If there are any biology teachers out there who believe, as Discovery Institute does, that the “strengths and weaknesses” of Darwinian evolution should be taught in science classrooms, below is something you can distribute to your students without fear of losing your job. If you want to play it safe, I suggest you distribute the original. On the other hand, if you don’t mind being a test case for academic freedom, just label this as a news item “Ideas on Evolution Going Through a Revolution among Scientists” that you copied from the Discovery Institute blog, and pull out the original after the school board has started proceedings aganst you. Biology’s understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a Read More ›

The problem with evolution is that, because it is always wrong, being wrong doesn’t count against it. In fact, evolution is so wrong that even its errors have errors. And whereas a normal theory with so many flubs would have long since been discarded, since evolution is true from the start it can’t be discarded. So instead evolutionists spend their time trying to determine just how wrong they are. One of evolution’s many problem areas is with the so-called evolutionary tree. Evolutionists compare the species to figure out which branch and twig they go on, but it never works out very well. One of the problems is that the fossil comparisons are inconsistent with the molecular comparisons. This has been Read More ›

Piotr is a professor of linguistics. I was curious to hear his view on the phylogeny of human languages. It is clear many human languages evolve and split off into dialects and maybe form their own new language from a common ancestor language. However, I’m of the opinion despite some language phylogeny, there is not one universal common ancestor language. In Harold Morowitz’s book Emergence he points out the general belief language appeared suddenly on the scene in human history in several widely dispersed geographical regions at around the same time. Even he found such a coincidence astonishing. Many people of faith accept the Tower of Babel account which essentially says there are independent language lines that emerged suddenly by Read More ›

Twenty five years ago the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley jointly sponsored a long-running series of conferences and publications on theology and science. Theologian Wesley Wildman calls it theDivine Action Project as so much of the work relates to the question of how God interacts with the world. And while the various participants hold to different nuanced views of divine action, they all generally agree that special divine action—the idea of God acting in miraculous or non law-like ways—is a problem. As Wildman explains:  Read more

Last Friday RealClearReligion.org, featured an article titled, The Pope Believes in Evolution (Aleteia, 13 June 2014) by M. Anthony Mills, a Ph.D. candidate in the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame University. Mills’ article was written in response to an earlier article by George Dvorsky (io9.com, March 16, 2013), titled, Does the new Pope believe in evolution? In his article, Dvorsky argued that Catholicism and Darwinism don’t mix: you cannot accept both. Darwinian evolution, according to Dvorsky, is “a God killer,” “a stand alone system,” a “fully autonomous process that does not require any guiding ‘rationality’ ([Pope] Benedict’s term) to function.” In his reply to Dvorsky, Anthony Mills makes several concessions that are quite remarkable, for a Catholic Read More ›

Having experienced recently an injury to my arm with breaks in three places, I have a fresh appreciation of the remarkable properties of bone. The focus of this blog is not the healing process, but rather the remarkable strength of bone and its ability to withstand intense impacts. The research work under consideration looked at the molecular structure of bone, which means we look with the perspective of nanotechnology. Like many materials, bone has crystalline regions and amorphous regions. The crystalline components (made up of calcium phosphate platelets) are located within a disordered material (the collagen protein matrix). There is also a significant amount of water within bone, and much of it appears to be structural. “[U]p to 28% of Read More ›

In Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution the engine of progress is death. Nature is one big Malthusian battlefield as natural selection kills off the less-fit designs. As David Hume had put it a century before, “A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” and nature is so arranged so as “to embitter the life of every living being.” In Darwin’s day Alfred, Lord Tennyson found that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and Herbert Spencer summarized Darwin’s new theory as the “Survival of the Fittest.” Or as Nietzsche lamented, it is the weak “who most undermine life.” But there’s only one problem: this is all the result of junk science. For every Serengeti Plain there are untold stories Read More ›