Got Berlinski?

Can’t get enough David Berlinski? If you’ve been going through withdrawl since Dr. Berlinski returned to Paris after his American book tour for The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, then have we got an interview for you: Read Christopher A. Ferrara’s interview “Jewish Intellectuals Challenge Tyranny of Darwinism.”

Intelligent Design Lab is Going Where no Evolution Simulation has Gone Before

Over the past decade or so there has been much hype about computer simulations of Darwinian evolution. The most hyped is Avida at the MSU Digital Evolution Laboratory. Avida researchers claim their work is not a simulation, but actually is Darwinian evolution in action. They describe it like this: In Avida, a population of self-replicating computer programs is subjected to external pressures (such as mutations and limited resources) and allowed to evolve subject to natural selection. This is not a mere simulation of evolution — digital organisms in Avida evolve to survive in a complex computational environment and will adapt to perform entirely new traits in ways never expected by the researchers, some of which seem highly creative. According to Read More ›

Evolving one species from another still “remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology”

This past weekend, I read in the New York Times that there are no weaknesses left in modern evolutionary theory. Now this from The Scientist. (emphasis all mine). This theory of evolution is really a framework for thinking about change in the living world. It provides no specific guesses for the kinds of traits that may exist, no strong requirements or prohibitions on how they may interact to make a complex organism or ecosystem, and no commitments to how innovation can occur. Even the problem of how a differentiated population ultimately divides into two distinct species (posed in the title of Darwin’s seminal work) remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology.

Behe: Lenski’s Evolution Lab Work Shows Random Mutation Breaks Genes More Easily Than It Builds Them

Over at his Amazon blog, Michael Behe has a new post reviewing the work of Richard Lenski on E. coli mutations. While Lenski interprets his findings as showing the quirky nature of evolution, Behe has a different perspective: I think the results fit a lot more easily into the viewpoint of The Edge of Evolution. One of the major points of the book was that if only one mutation is needed to confer some ability, then Darwinian evolution has little problem finding it. But if more than one is needed, the probability of getting all the right ones grows exponentially worse. Click here for more.

Message to New York Times Editorial Page: Hire a Fact-Checker

Over the weekend, the New York Times editorial page showed yet again how pro-Darwin ideology trumps the facts when it comes to the major media’s coverage of the evolution debate. On Saturday, the Times’ editorial page warned readers ominously: The Texas State Board of Education is again considering a science curriculum that teaches the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, setting an example that several other states are likely to follow. The Times apparently hasn’t been paying attention to Texas during the past decade, because (as we pointed out last week) the “strengths and weaknesses” language the Times’ editorialists so fear has been part of the Texas science standards since at least 1998! In short, the Texas State Board of Education Read More ›