I do enjoy reading ID’s most vehement critics, both in formal publications (such as books and papers) and on the, somewhat less formal, Internet blogosphere. Part of the reason for this is that it gives one something of a re-assurance to observe the vacuous nature of many of the critics’ attempted rebuttals to the challenge offered to neo-Darwinism by ID, and the attempted compensation of its sheer lack of explicative power by the religious ferocity of the associated rhetoric (to paraphrase Lynn Margulis). The prevalent pretense that the causal sufficiency of neo-Darwinism is an open-and-shut case (when no such open-and-shut case for the affirmative exists) never ceases to amuse me.

One such forum where esteemed critics lurk is the Panda’s Thumb blog. A website devoted to holding the Darwinian fort, and one endorsed by the National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education (NCSE). Since many of the Darwinian heavy guns blog for this website, we can conclude that, if consistently demonstrably faulty arguments are common play, the front-line Darwinism defense lobby is in deep water.

Recently, someone referred me to two articles (one, two) on the Panda’s Thumb website (from back in 2007), by Arthur Hunt (professor in Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Kentucky). The first is entitled “On the evolution of Irreducible Complexity”; the second, “Reality 1, Behe 0” (the latter posted shortly following the publication of Behe’s second book, The Edge of Evolution).

The articles purport to refute Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity. But, as I intend to show here, they do nothing of the kind!

Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism has morphed into a Templeton-funded book. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, Read More ›

That was the title of one of my recent lectures at our church. You can download the PowerPoint presentation here.

Cautiously introduced as a “guest voice” in the Washington Post, commentator David Klinghoffer talks about Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection, as a voice for healing the current social divide between the elite sinless Monkeyman and the traditional popular Adam: Pro-Darwinian educators were frustrated this week to find that most public high school biology instructors in their teaching do not wholeheartedly endorse evolution. The teachers reflect a stubborn division across American culture. For the past three decades, Americans have been locked into a basically unchanging split of views on the subject, with only about 16 percent believing in Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. Darwinism is, at bottom, a theory about us (trousered apes, meat puppets, etc.). Now, obviously, when Read More ›

This is one of those stories about which one says, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

These three Ohio bucks somehow locked antlers while battling near a small creek. When one deer slid into a shallow pool, it sealed the fate for all three, who drowned together, antlers still locked. Steve Hill talked to the men who found and recovered the deer and their combined 400-inches of antler to bring you the story of this sad, almost poetic scene.

Some said, heartlessly, that they’d make a nice chandelier. Others asked sensible questions:

Wildlife biologists are taught that anthropomorphism—endowing the animals they study with human qualities—is not good science. Yet, says Mike Tonkovich, deer project leader for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “I can’t help wondering what was that third buck thinking? Whatever possessed him to get engaged when the two were already entangled?”

Mmmm … Stupidity? He wasn’t thinking anything? Question: How many times has this happened when no human was around to see it?

But others outgassed on Darwinism: Read More ›

I would not have known, if I hadn’t read Suzan Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 (on the growing collapse of Darwinism): While speaking at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society meeting one Saturday night (March 12, 2008) on his book, The God Delusion, as she tells it, Richard Dawkins

admitted to being “guilty” of viewing Darwinism as a kind of religion and vowed to “reform”

Having a natural interest in reform, I would be most interested to learn of any evidence for this one. But now this, from Mazur:

(no one was allowed to tape Dawkins’ confession, however, with organizers of the event threatening to march offenders around the corner to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). (p 97)

Can’t help wondering whether the warning was principally aimed at Mazur. Certainly, in her book, she manages to put a number of Darwin devotees and their enablers, whom the New York Times considers important authorities for no particularly good reason, in a much less flattering light than they are used to.

It seems that Mazur had met up with Dawkins the night before at a book signing. On self-organization theory (to which Mazur is partial), he noted, Read More ›

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

… my sister’s husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn’t wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they’ve gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society’s disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of “free will” or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual — an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this: Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, morphed into a Templeton-funded book taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, “In Read More ›

Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life , sent this note re the latter book: John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of Read More ›

Not for the faint-hearted….a fascinating clip on the work of Dutch kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen who has created his own brand of beach creatures.  With over twenty years of arduous work under his belt, Jansen started by pulling his ‘offspring creatures’ up into the wind, then gave them propellers and wings/sails to increase their running power.  The commentator on this clip notes that: “through hours of experimenting and trial and error, Theo’s designs are becoming more and more independent”. Jansen’s own conclusion? “What I have found about this experience of making new forms of life is that you discover all the problems that the real creator must have had creating this world” And these are not even thinking, autonomous beings!  Read More ›

Jean Staune, the non-Darwinian mathematician who is convinced that anglophones make a mess of everything (and suddenly burst into my life a while back with a rude letter to the effect that I was responsible*), nw offers this in a key French magazine: “L’hypothèse d’un créateur est scientifique” (The hypothesis of a creator is scientific.) I wonder what would happen if he went to the United States and said that. They’d assume he was a tent-shaking fundamentalist, I guess. This guy weighs in too. And a bunch of other folk. More on Staune here and here. The French are famous for quite rightly scoffing at “le Darwinisme.” But it’s rare that they’ve penetrated organized public stunnedness so as to be Read More ›

The journal Nature drew attention to concerns about the Templeton Foundation’s activities on the occasion of the death of John Templeton in 2008. At that time, the editors indicated that “human moral impulses” have a natural, rather than a spiritual explanation and that their stance is to “turn away from religion in seeking explanations for how the world works”. That editorial elicited a blog from me, pointing out that many funding bodies have agendas that can raise suspicions of advocacy rather than following the evidence wherever it leads. “This publication [i.e. Nature] would turn away from religion in seeking explanations for how the world works, and believes that science is likely to go further in explaining human moral impulses than Read More ›

Last week, the New York Times featured an article which reported that “in just 50 years, a fish has evolved a resistance to toxic chemicals polluting its Hudson River home, a new study finds.” Read More>>>

Theistic evolution seems to have permeated the arts. Listen to this song by recording artists and Nashville native Steve Earle. Steve Earle, Ashes to Ashes, from the album Jerusalem, on New West Records.