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2007: Darwinist efforts to stifle the ID community are beginning to fail

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Guillermo Gonzalez.jpg

2007

The top intelligent design book honors for 2007 goes to Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution. Biochemist Behe reviews the scientific data and lays out clearly what evolution can and cannot do which he identifies as the “Edge of Evolution.” The genomes of many organisms have been sequenced, and the machinery of the cell has been analyzed in great detail. The evolutionary responses of microorganisms to antibiotics and humans to parasitic infections have been traced over tens of thousands of generations. As a result, for the first time in history Darwin’s theory can be rigorously evaluated. The results are shocking. Although it can explain marginal changes in evolutionary history, random mutation and natural selection explain very little of the basic machinery of life. The “edge” of evolution, a line that defines the border between random and non-random mutation, lies very far from where Darwin pointed. Behe argues convincingly that most of the mutations that have defined the history of life on earth have been non-random.

Most Darwinist response is ill-informed attacks and cries of “Darwindunit!” when it was plentifully obvious that Darwin didn’t do it.

Academic Persecution Continues. Last year Richard Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian for “allowing” a pro-intelligent design paper to be published. This year noted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University because of his intelligent design affiliations and the Baylor University administration shut down Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab and website for similar reasons. These three tragic stories and others will be exposed in the Ben Stein documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed to appear in theaters nationwide next spring.

These efforts were not successful. Gonzalez continued a productive publishing career in the study of exoplanets at Grove City College, and Marks continued to undermine Darwinism by his skeptical computer studies at Baylor.

Broken Molecular Clock. In a paper that challenges the Darwinian model of evolution, University of Pittsburgh professor, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, contends that evolutionary changes occur suddenly as opposed to the Darwinian model of evolution, which is characterized by gradual and constant change. Schwartz’s paper, “Do Molecular Clocks Run at All? A Critique of Molecular Systematics,” appears in the journal Biological Theory.

It seems that by 2007 Darwinists were having a little more difficulty keeping informed criticism destroying critics, ID-friendly or otherwise, or stifling evidence – not that they stopped trying. It’s worth noting that the Darwin lobby has a full time enforcement agency, National Center for Science Education, but the ID community neither has nor desires any such thing.

Next: 2008: Lots of people doubt Darwin that you didn’t think would, and are not afraid to say so

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