Author: Casey Luskin
C-SPAN’s Book TV to air Traipsing Into Evolution Saturday, Aug. 26th
Saturday, August 26th at 7pm EST C-SPAN’s BookTV will air “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision”, featuring two of the book’s authors, John West and Casey Luskin. The program will air again Sunday, August 27th at 6:30am EST and Monday, August 28 at 12:00am EST. The featured event was held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington D.C. for Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, the first book-length critique of Judge John E. Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case, the first court case to assess the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The event, held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington, D.C., was full, (as was a similar one in Seattle at Read More ›
Post-Darwinist: Who Invented the term “Darwinist?”
Last December I addressed the point that “Darwinists” are wrong to allege that ID-proponents invented terms such as “Darwinist” or “Darwinism.” (See Busting Another Darwinist Myth: We’d love to take credit for “Darwinism,” but we can’t.) This post was prompted after E.O. Wilson said in Newsweek that “[s]cientists … don’t call it Darwinism,” implying that if you use the term “Darwinism” then you aren’t a scientist. But on Sunday, Denyse O’Leary posted an excellent article documenting multiple usages of the term “Darwinist” or “Darwinism” by, well, leading Darwinist scientists like Richard Dawkins, Ernst Mayr, and H. Allen Orr. See Darwinism/Darwinist: Now a term of reproach? at Post-Darwinist blog for the full article! http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2006/08/darwinismdarwinist-now-term-of.html
iTunesTM Listeners Weigh-In On the ID The Future Podcast
Discovery Institute has been producing the ID The Future Podcast for a few months, and already iTunes listeners are giving it rave reviews. What follows is a brief highlight of the reviews and some brief commentary to thank the reviewers: Comment by SeanG: “A timely and well needed podcast that will foster dialogue and knowledge of what a large portion of the American public believe. I have many political, philosophical and scientific “blurbs” on my I-Pod, and this new addition to the scientific/philosophical debate by the many fine doctorate holding professors and research scientists at the Discovery Institute will do nothing but add clarity to an issue that demands such. Many of the issues found herein are merely current ruminations Read More ›
Derbyshire Attacks Gilder Part III: Praising Judge Jones while Pretending To Not Praise George Gilder
Maybe the most fascinating part of Derbyshire’s article is the candor with which he evaluates the strength of Gilder’s arguments. Derbyshire states clearly that “[Gilder’s metaphysic] refutes evolution, which has high-information-bearing substrates arising out of low-information-bearing ones… [and] As metaphysics go, [Gilder’s is] a pretty good schema… a good metaphysic for our age…” Thus it seems that Derbyshire affirms one of Gilder’s central points! In an attempt to not sell the entire farm, Derbyshire assures his fellow naturalists that we are “getting along just fine… discovering new things about the world, pushing the wheel of knowledge forward a few inches every year.” But Darwinist biologist Franklin M. Harold wrote that while “[w]e should reject, as a matter of principle, the Read More ›
Derbyshire Attacks Gilder Part II: Overblown Claims for Evolution
By Joe Manzari and Casey Luskin John Derbyshire claims that modern biology is built on evolution. He says that “Creationists seem not to be aware of how central evolution is to modern biology. Without it, nothing makes sense… Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied.” However, in 2001, A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, made it clear that “evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.” Apparently Derbyshire sees things differently from Wilkins, claiming that evolution is vital for “such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops.” Yet Wilkins’ sentiment was re-affirmed in 2005 by Philip Skell, a member of Read More ›