Category: Culture
Second verse, same as the first
The Washington Post published a lead editorial yesterday that seems to steal a page right out of The New York Times playbook (Darwinian end-run around scientific evidence, on three!). The Post’s first paragraph is shockingly similar to the Times’ opening from just the day before: “With their slick web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of “intelligent design” — a “theory” that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution — are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. Rather than attempt to prove that the world was created in six days, they operate simply by casting doubt on evolution, largely using the time-honored argument that intelligent life could not have come about by a random natural process Read More ›
Sticker Shock at Instapundit
Instapundit is featuring a joke equating the Cobb County evolution sticker with belief in a flat earth. Glenn Reynolds doesn’t fit neatly into the Republican or Democrat camp. For that reason I’m optimistic he will soon move past the simplistic binary opposition of idiot-Darwinism-doubters-who-only-grudgingly-concede-the-earth-is-round vs. enlightened-secularists-who-understand-that-Darwinism-is-a-given-and-doesn’t-threaten-religion.
Uncommon Knowledge: Wells vs. Pigliucci
Earlier this month, the PBS show Uncommon Knowledge taped a discussion about the controversy over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The guests were Darwinists Dr. Massimo Pigliucci of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and CSC Fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells. Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson moderated the discussion. The 30-minute show will be aired by PBS sometime in the next few months, but in the meantime Dr. Pigliucci has posted his version of what happened on a skeptics’ web site. We recommend that anyone interested in this controversy watch the actual show when it airs. Since Dr. Pigliucci has chosen to publicize his own version of the discussion beforehand, however, we have asked Dr. Wells Read More ›
Did I miss the memo on the sanctity of Darwinism?
The New York Times lead editorial Sunday, Jan 23, avoided addressing in any detail the scientific issues in the national debate over how to teach evolution and instead tried to equate the scientific theory of intelligent design with creationism, and proclaimed all critics of Darwinian evolution are Biblical creationists. It reads like a briefing paper from the ACLU, and probably was inspired by one. Critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. Creationists who believe that God made the world and everything in it pretty much as described in the Bible were frustrated when their efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools or inject the teaching of creationism were judged Read More ›
Rhetorical Excess of the Day [II]
The tasteless, over-the-top effort by some Darwinists (especially those at the ACLU) to castigate anyone who disagrees with them on evolution as Nazis or Holocaust deniers continues unabated. In a recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, Jeffrey Selman, whom the ACLU represented in the Cobb County case, implies that if we allow students to hear about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory we are one step away from putting Jews in the ovens: When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board’s decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution “a theory, not a fact” was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue. Still, he said, he could Read More ›