Author: David Klinghoffer
Darwinists in a Muddle: Do Lenski’s Microbes Show “Why Evolution Is True,” or Not?
Jerry Coyne is ticked off that readers are attributing significance in the wider evolution debate to Michael Behe’s current paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology, explicating the results of viral and bacterial evolution studies — notably the famous long-term study of Richard Lenski: As I predicted, the IDers completely ignore the limitations of this paper (see my analyses here and here), and assert, wrongly, that Behe has made a powerful statement about evolution in nature. What Coyne “completely ignores” is that Darwinists have accustomed themselves to waving Lenski as a banner that makes “a powerful statement about evolution in nature.” In The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins devoted an ecstatic and detailed discussion to Lenski’s work, enthusing: Creationists Read More ›
Michael Behe’s Challenge: A Conversation with Biologist Ann Gauger
At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there Read More ›
Science and Worldviews: Slate Sees the Light
Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point: Could it be that disagreements over climate change are Read More ›
About That Arsenic-Gobbling Microbe…Bad News for Darwinists?
NASA’s discovery of an arsenic-ingesting microbe in California’s forbidding Mono Lake looks, on the surface, like bad news for Darwinists hopeful to show what a no-big-deal it is for a planet to bring forth life unguided. The bacterium evidently uses arsenic for purposes that all other known organisms would use phosphorus, including incorporating it in DNA. A reporter for Nature News cites UC Santa Barbara geomicrobiologist David Valentine as observing that the discovery may mean “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life.” That’s interesting. Under Darwinian assumptions, the observation that such an alternative life chemistry is possible means that some planets previously assumed to be inhospitable to life, due to being poor in phosphorus, Read More ›
Celebrating Ten Years of Icons of Evolution
In the ten years since the book first appeared, Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution (2000) has itself achieved iconic status among the primary texts in the literature of scientific Darwin-doubting. ENV will celebrate the anniversary all this month with a series of videos and interviews — Dr. Wells updating the “icons,” colleagues reflecting on the impact the book had on them, an enhanced website for the book, and more. For anyone interested in educating himself about the facts behind the slogans and propaganda that pass for much of the argumentation on behalf of Darwinism, Jonathan Wells’s sweetly reasoned, scientifically impeccable presentation gives the goods on peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, four-winged fruit flies, the tree of life, and other crusted barnacles Read More ›