Month: November 2009
Truth or Dare with Dr. Ken Miller: A Lecture Guide to the Anti-Intelligent Design Claims by Dr. Kenneth Miller
Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture Guide Permission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1 (This Article): Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”? • Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design • Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution • Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils • Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum • Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade • Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Introduction Brown University biologist Dr. Kenneth Miller Read More ›
David Berlinski on The Deniable Darwin and Commentary
Q: Many of the most important and lengthiest essays in The Deniable Darwin were originally published in Commentary magazine. How did that fruitful partnership, or patronship, come about? Did you encounter any resistance from the Commentary readership? DB: My association with Commentary was a stroke of good luck. I wanted a wider readership. Who doesn’t? So I wrote [editor] Neal Kozodoy a letter. It was 1994. Neal, for reasons of his own, thought it important to broaden Commentary‘s intellectual horizons. We had been struck by the fact that science as an institution lacks for critics. To a very surprising extent, it gets a free pass. So our association began. I’ve never known a better editor. “The Deniable Darwin” provoked a Read More ›
Even Evolution’s Priests May Doubt
There’s a narrative that should be familiar to most of us by now: a man is considered the great hero of the faith, a sign of hope for every true believer as he advances its claims, but secretly he struggles with his doubts about what he’s preaching. This time, there’s a twist to the old story: the faith the man espoused publicly was Darwin’s theory, and the man was the brilliant Stephen Jay Gould. In Suzan Mazur’s fascinating new book, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry, Richard Milner describes Gould as “a popular articulator of Darwinian evolution to a new generation, while privately, his creative and rebellious mind sought to move beyond it.” (emphasis added) A personal Read More ›
Did Judge Jones Get Anything Right in his Activist Ruling Against Intelligent Design?
David Opderbeck, Professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law, has in the past offered some insightful criticisms of the Dover ruling, including the facts that Judge Jones: “misrepresents key ID arguments by stating that they are only negative arguments against evolution rather than positive evidence for design” “went far beyond the case / controversy at hand by giving his primer on whether ID is ‘science’” used “criteria for determining what constitutes ‘science’” that seemed “muddled and dangerous” “misrepresents the merits of key ID arguments, in particular irreducible complexity” Now over at the pro-Darwin BioLogos blog, Professor Opderbeck writes “In Defense of Dover.” Well, only sort of. Professor Opderbeck qualifies his post’s pro-Judge Jones title, stating: “I still Read More ›
Reflections on the University of Chicago Darwin 2009 Fest
Thanks to various live-bloggers, you can read summaries of all of the University of Chicago Darwin 2009 conference presentations. The conference organizers have also promised to make video podcasts available of all the lectures shortly. By contrast, what follows below is — as they say in sports television — color commentary. This will be a longer post, because much was said that calls for comment. Bottom line: this was an outstanding conference, where any ID theorist would have enjoyed himself, and learned a lot, if he didn’t mind a bit of mocking laughter along the way.