How James Carville’s New Book, 40 More Years Misrepresents Intelligent Design

In his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, Democratic strategist James Carville badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as a wholly negative argument against evolution. What’s most incredible is that Carville makes this inaccurate characterization directly after quoting passages from ID proponents making wholly positive arguments for design. One such passage he quotes is from our Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators, as follows: Intelligent design “begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI)….One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When [intelligent design] researchers find irreducible complexity Read More ›

Darwin Unlikely to Supplant Adam Smith in Economics

In elevating the economic value of Charles Darwin over Adam Smith in the New York Times, Robert Franks misrepresents Smith. Franks claims that Darwin, better than Smith, accounted for conflicts between individual and collective interest. But Smith knew of such conflict. His invisible hand reliably guides private self-interest to socially beneficial outcomes only under a stable rule of law. For markets to work, rule of law must fetter private actors–prevent them from killing, defrauding, and stealing from each other. So Smith’s market “competition” is neither anarchy nor Darwinian nature, red in tooth and claw. Franks offers examples that he claims favor Darwin’s account. From illegal steroid use to mortgages that misrepresent the underlying risk of a loan, however, we have Read More ›

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Autonomy

In medical ethics, there is a growing conflict between two important principles: autonomy and dignity. In an important way, autonomy and dignity are virtues derived from different worldviews. Autonomy owes much to the secular/materialist view of man, whose very existence is the product of an autonomous struggle for existence. Dignity owes much to the Judeo-Christian understanding of man, who is created in the image of God. Certainly there is overlap; advocates of autonomy obviously have some respect for dignity, and advocates for dignity have some respect for autonomy. But the differences in approaches to ethics are real, and are of great consequence. The differences are particularly clear and important in the issue of physician-assisted suicide. Oregon has passed a law Read More ›

Don’t Miss the Book That Changes Everything Tuesday, July 21 With Stephen Meyer and DNA Evidence for Intelligent Design

It’s the question that Darwin never even began to address: How did the very first life begin? Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of the new book Signature in the Cell (HarperOne, June 2009), investigates how new scientific discoveries are pointing to intelligent design as the best explanation for the complexity of life and the universe. “It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code information,” states Dr. Meyer. “In the cell, information is carried by DNA, which functions like a software program. The signature in the cell is that of the master programmer of life.” On Tuesday, July 21, Dr. Meyer will present his Read More ›

Peppered Moth Now Reverts Back to Gray: Evidence of Oscillating Selection?

In the world of peppered moths, gray is the new black. The “peppered moth” became famous after textbooks started using it as an iconic example of evolution. It’s still employed in some current textbooks: Douglas Futuyma’s 2005 edition of Evolution states, “By the 1930s, however, examples of very strong selection came to light. One of the first examples was Industrial Melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia). … There is considerable evidence, obtained by several independent researchers, that birds attack a greater proportion of gray than black moths where tree trunks, due to air pollution, lack the pale lichens that would otherwise cover them.” (p. 393) While Futuyma is right to further note that “other factors also appear to affect Read More ›