Author: Jonathan Wells
The Cracked Haeckel Approach to Evolutionary Reasoning
There’s an old lawyers’ joke about the “cracked kettle” approach to legal argumentation. Jones sues Smith for borrowing her kettle and returning it with a crack in it. Smith’s lawyer then defends her with the following arguments (in order): In my book Icons of Evolution I described a 2000 conference talk in which Kevin Padian (President of the National Center for Science Education) used argumentation very much like this to defend his claim that birds are modified descendants of dinosaurs.1 Darwinists are now using a similar approach to defend Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings.
Flock of Dodos, or Pack of Lies?
EDITORS NOTE: This is an updated and expanded version of a previous post. Darwinist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson showed “Flock of Dodos” in Seattle on Wednesday, February 7. Although the film sacrifices truth in order to tell a good story, it fails even at that. As entertainment, it’s a flop. But I’m less interested in the film’s cinematic shortcomings than in the way it misrepresents the truth — and in the way Olson is dealing with criticisms of those misrepresentations.
Cellular Zip Codes: Where’s the Postmaster?
In 1970, Nobel laureate Jacques Monod called DNA the “secret of life” and said that the discovery of its structure and function — especially “the understanding of the random physical basis of mutation” — means that “the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded” and that humans are “a mere accident.”[1]
Darwin’s Defenders in Kansas Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat it Too
As a member of the Kansas Science Standards writing committee last year, Stephen B. Case adamantly opposed critical thinking in high school biology classes. A Darwinist, Case was furious when the Kansas State School Board decided that students should learn the evidence and scientific arguments both for and against evolutionary theory. Intelligent design (ID) was not included in the state science standards, but Darwinists feel threatened by it anyway. Case writes: “One thing is clear: The scientific community has not embraced the explanation of design because it is quite clear that on the basis of the evidence, it is just wrong. Beyond the clarity that design is not science, the smoke is hiding an attack on the religious faith and Read More ›
