Two nights ago, I finally saw the Expelled film.

I had become almost proprietorial about the widely denounced #5 political documentary.  I had first broken the story of its existence last August. I watched it pitch and roll through accusations of trickery, a threatened lawsuit over plagiarism and a real one over intellectual property, production delays (it was supposed to be released on Darwin’s birthday but was pulled for edit), and, inevitably, street drama.

Security was so tight that – as I learned a couple of weeks ago – not only could I not get a screener, neither could the the screenwriter – fellow Canadian Kevin Miller.

Okay, so there I am, sitting half-frozen in a half-empty theatre in downtown Toronto, and … I had two main reactions: Read More ›

Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, published :

An Intelligent Discussion about Life

in The Seattle Times, April 17, 2008
Chapman posted the following extensively footnoted version of this article at www.discovery.org/a/4522.
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He’s now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse. Read More ›

As Michael Behe discusses in the article I linked in my last post, Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala reject ID, because they believe it makes God (if one assumes God is the designer) culpable for all of the pain and misery in the natural world.  Ayala goes so far as to suggest that ID is blasphemous because it implicates God in causing this pain and misery. Miller and Ayala are wrong, and their error stems from their failure to understand elementary principles of culpability that any 1st year law student can stand and recite from memory. Generally, the law recognizes four culpable mental states (mens rea for the Latin buffs).  In descending order they are: Intentional conduct.  An actor acts intentionally when Read More ›

[photo of Eugenie Scott from www.ExpelledTheMovie.com serving as one of the Class Officers of The Big Science Academy. She will have a starring role in the best pro-ID movie yet.]

ID is a lineal descendent of William Paley’s Argument from Design (Paley 1803,)

Eugenie Scott
NCSE

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The Chicago Reader, a publication I used to read when living in Chicago, reports on my recent blog post at UD about Jerry Coyne, comparing him to Herman Munster (for the comparison, go here): Meanwhile, in what seems like an odd move, creationists have chosen to play on Coyne’s home court by claiming to be scientists themselves, and presenting “intelligent design” as an alternative scientific hypothesis to Darwinian evolution (though its advocates put forth no testable predictions). Last year in the case Kitzmiller v. Dover, Pennsylvania federal judge John E. Jones III ruled against that claim after a lengthy trial, but the efforts continue. Coyne’s latest New Republic article (June 18) takes on the new book by intelligent-design advocate Michael Read More ›

“Paris – Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life’s origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question. The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory… ” (go to article) You may recall that shortly after Pope Benedict’s inauguration, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna touched off a fire storm (July 2005) with an op-ed piece in the New York Times questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and appearing to endorse the concept of intelligent design. This brought a quick response from Prof. Kenneth Miller, Read More ›

Molecular Mechanisms of Antibacterial Multidrug Resistance Cell Magazine 22 March 2007 Michael N. Alekshun and Stuart B. Levy Schering-Plough Research Institute, 2015 Galloping Hill Road, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance, Department of Molecular Biology & Microbiology and Department of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02111, USA Available online 22 March 2007 My emphasis. Treatment of infections is compromised worldwide by the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. Although classically attributed to chromosomal mutations, resistance is most commonly associated with extrachromosomal elements acquired from other bacteria in the environment. These include different types of mobile DNA segments, such as plasmids, transposons, and integrons. However, intrinsic mechanisms not commonly specified Read More ›

I sent the following [addresses munged to foil email address harvestors]: From : David Springer Sent : Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:41 AM To : bforrest CC : dembski, richard.dawkins, Kenneth_Miller, eugeniescott, ddennett, krauss, patricia.princehouse, pennock, welsberr, kpadian, rthompson Subject : Debate Challenge Dear Professor Forrest, I wanted to make sure that you were aware that Professor Dembski has challenged you to a debate. Topics “Perhaps we can settle the matter of cowardice directly: let Forrest and me debate the matter at a symposium spanning a day with each of us delivering two hour-long lectures and then going toe-to-toe in a final exchange.” Many of the commenters think you will decline but are eager to see it should you take Read More ›

