Author: David Klinghoffer
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 ›
Who or What Plays the Music of DNA?
As I was driving in to work, the local NPR station had on an interview with a guy who’s involved with gathering billions of seeds of various plant varieties into a “doomsday vault.” It is on a remote Norwegian island and intended as a precaution against the presumed devastations of global warming. There were few surprises in the conversation — the grim mood was well suited to the NPR target audience, which eats this stuff up — apart from one rather interesting question from a listener. The guest, Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was asked why his group bothers with seeds. In the future, won’t we be able to reconstitute life from the digital code of DNA? Read More ›
“Intelligent Design” in Hebrew?
In the Hebrew version of Wikipedia, the page on intelligent design translates ID with the phrase “tichnun tivoni,” which means something like “intelligent planning.” And so it’s translated regularly too in Ha’aretz and other Israeli news sources. The Wiki page is well supplied with the usual distortions that you’d expect from Wikipedia in any language, but never mind that. The question of how to translate “intelligent design” into the language of the Bible is an interesting one. Is there an actual Biblical phrase that captures the idea? In the journal Azure, published by the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, an essay on the “Secret of the Sabbath” indirectly suggests an answer. Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz reflects on the passage from the Read More ›
Pickpocketed by the Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution, a wonderful taxpayer-supported educational establishment, has a bad record when it comes to treating scientific Darwin-doubters with due respect for academic freedom and free speech. Now to this list of indictments add respect for intellectual property. Readers will recall the Richard Sternberg affair, in which supervisors at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) persecuted an evolutionary biologist on staff just for editing a peer-reviewed research paper supportive of intelligent design. More recently, senior figures at the Smithsonian may have pressured the affiliated California Science Center to cancel a contract to show a Darwin-critical documentary, in what seems to be an instance of a public facility illegally regulating speech. In both of those cases, the indications suggest Read More ›
Darwinism’s “Virtual Reality”: A Lepidopterist Explains
In explaining how the Darwinian “trick is done,” internationally famous lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera recruits a name I haven’t heard much about since college: the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. In the latest volume of d’Abrera’s epic Butterflies of the World series, titled Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, he gives us Foucault in a supporting role you wouldn’t have expected. The two make an odd pair. D’Abrera is the Australian butterfly expert and defender of traditional Linnaean taxonomy, Foucault the French Nietzschean and amoralist. But Foucault’s concept of the episteme, an a priori framework in which scientific and other thought is carried out, nicely describes the hermetically enclosed scientific world of the Darwinist as d’Abrera sees it. Read More ›