Author: Jonathan Witt
UPI Story Weak on Weaknesses
Phil Magers’ recent UPI story about evolution in the classroom (“Teachers feel pressure”) conveys a growing problem for biology teachers: more and more students refuse to uncritically accept Darwinism. How horrible! Magers’ pro-Darwin analysis is simplistic, even misleading. This is fitting, for so too is the presentation of evolution in the typical classroom. When students aren’t being fed bogus evidence for Darwin’s theory (like Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings), they’re being led to believe the theory is without important weaknesses.
Syndicated Article Presents Opinion as Fact
In a recent news story, Alexandra Witze writes, “Although intelligent design is not scientific …” That’s highly misleading. In a supposedly fair and accurate news story about this growing controversy, Witze presents as fact a key point of contention in the debate.
Berkeley Goes Radical
Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski has a delicious response to UC Berkeley Dean Holub’s frantic worrying about the demise of Darwinism amongst his colleagues. Appearing in today’s Berkeley student newspaper, the essay begins, “Wearing pink tasseled slippers and conical hats covered in polka dots, Darwinian biologists are persuaded that a plot is afoot to make them look silly. At Internet web sites such as The Panda’s Thumb or Talk Reason, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack critics of Darwin’s theory such as William Dembski by misspelling his name as William Dumbski.” Read on.
Meyer Rebuts Shermer’s Misinformation
In a recent LA Times op-ed, Michael Shermer distorts the facts of a recent video-taped debate between him and design theorist Stephen Meyer. Dr. Meyer offers a different view of their conversation here.
Distinguished Johns Hopkins M.D. Doubts Darwin
Somebody forgot to get the word to Paul McHugh: Respectable intellectuals don’t doubt Darwin — ever! McHugh is a university distinguished service professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the new issue of The Weekly Standard, he provides detailed evidence that Darwin’s narrative of the origin of species is in crisis, and that civilized discourse about the growing controversy surrounding his theory is all to the good: Those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method. “Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts Read More ›