It has been more than a year since kairosfocus posted his now-famous challenge on Uncommon Descent, inviting Darwinists to submit an essay defending their views. A Darwinist named Petrushka has recently responded, over at The Skeptical Zone. (Petrushka describes himself as a Darwinist in a fairly broad sense of the term: he accepts common descent as a result of gradual, unguided change, which includes not only changes occurring as a result of natural selection but also neutral change.) The terms of the original challenge issued by kairosfocus were as follows: Compose your summary case for darwinism (or any preferred variant that has at least some significant support in the professional literature, such as punctuated equilibria etc) in a fashion that Read More ›

Good day, my name is JoeG and I would like to get something out in the open and hopefully have it become fully understood by everyone. For decades I have been debating against evolutionism and for decades I have been told that my position is “anti-evolution.” I found that strange because my position allows for a change in allele frequency over time, i.e. evolution. It also allows for natural selection, ie evolution. Speciation is OK too, i.e. evolution. Offspring are different from their parents meaning my position also allows for descent with modification, i.e. evolution. The whole point of my opponents seems to be a strawman: they want to be able to “refute” my position by showing that allele frequencies Read More ›

I’d like to begin my post by inviting readers to watch a short video of a 2010 TED talk titled, The roots of plant intelligence, by Professor Stefano Mancuso, who works in the Department of Plant, Soil & Environmental Science at the University of Florence. Professor Mancuso, who describes himself as a plant neurobiologist, is a leading advocate of the radical idea that plants are intelligent, and that their intelligence is embodied not in a brain but in a highly resilient distributed network whose information processing is, in its own way, just as sophisticated as that found in animals. Reporter Michael Pollan interviewed Mancuso and his colleagues for a thought-provoking article, titled, Are Plants Intelligent?, which was published in the Read More ›

When Why Evolution Is True, a Website with about 9,000,000 views a year, voices allegations undermining the reputation of an academic at a state university, it is no light matter. Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Ball State University (BSU), who was hired by the university in 2013. In an article dated January 4, 2014, Professor Jerry Coyne not only recycles old allegations about Dr. Gonzalez which have been refuted again and again, but he gives unwarranted credence to new ones made by a man who doesn’t even know Dr. Gonzalez. Why Dr. Gonzalez was really denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007 Coyne denigrates the academic achievements of Dr. Gonzalez, noting that he was Read More ›

As we’ve seen, a large percentage of the American public – 47% according to a recent Harris Interactive poll – now believes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. One possible reason for this high percentage is that high school and college students are not told about the problems which call Darwin’s theory into question – as well as theories of evolution which are based on random genetic drift. Still, there are heartening signs that the wall of ignorance supporting the dam of evolutionary orthodoxy is about to collapse. A steady stream of ground-breaking books and peer-reviewed scientific articles authored by scientists who question key assumptions of modern evolutionary theory has been coming out in the last couple of years. It is Read More ›