent Design is anti-evolution. That is not correct. To understand Intelligent Design’s criticism of evolution, it is important to pinpoint specifically where we believe evolutionary biology made a wrong turn and why it matters.

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This sort of finding, assuming it holds up, is killing Darwinism. From ScienceDaily: The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age — pointing to the possibility that they were lagging biologically. “In children, we think slower epigenetic aging might indicate an inability to thrive,” said Michael Kobor, a Professor in the UBC Department of Medical Genetics Read More ›

  From Michael Chaberek, OP, in Aquinas and Evolution: When a scientist discovers the material or the efficient cause while not finding any other, it does not follow that no other causes exist. It simply means that the scientific explanation does not include those other causes. This is not reductionism, because drawing more abstract and general conclusions about living beings as separate substances (or nature as a whole) is outside of science. Reductionism begins not when scientists speak about material and efficient causes alone, but when they (or anyone else) claim that scientific knowledge is the only possible type of knowledge, or that science explains everything, including the mystery of life. And this is not what the proponents of intelligent Read More ›

Ask a scholar. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, introducing a podcast with German history scholar Richard Weikart, author of Hitler’s Religion In an ID the Future conversation with Todd Butterfield, Professor Weikart reveals the complexity of his topic — Hitler’s true religious views, which are so often subjected to, yes, simplistic caricature. Sometimes you’ll see Hitler portrayed as a Christian, other times as an occultist. Neither is true. You could call him a pantheist. More. Podcast here: On this episode of ID The Future, Tod Butterfield talks with CSC Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weikart about his recently published book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. In particular, Weikart explores Hitler’s pantheism and his Read More ›

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains: Our best theories, like the aforementioned theory of evolution, the Big Bang theory, and Einstein’s General Relativity, cover all of these bases. They have an underlying quantitative framework, enabling us to predict what will happen under a variety of situations, and to then go out and test those predictions empirically. So far, these theories have demonstrated themselves to be eminently valid. Where their predictions can be described by mathematical expressions, we can tell not only what should happen, but by how much. For these theories in particular, among many others, measurements and observations that have been performed to test these theories have been supremely successful. More. “Fossils, genetic inheritance, and DNA prove the theory of evolution” Read More ›

From Phoebe Weston at the Daily Mail: Falling in love is one of life’s great mysteries, but now scientists believe this strange feeling could be key to our evolutionary success. For the first time researchers have found evidence ‘selection promoted love in human evolution’ as it increased the chances of us having families. Scientists studied the Hadza people of Tanzania, who don’t use modern contraception, and found passionate partnerships were associated with having more children. It follows previous research that found love may have evolved to stop male primates from killing their infants. More. From the human history for which we actually have a good deal of evidence (not just from a small, outlier group), “passionate partnerships” were not the main Read More ›

Extinct animals? Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to Theo Murphy International scientific meeting organised by Dr Rob Knell, Dr Dave Hone and Professor Doug Emlen [May 9-10 2018] Sexual selection is potentially an important driver of macroevolutionary processes like speciation and extinction, but this has rarely been tested using the fossil record. This meeting will bring biologists and palaeontologists together to discuss sexual selection’s role in macroevolution, how to detect it in extinct animals and how to measure its influence on the history of life across geological time. One thing about studying sexual selection in extinct animals, we may never be able to find out if we are wrong. Sexual selection was Darwin’s other Really Big Theory of how evolution happens, Read More ›

Linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages) writes, Recently listened to “Noam Chomsky speaks about Universal Linguistics: Origins of Language” on YouTube. The talk was at Winona State University in Minnesota on March 20, 1998. This is about 20 years back, and the man could more comfortably sound like an ID person than he could now. He is a Cartesian, meaning that for all practical purposes he accepts the mind-body distinction, that is, that human language is creative yet operates within the parameters of grammar that is innate. Yet he says there is no physical-mental distinction because there is no physical. Newton’s law of gravitation–an attractive force at a distance–is as mystical and unexplainable as the telekinesis of a psychic (if Read More ›

  A new book critiquing theistic evolution is hitting the shelves. But meanwhile, a Catholic book along the same lines, Aquinas and Evolution by Michael Chaberek, OP, is performing a much-needed service: Helping people understand that Catholicism is not a branch of naturalist atheism. To listen to some Catholic evolutionists, we might find it hard to distinguish. Brief excerpt from Chaberek: Thomistic critics of ID reject ID for “philosophical reasons” and adopt the Darwinian explanations for the “scientific reasons.” But this means that they fight the alleged mechanistic reductionism of intelligent design and, at the same time, they accept the real and quite blatant reductionism of the Darwinian theory. Indeed, there is no greater misunderstanding of life and no greater reductionism in biology Read More ›

Structuralism just means that what can really happen in evolution is probably governed by physics and chemistry, rather than by biologist suggesting why one outcome or another is, in a Darwinian sense, more fit (Darwinsplaining). Explanations that fit a constantly shifting theory are easy to make up after the fact. Real explanations are hard work. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: A mini-exhibit in Amsterdam of D’Arcy Thompson themes set up for the public to view by Dutch academics who recently held a private meeting on these subjects, seems clearly anticlimactic to the rich display offered the public at the centenary celebration of Thompson’s On Growth and Form book last month in Scotland. … It could have been a far livelier Read More ›