AAAS Fears Academic Freedom, Free and Open Inquiry, in Oklahoma

A great opinion article in Friday’s Tulsa Today reiterates a point I made in an ENV post last week: Darwinists oppose academic freedom legislation because they want to censor scientific evidence which some scientists think challenges biological evolution. In the article, Jonathan Bartlett critiques Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), who opposed the Academic Freedom Bill in Oklahoma: “First, the bill only covers scientific views and scientific information. Therefore, Intelligent Design can only be included if it is scientific. If Intelligent Design isn’t scientific, Leshner has nothing to worry about. If Intelligent Design is scientific, then Leshner is playing politics with science by trying to limit scientific views by law.” Bartlett is absolutely Read More ›

Support Evolution Research; But Don’t Support Anti-Scientific Attitudes

Last week reports stated that a Canadian evolutionist education expert, Brian Alters, was denied funding of a project entitled “Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution’s intelligent design theory on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policymakers.” While I am skeptical that design proponents have a desire or capability to stifle evolution-based scholarship, I make my primary point: no one should have his or her funding denied simply because it would support an unpopular position among those holding the funding purse-strings. For this reason, pro-evolution and pro-ID research should both be absolutely supported. Individuals at the SSHRC had no right to deny funding to Dr. Alters’ research if their reason was that they disagreed with his strong pro-evolution viewpoints. But perhaps they Read More ›

Setting the York Daily Record Straight, Again

We have made it well known that we wish the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania had taken our advice. This has been reiterated countless times — before, during and after the litigation and decision. (WE even recently published an entire book about the Dover decision, Traipsing Into Evolution.) Our long-standing policy has been to urge a more robust treatment of evolution in public schools, so that students might learn both the scientific weaknesses and strength’s of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and chemical origin-of-life scenarios. But this is NOT the path that was taken in Dover. This too has been communicated all throughout the Kitzmiller saga. But an article from two weeks ago in the York Daily Record shows that some Read More ›

Attempts to Misconstrue Intelligent Design in Kentucky Fail

In the most recent news about the controversy about intelligent design in Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Ledger‘s Political Notebook reports on the nomination of Kentucky’s State Board of Education candidates. Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher took heat for speaking favorably about teaching intelligent design just before Judge Jones’ Kitzmiller decision was issued. The Governor had mentioned intelligent design in his State of the Commonwealth address in January, 2006 and then in February sent a letter about teaching intelligent design to the Kentucky Academy of Sciences. (The letter was in response to the Academy’s December vote to reject any teaching about intelligent design.)After the Kitzmiller decision struck down the Dover Area School Board’s intelligent design policy, some states, such as Ohio, began retreating Read More ›

Science Plays Politics, but Implies Behe and Snoke (2004) Supports Irreducible Complexity and ID after all

Last September, a blogger with The Scientist used the old Darwinist line that Michael Behe and David W. Snoke’s 2004 article in Protein Science neither supports irreducible complexity nor ID. The blogger did this to challenge my claim that Michael Behe has authored a peer-reviewed paper in a scientific journal which supports ID. Yet supporting my original claim is an article in the current issue of Science which implies that Behe and Snoke’s arguments are precisely about irreducible complexity, and also ID. In the current issue of Science, Christoph Adami has an article where he concedes that enzyme-substrate interactions can be irreducibly complex (they think they refuted irreducible complexity for one enzyme-substrate system), and that design theorists use this precise Read More ›