Anyone who writes “Is your Earth still flat?” is trading on an anti-Christian myth promoted by late-nineteenth century Darwinists. Although many of you probably already know this, it’s worth repeating periodically. Below is the text of a handout distributed at the 2002 Ohio School Board Debate between Kenneth Miller, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells. THE FLAT EARTH MYTH “The earth isn’t flat – end of story.” So says Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “We don’t have to have classes or be sensitive to the issues of those who believe that, because they’re wrong.” Defenders of Darwinian evolution sometimes compare their critics to believers in a flat earth. According to the Read More ›

For those who are convinced that Darwinism has no meaningful philosophical or theological implications I offer the following quotes from biology textbooks. Special thanks go to ID colleague Casey Luskin.
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Casey Luskin has posted an interesting response (part II) to Barbara Forrest’s Kitzmiller Account, Here he addresses Dr. Forrest’s usage of quotations from ID proponents: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/09/response_to_barbara_forrests_k_1.html As is typical in the Evo camp, Dr. Forrest attempts to make the usual conflation of ID and religion by quoting Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Many cite Johnson as the founder of the current ID movement. Popularizer perhaps, but founder he was NOT, nor can he authoritatively be credited with setting its parameters. Luskin notes (as does Dembski in ‘Cosmic Pursuit’, 1998) that Charles Thaxton and Dean Kenyon first wrote on the subject during the ’80s. But is concept even that new? “Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that nature exhibits features which Read More ›

Let’s face it, the reason Darwinian evolution is so controversial, especially in the public schools, is that it has profound implications concerning who we are, where we came from, and whether or not our lives have ultimate meaning and purpose. This is not the case in chemistry, physics or mathematics. Schoolchildren are not as unperceptive as some people would like to believe, and they pick up on these implications immediately, as my daughter did in the seventh grade.

Darwinian theory has been singled out for special scrutiny in public education not only for this reason, which should be enough, but because the evidence is not nearly as solid as it is in the hard sciences such as those mentioned above.

In a previous thread (https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1514) I commented about the suppression of evidence and discussion concerning Darwinian theory in the public schools. I don’t advocate for the teaching of ID in the public schools, and I do agree that evolution has occurred. Things are not now as they once were, so “evolution” has taken place by definition — living things have changed over time. There is no substantive controversy here.

What I object to is an incomplete at best, and dishonest at worst, presentation of the evidence for Darwinian theory in public education. Here are some proposals for how the evidence could be more appropriately presented without “subverting science.” Perhaps commenters could add to the list, and I’d be curious as to why anyone would object to such an approach.

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Emile Zuckerkandl, an erstwhile co-author with Linus Pauling, just got accepted a very long piece attacking ID in GENE (go here): Gene Article in Press, Accepted Manuscript doi:10.1016/j.gene.2006.03.025 Copyright  © 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V. Intelligent design and biological complexity Emile Zuckerkandl Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University and Institute of Molecular Medical Sciences, P.O.Box 20452, Stanford, California 94309 Received 16 October 2005; accepted 15 March 2006. Available online 5 August 2006. ABSTRACT. Before any intelligence can appear, a world endowed with the potential for being experienced as a body of phenomena has to be existent. Indeed, if there is to be an intelligence, there first has to be something intelligible. Hence, when an intelligence is present, “creation” must already Read More ›

For those who are interested in what Professor Behe actually said in Dover (instead of the distortions of his testimony in Judge Jones’ opinion), click on “more.”  [Thank you to tribune7 for sussing this out].

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Here’s a recent exchange between me and a well-known journalist: Dear Mr. Dembski: I got your email from [snip]. I’m a science writer who has written for the usual suspects: New York Times (book review, op-ed, magazine, week in review), The Atlantic, Discover, Omni, Wall Street Journal, many others. You can google me, but the NY Times and WSJ block search engines, and that’s where most of my journalistic stuff is. . . . I am not sympathetic to ID or creationism, but I’m thinking of writing a piece–not yet sure for whom–about how silly the neo-Darwinists have become, Dawkins and Dennett come to mind. It seems to me the evolutionists have fielded the wrong team, and despite the recent Read More ›