Evolution

The Wars Over Evolution By Richard C. Lewontin New York Review of Books Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005 The Evolution-Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $25.95 Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd University of Chicago Press, 332 pp. $30.00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18363 “… Maybe God is lurking out there somewhere but He doesn’t leave any residue in our test tube, so we will be tempted to assume He doesn’t exist. This is a philosopher’s worry that does not, as far as I can tell, correspond to the way people really acquire their views of reality. Some may have had mountaintop conversions at some point in Read More ›

Last spring The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) hired me as an expert witness in the Dover area school district case regarding ID (Kitzmiller v. Dover). That case went to trial this week (26Sep05). Because the focus of that case and trial is a book titled Of Pandas and People and because I am the academic editor for the publisher of that book (i.e., The Foundation for Thought and Ethics [FTE]), when FTE tried to intervene in the case, TMLC decided to drop me as an expert witness, citing a conflict of interest. In any event, I did a lot of work on the case, including an expert witness report as well as a rebuttal of the opposing expert witness Read More ›

Authors of Proposed Changes to Kansas Science Standards
Dated March 29, 2005

September 27, 2005

To: Members of the Kansas State Board of Education

Re: Letter from THE ELIE WIESEL FOUNDATION FOR HUMANITY dated September 9, 2005, signed by Elie Wiesel and 37 other Nobel Laureates Read More ›

Exhibit 1: Letter by 6 Nobel laureates et al. to all 50 governors of the United States — go here.

Exhibit 2: DEFCON’S top 10 Places Where Science Education is Under Threat — go here.

As these exhibits indicate, the other side is pulling out all the stops. It makes you wonder whether they’ve got something to lose. Read More ›

MISSENSE MEANDERINGS IN
SEQUENCE SPACE: A BIOPHYSICAL
VIEW OF PROTEIN EVOLUTION
Mark A. DePristo, Daniel M. Weinreich and Daniel L. Hartl

“Taken as a whole, recent findings from biochemistry and evolutionary biology indicate that our understanding of protein evolution is incomplete, if not fundamentally flawed.” Read More ›

Rob Pennock, as the witness of the hour in the Dover case, is citing me shamelessly. According to the local paper (go here), the quote of the day is: “So long as methodological naturalism sets the ground rules for how the game of science is to be played, (intelligent design) has no chance (in) Hades.” — William Dembski, senior fellow at the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute. So who does set the ground rules for science? And why should be trust Darwinists like Pennock? Pennock lost my trust a long time ago (go here).

CHURCH/STATE AT DARTMOUTH By William F. Buckley Jr.
Tue Sep 27, 8:06 PM ET

The whole business of whether public schools can permit “intelligent design” to be acknowledged as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in explanation of human life will begin democratic exercises in a courtroom in Pennsylvania this week. There are regular flashpoints on this matter of the separation of church and state. Some of them test out constitutional questions, others merely modi vivendi. A week ago Noah Riner, the president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, ran into the wrath of orthodox hard-liners.

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From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. And just remember, those are our tax dollars with which he is going to indoctrinate our kids and oppose intelligent design. Here’s a novel thought: Let chancellor Hemenway and his colleagues come up with their own support that does not require the government establishing a secular religion based on evolution. Here is his letter: Read More ›

From: Kenneth Miller [mailto:Kenneth_Miller@Brown.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 2:17 PM
Subject: Re: Some other questions…

Dear Friend,

You are one of scores of people who have written messages to me as a result of my scientific testimony at trial in Harrisburg, PA. I hope you will forgive the fact that I cannot possibly reply to each of you individually. While I appreciate your comments and respect you right to hold views with which I disagree, I thought it might be helpful to make a few things clear. Read More ›

Colorado Springs Gazette on the Dover case, Tuesday’s edition (9/27/05).

Agreeing Only to Disagree on God’s Place in Science
By GEORGE JOHNSON

September 27, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/science/27essa.html?ei=5070&en=a8b05baabb3ce5f6&ex=1128484800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

… On matters scientific, Dr. Dawkins, who came from Oxford, and Dr. Conway Morris, a Cambridge man, agreed: The richness of the biosphere, humanity included, could be explained through natural selection. [I’ve corresponded with Conway Morris; he regards natural selection as an engine that powers evolution but not as what gives it direction. –WmAD] Read More ›

In today’s Washington Post, one reads: If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species’ DNA and the two animals’ population sizes. “That’s a very specific prediction,” said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project. Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted. COMMENT: Darwin’s theory Read More ›

The Dover Area School District trial about the teaching of ID starts today, and you can expect a lot of press coverage concerning it. Yesterday evening, the BBC interviewed me and Robert Boston of Americans United for Separation the Secularization of Church and State regarding Dover (it was a telephone debate). Boston was following the script of the Secular Coalition for America to a tee: ID is biblical creationism with biblical references omitted (so what do you do with Plato, Aristotle, and Antony Flew?); ID has no presence in the scientific community (so what do you do with the recent peer-reviewed publications?); yeah, but 99.9% of publications reject ID (but just moment ago you said it was 100%); etc. Dealing Read More ›

Although it is widely known that Charles Darwin was a man of independent means (approximately US$10,000,000 in current money), recent historiographical studies have unearthed a new source of that money. Previously, it was thought that his wealth all derived from a shrewd marriage and wise investments. It has now come to light that a significant portion of that wealth derived from ownership of a wool factory, wool being the commodity that Darwin used to pull over the eyes of the scientific community.

Sad to say, the imperialist reactionaries against ID (e.g., ACLU and NCSE) have gotten their message out in China better than we have. See the recent report in the People’s Daily Online: http://english.people.com.cn/200509/24/eng20050924_210621.html.