Month: July 2010
Federal Appeals Court Rejects Chris Comer’s Lawsuit Alleging Discrimination Against Evolution
In 2007, Chris Comer was forced to resign from her job at the Texas Education Agency (TEA). She then filed a lawsuit alleging she was forced to “stay neutral on creationism,” and claimed that TEA’s “neutrality” policy violated the First Amendment. We reported last year when Comer lost on summary judgment at the federal district court level. Comer then appealed her case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which filed its ruling on July 2 upholding the district court’s decision and tossing Comer’s case. The Fifth Circuit held, “we find no evidence to support the conclusion that the principal or primary effect of TEA’s policy is one that either advances or inhibits religion, we conclude that the policy does Read More ›
Sneers and Double Standards Pass for Scholarship in Evolution: Education and Outreach
Pop quiz: Did the following quote come from (A) Panda’s Thumb, or (B) An article in a scholarly journal published by Springer science publishing? “An especially good example of silliness is the ID assertion that natural processes cannot create new genetic information. ID advocates have recently been pushing this line heavily as of late (Meyer 2009)…” If you answered (A), then… …you’re wrong. It came from a recent article by former NCSE staff-member Nick Matzke in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach — an NCSE-aligned outfit, where apparently such language passes for scholarly argument. But in the words of Jay Richards, “a sneer is not an argument.” Of course Matzke’s reference in the quote from his recent paper is to Read More ›
Is Intelligent Design Science?
Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell thinks so.
Simple Logic (and the Data) Refute PZ Myers on ‘Junk DNA’ (Updated)
A few weeks ago, PZ Myers commented on so-called ‘Junk DNA’. Under the headline, ‘Junk DNA is still junk’, Myers wrote: The ENCODE project made a big splash a couple of years ago — it is a huge project to not only ask what the sequence of a strand of human DNA was, but to analyzed and annotate and try to figure out what it was doing. One of the very surprising results was that in the sections of DNA analyzed, almost all of the DNA was transcribed into RNA, which sent the creationists and the popular press into unwarranted flutters of excitement that maybe all that junk DNA wasn’t junk at all, if enzymes were busy copying it into Read More ›
Can DNA Prove the Existence of an Intelligent Designer? An Interview with Stephen Meyer
Biola Magazine this month features an insightful interview with Stephen Meyer about intelligent design and his book Signature in the Cell. In the growing movement known as intelligent design, Stephen Meyer is an emerging figurehead. A young, Cambridge-educated philosopher of science, Meyer is director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute — intelligent design’s primary intellectual and scientific headquarters. He’s also author of Signature in the Cell, a provocative new book that offers the first comprehensive DNA-based argument for intelligent design. On May 14, Meyer gave a lecture at an event hosted by Biola’s Christian apologetics program in Chase Gymnasium, where he made his case that the origin of the information needed to create the first Read More ›