Month: February 2010
Misusing Protistan Examples to Propagate Myths About Intelligent Design
The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology recently published several papers from a workshop sponsored by the International Society of Protistologists titled “Horizontal Gene Transfer and Phylogenetic Evolution Debunk Intelligent Design.” So here we have a respected scientific society, presumably planning a workshop months in advance, and finally laying out their considered case for why intelligent design fails. As you might imagine, I was most anxious to read about it. Unfortunately, rather than scholarly papers, the manuscripts read like press releases from the National Center for (Darwinian) Science Education. So the introductory essay1 by Avelina Espinosa tells us that ID has “creationist beginnings,” claims that I say “evolution” is “impossible,” and places in my mouth the phrase “design creationism” (I have never Read More ›
How to Completely Misunderstand Intelligent Design: A Response to Stephen Barr
Intelligent design (ID) has attracted its fair share of critics. If it’s not the fulminations of New Atheists, it’s extremely uncharitable readings from some Catholic intellectuals who think they smell mechanism or interventionism. While the criticisms vary, they tend to have one thing in common: they’re based, not on actual ID arguments, but on stereotypes and misunderstandings of those arguments. It’s hard to find ID critics who actually describe an ID argument correctly before proceeding to refute it. Catholic physicist Stephen Barr is a constitutionally uncharitable critic of ID. It’s not clear that he has even read the books that he criticizes. But he criticizes them nonetheless. In a February 9 diatribe in First Things, he makes several complaints. For Read More ›
Just to Recap
Darwin was wrong. Missing links still missing. There is no such thing as junk DNA. Birds did not descend from Dinosaurs. Irreducible complexity is still irreducibly complex. Tiktaalik has been invalidated by an earlier ancestor. Haeckel’s embryo drawings are still fake (and still in textbooks). et, evolution is a fact?
Cornelia Dean Doesn’t Trust You — But Then Again, She Doesn’t Trust Herself, Either
There’s a disturbing trend for the role of media in a democracy: journalists who don’t trust their profession, the public, or themselves. These days more reporters, editors, and journalism advocates are urging their colleagues to jettison objectivity in reporting and replace it with something they can trust: their blind allegiance to authority.Perhaps no one serves as a better example of this than New York Times science writer Cornelia Dean. Her new book, Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public, has a gem of a chapter titled “The Problem of Objectivity.” You read that correctly. Here’s a journalist who sees objectivity as a problem. To wit: In striving to be “objective” journalists try to tell Read More ›
Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information
Links to our 8-Part Series, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information”: • Part 1 (This Article): Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information• Part 2: The Evolution-Lobby’s Useless Definition of Biological Information• Part 3: The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”• Part 4: Finding Darwin in All the Wrong Places• Part 5: How to Play the Gene Evolution Game• Part 6: Asking the Right Questions about the Evolutionary Origin of New Biological Information• Part 7: Assessing the NCSE’s Citation Bluffs on the Evolution of New Genetic Information• Part 8: The NCSE’s Citation Bluffs Reveal Little About the Evolutionary Origin of Information Read the Full Article: Read More ›