Expelled and the Argument against Denying the Discussion

CT Movies reviewer Brett McCracken has seen Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and his thoughtful review is available online. It’s worth noting that McCracken, in his own words, “came into this film very, very skeptical . . . But I was pleasantly surprised with Expelled on a number of levels.” McCracken seems to get the point of the film, that it’s an argument against censorship. Indeed, the film hits a nerve in its critique of the contemporary American academy. As a graduate student immersed in academia and all its idiosyncrasies, I can attest to the pervasive and disturbingly hypocritical sense of close-mindedness that stifles the spirit of progressive discourse. It goes beyond the scientific communities in higher education and touches many Read More ›

Woodstock of Science Set to Dethrone Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

At Scoop freelance reporter Suzan Mazur pulls back the veil on one of science’s dirty little secrets — Darwinism is dead as a theory of evolution. This won’t be surprising to the early adopters here at ENV, but it will come as a surprise to many in the media who have lazily just regurgitated the tired old refrain of the NCSE that Darwinian evolution is the be-all and end-all of modern biology. Mazur reports on an upcoming conference at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria which she thinks will be the Woodstock of evolution. What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature — let’s call them “the Altenberg 16” — who Read More ›

Contra ISSR, Darwinism, Not Intelligent Design, Is the Real “Science Stopper”

The International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR), a group founded in 2002, recently issued an ill-informed statement attacking intelligent design as a “science stopper.” But as today’s guest columnist, Dr. Angus Menuge, points out, ISSR got things backwards. A professor of philosophy at Concordia University-Wisconsin, Dr. Menuge is author of the excellent study, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman and Littlefield) and a contributing author to Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge University Press).

Evolution’s Glass Ceiling

Discovery senior fellow David Klinghoffer has an interesting piece just out in the new Townhall Magazine, in which he looks at whether or not scientists really are free to research intelligent design. Of course, ID-critics claim that academic freedom reigns supreme: I asked leading ID-critics whether Darwin-doubters face any hurdles, beyond the strength or weakness of ID itself, to researching and testing their ideas. Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist, emailed me with a withering reply: “The conclusion of ‘Design’ should follow from well-done research on comparative genomics, molecular biology, gene expression, and biochemistry. There is, as you surely know, no barrier to such research.”Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, was emphatic: “I cannot imagine any Read More ›

Florida State Board Tricked into Meaningless “Compromise” to Retain Dogmatism and call Evolution “Scientific Theory”

Today the Florida State Board of Education voted 4-3 to adopt science standards that call evolution “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.” While it is good that students will learn about evolution, these standards will make for bad science education because they elevate Darwin’s theory to a dogma that cannot be questioned. Even worse, some board members thought that they could rectify the dogmatic tone of the standards by calling evolution a “scientific theory.” Some news articles are even calling this a “compromise.” Those board members were tricked into a false compromise: inserting the word “scientific theory” before the word “evolution” is a meaningless and impotent change that will do absolutely nothing to actually inform students about the scientific Read More ›