Month: January 2008
Nature Fulfilling Its Charter to Defend Evolution at all Costs
In his acclaimed book Evolution: The History of an Idea, the respected historian of evolution Peter J. Bowler explains that the journal Nature was originally founded in the late nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley and others for the express purpose of promoting a “campaign” to support Darwinism: By exploiting their position in this network, Huxley and his friends ensured that Darwinism had come to stay. (Ruse, 1979a). They controlled the scientific journals–the journal Nature was founded in part to promote the campaign–and manipulated academic appointments. Hull (1978) has stressed how important these rhetorical and political skills were in creating a scientific revolution. The Darwinists adopted a flexible approach which deflected opposition, minimized infighting among themselves, and made it easy Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 13: “The abrupt appearance of biological forms” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 13 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] PBS has a slide stating that evolutionary paleontologists “continue to unearth key fossils that bridge those gaps Darwin bemoaned.” But evolutionary paleontologist David Raup wrote in 1979 that “we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded … ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”1 PBS asserts that fossils discovered in the “past half century” have “filled in” gaps to explain the Cambrian explosion in evolutionary Read More ›
Letter Responding to Editorial Praising NAS Efforts to Suppress Scientific Criticisms of Darwinian Evolution
CSC senior fellow John West had the following letter to the editor published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today, responding to a short editorial they published earlier this week. EVOLUTION The P-I Editorial Board applauds efforts by National Academy of Science officials to suppress scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution in classrooms across the country. Such criticisms, we are told, are a sham.But some of the academy’s own eminent scientists such as Dr. Philip Skell strongly disagree. The Evan Pugh Professor (emeritus) at Penn State University, Skell argues that “scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these.” Skell is not alone. More than 700 Ph.D. scientists have adopted a statement expressing Read More ›
Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 12: “The origin of life remains a mystery” (from JudgingPBS.com)
[Editor’s Note: This is slide 12 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] If, as Slide 11 suggests, human origins are a mystery to Darwinian scientists, the chemical origin of life presents a far greater challenge. As Gregg Easterbrook recently wrote in Wired Magazine, “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”1 Origin of life theorists have struggled simply to account for the origin of pre-biological organic Read More ›
Diane Rehm Fails to Ask NAS the Hard Questions
Yesterday, The Diane Rehm Show on NPR held a discussion on the new National Academy of Sciences (NAS) booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism. To anyone with eyes to see, the booklet is a transparent attempt to label any criticism of Darwinism as “creationism.” This evolutionary-evangelistic tract is so dogmatic Catholic News World said, the NAS “has produced a new text warning against the terrible danger that someone, somewhere, might not entirely accept evolutionary theory.”