Month: October 2007
Thank You, Dr. Watson: Truth about Eugenics and Darwinism Now Becoming Unavoidable
The mainstream media in the United States–and some of the conservative press, for that matter–are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists. So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.
Meet the Materialists, part 2: Julien LaMettrie and Man a Machine
Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here. A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin. One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms Read More ›
Newsweek‘s Trojan Horse: Sharon Begley Muffles the Cosmic Design Inference and Forces Her Philosophical Blinders on Newsweek Readers
In a recent ID the Future podcast interview, Dr. Scott Chambers discusses the fact that the expansion rate of the universe implies an incredibly high degree of cosmic fine-tuning to allow for the existence of life. Just a few weeks ago, Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley also discussed the universe’s expansion rate. This issue has huge implications for the debate over cosmic design, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Begley’s article. Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis–a pet philosophical favorite of materialists–while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if Read More ›
Council of Europe Makes Its Dogmatism Official: Intelligent Design poses “a threat to human rights” (Part 1)
This month the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a resolution regarding “The dangers of creationism in education,” which calls intelligent design (ID) “a threat to human rights.” The CoE is a non-governmental body in Europe that aims to protect human rights, but its resolutions carry no force of law. Even if the CoE’s edicts did carry the force of law, it’s difficult to take this resolution seriously due to its assertion that questioning Darwin somehow threatens human rights. David Berlinski, a mathematician and Discovery Institute senior fellow who lives in Paris and has made many scientific critiques of Darwinian evolution, has given us an insightful analysis of the resolution, here. As Dr. Berlinski puts it, “if this is what a Read More ›
1% Genetic Difference Between Humans and Chimps a “Myth”
Last July, David Tyler wrote an insightful post at ARN stating, For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. ‘Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.’ However, this ‘given’ is about to be discarded. Tyler was quoting a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%,” which reported that “human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%.” The statistic of an alleged 1% difference between human and chimp DNA is Read More ›