Category: Culture
Bloggingheads Explains
In a new segment, Bloggingheads chief Robert Wright and Bloggingheads correspondent George Johnson go on for 75 minutes about the trauma of a pair of heretics (me and Paul Nelson, on separate segments) appearing on their site. I would urge everyone who doesn’t have pressing matters to attend to, such as the need to wash your hair, to tune in for the full time. It’s really fascinating in its way to see two grown men in such a hand-wringing lather. It’s also fascinating to see that neither of them in 75 minutes offers a reason for the correctness of their own views, or the wrongness of ours. The closest they come is when George Johnson invokes the hoary “methodological naturalism.”
In Oklahoma, Darwinist Choir Sings the Praises of Suppression and Censorship
It’s funny how a little thing like a documentary film can send the Darwinist choir into tizzy tantrums. If Darwin’s theory is the be all end all of science, why are they so worried by a small, independent film? Because, it is the power of the ideas in the film that have them scared. The makers of Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet have produced the third in their trilogy of films about intelligent design, Darwin’s Dilemma The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion. It’s a fantastic film and the producers are screening it in various venues around the country before it’s release on DVD next week. One of which is the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural Read More ›
Biologist Jonathan Wells: Fossil Evidence Deepens Darwin’s Dilemma
As Jonathan Wells reminds us in his new article, “Deepening Darwin’s Dilemma,” 2009 is a year of anniversaries for evolution — not just for Darwin and The Origin, but also the centennial of Charles Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale. With Darwin’s Dilemma coming out next week and premiering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Dr. Wells’ article couldn’t be more timely. As he explains in the film and will be on hand to explain in person on September 29, Darwin saw the Cambrian explosion as a serious argument against his theory, but he countered it by supposing “that fossils of the ancestors of Cambrian animals once existed but were destroyed…The discovery of microscopic and soft-bodied Precambrian fossils makes Read More ›
Screening Darwin’s Dilemma at Sam Noble Museum of Natural History Sept. 29
For those of you in Oklahoma, two events two weeks from now are bringing intelligent design to your doorstep. First, Stephen C. Meyer will give a free lecture at the University of Oklahoma on September 28. The next day is the Southwestern premiere of Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History September 29th. Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. The screening is sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Read More ›
Reducible Versus Irreducible Systems and Darwinian Versus Non-Darwinian Processes
Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine.” As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored. Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s Read More ›