Category: Science
Stephen Meyer Discusses Craig Venter’s “Synthetic Life” on CBN
Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, makes another appearance (see the first here) on The 700 Club, this time for the show’s interactive web broadcast. In this interview, Meyer discusses the recent hype concerning Craig Venter’s claims to have produced artificial life. While praising the ingenuity of Venter’s research team, Meyer explains that Venter did not really succeed in producing artificial life at all. Rather, Venter’s team inserted a synthetically sequenced chromosome into a non-synthetic cell. The cell’s machinery was then able to successfully read the instructions on the chromosome and transform the cell into the specified organism. Meyer highlights the indispensability of rational deliberation — intelligent purposive design — in the sequencing of the one million Read More ›
Uncensoring and Simplifying the Scientific Case for Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy is a book I’ve long hoped that someone would write. Don’t get me wrong — there are other good books out there that explain the fundamentals of intelligent design (ID) in plain language. But with clarity, elegance, and accuracy, Intelligent Design Uncensored fills this niche better than most. The authors, Dr. William Dembski (an expert in the technical arguments for ID) and Dr. Jonathan Witt (a writer with a strong grasp of the relevant science) — both Discovery Institute senior fellows — make an ideal team. After taking the reader on a tour of molecular machines and cellular complexity, Dembski and Witt condense the scientific thinking behind the design inference into Read More ›
Richard Dawkins Opens Mouth; Inserts Foot
In 2003, the BBC launched a documentary series known as Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, presented by the atheist Jonathan Miller. The interviews that were conducted, being too lengthy for inclusion in the 2003 series, were later archived in a 2004 documentary series, entitled The Atheism Tapes, a supplementary series of six programs, consisting of the uncut interviews with a single contributing atheist. One such film featured Jonathan Miller interviewing our old friend, Richard Dawkins. A clip from that interview is appended below: Three minutes into the embedded interview, in speaking of the purported instances of irreducible complexity in nature, Richard Dawkins succeeds in decimating any pretense to neo-Darwinism’s status as a falsifiable proposition. He states, “There cannot have Read More ›
Believing Life’s ‘Signature in the Cell’ an Interview with Stephen Meyer
Click play to watch Stephen Meyer’s interview on the evidence for intelligent design, which aired Friday, June 18, on The 700 Club.
Current Textbooks Misuse Embryology to Argue for Evolution
Sylvia Mader’s 2010 textbook, Biology, uses colorized versions of Haeckel’s embryo drawings with only a few small modifications. As seen in the side-by-side comparison above, the black and white drawings are Haeckel’s original drawings and the colored drawings are from Mader’s 2010 textbook. Just like Haeckel’s original drawings, Mader’s colorized drawings obscure the differences between the early stages of vertebrate development in order to give students the following misleading caption: “At these comparable developmental stages, vertebrate embryos have many features in common, which suggests they evolved from a common ancestor. (These embryos are not drawn to scale.)” (Sylvia S. Mader, Biology, p. 278 (McGraw Hill, 2010).) Click the graphic for the full picture. Haeckel’s long-discredited recapitulation theory is not necessarily Read More ›