Incomparably more influential than any science textbook, Wikipedia with its seen-as-if-through-a-funhouse-mirror rendering of intelligent design passes along with its distortions directly into the bloodstream of popular consciousness. If you’re ever looking for a way to kill time, counting errors per sentence in any Wikipedia article that touches on ID will soak up plenty. This of course is a way to really kill time — not to use it effectively by somehow correcting the errors. No class of people on the planet has more time on their hands than the guys who edit Wikipedia articles. As part of what seems to be a 24/7 unpaid job, they stand ready at a moment’s notice to change any attempted correction back to its Read More ›

Try to imagine being operated on without anesthesia. A kidney is removed and then, while you are still fully awake, the surgeon displays it to you for your consideration in his hand. Sounds like a very bad nightmare but this is the kind of thing Dr. Josef Mengele did routinely with patients at Auschwitz. What would inspire a human being to such devilry? What influence, perhaps early in life, might have nudged him off the course of what could have otherwise been a conventional medical career?

A reader of my blog, Paul Burnett taunts me: Go ahead, David, say it: “Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people.” That is of course a ridiculous parody of what I’ve written on Darwinism and its historical consequences, and I’ve never written a word about Darwin-Mao, but…now that you mention it, Paul, I just so happen to have before me on my desk China and Charles Darwin, by China scholar James Reeve Pusey of Bucknell University, published in 1983 by Harvard University Press. Pusey is a son of the illustrious late Harvard president Nathan Pusey. (They don’t give people names like that anymore, do they? Too bad.) Let’s just look up Read More ›

Confronted with problems in life, it’s useful to think in terms of trends. Whether I am a consumer strapped with paying off credit card debit or a Darwinian biologist strapped with trying to explain the origin and development of life, is a given problem’s power to bedevil me getting, on the whole, bigger or smaller? If smaller, then that’s a cause for relief. Evolutionists talk grandly, seeking to give the impression that their problem is increasingly in hand, or in the bag, or under control, whichever metaphor you prefer. But this is mostly bluff, as a report in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reminds us. If the evolutionary origin of DNA coding remains an enigma, try adding to that the Read More ›

At his website Why Evolution Is True, Jewish atheist and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has responded in two posts to my own entry on Chanukah, knee pain, and suboptimal design in creatures as a bogus argument for atheism. (As an aside, note the gentleman’s last name. I’m guessing it started out as Cohen, meaning that he is presumably a cohen, a descendant of Aaron. In Ashkenazic pronunciation the Hebrew name often comes out as coyne. Pending information to the contrary, take a moment to appreciate the irony of his illustrious priestly lineage.) Professor Coyne is full of “Aha’s!” and “Gotcha’s!”  He writes:  [T]he “bad designs” [in creatures] are more than just random flaws in the “design” of organisms: Read More ›