Evolution

Science friction: God’s defenders target 3000 schools
By Linda Doherty and Deborah Smith

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/13/1131816809073.html
November 14, 2005

Up to 3000 schools have been targeted in a DVD blitz aimed at challenging Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favour of an “intelligent designer”.

The right to teach intelligent design in science classes is being tested in US courts and a fiery debate has erupted in Australia that has pitted scientists against advocates for the “alternative theory” to evolution.
Proponents of intelligent design say some forms of life are so complex they can be explained only by the action of an unspecified “intelligent designer”, who some say is God. Read More ›

Kansas Evolution Ruling Chases Jobs Away By Scott Ott . . . According to an unnamed spokesman for the corporate coalition, the businesses plan to relocate to communities in states “where faith in evolution helps to build strong families and produces workers who know the value of slow, undirected change over vast spans of time.” “The last thing our companies need is a wave of employees who use logic to question orthodoxy and demand proof for dogmatic assertions,” the spokesman said. “Kansas employers are saying, ‘Give me that old time evolution. It was good enough for our mothers and it’s good enough for me’.” http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=2059

Jeffrey Shallit’s deposition in the Dover case is now available online (go here). The deposition itself was attached to the Plaintiff’s argument against the Defense’s motion for summary judgment (go here). I solicit your reactions to Shallit’s deposition.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5007508

[From a colleague:] The way a scientific theory gets empirically established is not by showing that the evidence requires that precise theory. That is an impossible task–there are always infinitely many theories that fit the data. Rather, it gets established through showing that the evidence discredits the main alternative theories but does not discredit this theory. Read More ›

Evolution suffers Kansas setback The US state of Kansas has approved science standards for public schools that cast doubt on evolution. The Board of Education’s vote, expected for months, approved the new language criticising evolution by 6-4. Proponents of the change argue they are trying to expose students to legitimate scientific questions about evolution. The Kansas decision came as voters in Pennsylvania replaced all eight school board members who approved a similar policy in some of the state’s schools. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4419796.stm

The Epicurean trilemma (see Hume’s Dialogues) tries to reconcile: (1) God is good, (2) God is all-powerful, (3) Evil exists. Ian Bibby just sent me this Darwinian trilemma: Science cannot test the proposition that biological features are designed. Darwinism explains the appearance of design in biology not as actual design but as the product of natural selection and random variation. Darwinism is science.

The first mention of the Vise Strategy appeared on this blog here. I devised the Vise Strategy to aid the Thomas More Law Center in interrogating the ACLU’s expert witnesses in the Dover Trial. Since all witnesses in that trial have now been called (all that remains is for Judge Jones to render his verdict), I am making available the full-blown Vise Strategy here.

[As one of my colleagues has put it:] “The Grantsburg school board deserves congratulations. Finally, a local school district has adopted the kind of policy we’ve all been recommending for so long. This policy appears to be bullet-proof from a legal perspective. It will be interesting to see how the ACLU/NCSE/Americans United crowd will respond to this policy. It will also be interesting to see how –or if– the legacy media will cover this victory for quality science education.”

‘Teaching the controversy’ in Wisconsin
By Lawrence Hardy
http://www.asbj.com

It will be deer season soon in Northern Wisconsin.

Winter will come, the nights will grow long, and the ice-fishing shacks will appear like matchboxes on the frozen glacial lakes.

The forests that teem with wildlife — sandhill cranes and eagles, grouse and ospreys, thousands of ducks and geese — will seem quieter now that the brief summer is over.

But in the town of Grantsburg, five miles from the winding St. Croix River and the Minnesota border, the turmoil isn’t over, even though school officials say they very much want it to be.

“It’s done. I don’t have anything more to say,” says Cindy Jensen, a board member for the 1,000-student Grantsburg Schools. “Hopefully, the waters are calmer now.”

It’s been almost a year since the school board approved a curriculum that will require science teachers to ask students to think critically about evolution — to “teach the controversy,” as the board puts it. Read More ›

[Excerpt:] Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us. [For complete article, go here.]

Visit http://www.mutationengineer.homechoice.co.uk and you will see how a simple molecule could dramatically accelerate evolution in a way which might allow design without intelligence.

An Evolutionist’s Evolution By GLENN COLLINS, NYTimes, 7Nov05 It may seem that the American Museum of Natural History is cruising for controversy in presenting “Darwin,” the most comprehensive exhibition any museum has offered on the naturalist’s life and theories. It is a time, after all, when the theory of evolution by natural selection seems as newsworthy as it was back in the days of the Scopes trial 80 years ago. . . . The exhibition mentions intelligent design not as science, or as a theory to be debated, but as a form of creationism, which offers the biblical view that God created the earth and its creatures fully formed within the last 10,000 years. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled Read More ›

http://nsmserver2.fullerton.edu/departments/chemistry/evolution_creation/web

Rick Smalley, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Rice University, died earlier this week. You can read about his scientific contributions and passing here. I had the privilege of having lunch with Rick this summer. The meeting was arranged by his pastor at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, my friend Ben Young. Rick had in the previous year become a Christian as well as a member of Second Baptist Church, and begun to express his doubts about Darwinism publicly (see here and here). I reported on my lunch meeting with Rick here, though to spare him harrassment I did not mention him by name. Rick’s prediction at the end of his life was that ID would be mainstreamed in five years Read More ›

From “Science Versus Scientism” by John Silber (appeared in the Nov05 issue of The New Criterion):

The critical question posed for evolutionists is not about the survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutations and environmental influences over millions of years. Read More ›