Month: March 2009
Debate Over Behe’s Edge of Evolution in Genetics
The debate that isn’t supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution.” In their effort to refute Behe’s claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal. What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his Read More ›
A Note on Purim
At the risk of sounding a brief religious note and therefore inviting from ID critics the usual (and so extremely logical!) inference that the Discovery Institute supports theocratic rule, let’s consider for a moment the message of Purim. That Jewish festival is upon us today and, with its themes of randomness versus a guiding providence at work in history, it happens to be an excellent time for reflecting on themes relevant to ENV. Celebrated with lots of eating, drinking, and charitable and other gift-giving, Purim recalls the events told in the Bible’s book of Esther. In the story, which is very much screenplay-ready, a conniving minister to the king of Persia uses his influence on the monarch to plot the Read More ›
My Reply to Timothy Sandefur: The teaching of only the strengths of Darwinism in public schools is inherently the propagation of atheist belief.
Timothy Sandefur, a Panda’s Thumb contributor and an atheist, is a leader in the Darwinist crusade to censor balanced discussion of evolutionary theory in science classrooms. Mr Sandefur responded to my open letter to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Darwinist organization that lobbies for censorship of discussion of the weaknesses of evolution in public schools and has boycotted the citizens of Louisiana because they recently passed legislation protecting academic freedom in public schools. Mr. Sandefur begins his post with a sneer: With the possible exception of Casey Luskin, no Discovery Institute fellow seems more eager to embarrass himself in public than Michael Egnor… I always strive to be more embarrassing than Casey, but now it seems I’ll Read More ›
Censorship Is Wrong
Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen has filed a resolution in the Oklahoma State Legislature asking the University of Oklahoma to dis-invite Richard Dawkins, who was invited to speak at the university as a part of the university’s Darwin 200th birthday celebration. The proposed resolution reads:
Templeton’s Darwin Conference in Rome
“Do you know who funded it?” asked the email from the AP reporter. She and a number of other people read my post from three days ago about the Darwin conference being held in Rome. I took a deep breath and replied to the AP email, “Yes, I know who funded it.” It was the Templeton Foundation.I took a deep breath because Templeton is a powerful and well-connected. You don’t want to cross Charles Harper of Templeton if you can help it. But in public and private Harper has attacked intelligent design and Discovery Institute. He is not just interested in discussion, but in molding the discussion in certain ways. To that end, Templeton funds go to many groups and Read More ›