Authors of Proposed Changes to Kansas Science Standards
Dated March 29, 2005September 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 ›
The Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee of the Computational Intelligence Society recently recently drafted the following statement at its Montreal meeting (go here for the full report; note that the minutes of this meeting will eventually appear here): Read More ›
Guillermo Gonzalez, ID theorist extraordinaire, spoke last night (9/28) at University of Northern Iowa (UNI). He was invited to speak there by the local chapter of Sigma Xi back in August. When the biology professors there caught wind of it in mid-September, they organized a petition statement very similar to the one organized by Hector Avalos et al. at Gonzalez’s home institution, Iowa State University (reported on this blog earlier — go here). As a result, the local media was extremely interested in his talk. Indeed, it was reported in just about every major Iowa paper. Not surprisingly, the auditorium was packed. When Gonzalez arrived last night, he found that someone had posted outside the auditorium a huge blowup of the petition statement with all its signatures and a signup sheet for people to add their signatures. 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 ETThe 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.
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).
I’ve just posted two pieces on my designinference.com website about the role of probabilistic reasoning in design inferences. The first is titled “A Primer on Probability for Design Inferences.” This piece is new. The second is chapter 33 from my book The Design Revolution, titled “Design by Elimination vs. Design by Comparison.”
On the Trail of Intelligent Design By Michael Scott Moore http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,376919,00.html … UCSD in [2001] had the only student club in America devoted to intelligent design. It was called the IDEA Club — “Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness” — and its website invited atheists and believers, evolutionist professors and young-Earth creationists, Phys.-Ed. majors and Hindus — absolutely anyone — to come in and wrangle over Darwin. Their openness impressed me. Disagreement and debate were part of the fun, at least in their online manifesto. They just wanted to talk. Sites like “The San Diego Humanist,” by contrast, published mean-minded, antireligious sarcasm. “We atheists and humanists and freethinkers have all been made to feel pretty much apart from the rest of the Read More ›
Letters to the Editor
By REGISTER READERS
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050927/OPINION04/509270355/1035/OPINION
September 27, 2005Intelligent designer behind such a planet?
By Hector Avalos
Steven Jay Gould tells us why in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. After conceding that critics of evolution had a strong case at the Scopes trial, Gould still thinks their intellectual descendants need to be neutralized: “They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies in the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women by reducing the vital concept of family to an outmoded paternalism, and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.” Is this debate about science or cultural control?
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 ›
Frank Beckwith’s initial salvo in an online debate with Douglas Laycock: http://legalaffairs.org/webexclusive/debateclub_id0905.msp.