Category: Science
“Design by natural selection should now be obvious”
CSC senior fellow David Berlinski recently sent me the following comments about science writer Dr. Susan Blackmore’s adoration of the inevitability of natural selection.
Debate at National Press Club Focused on Intelligent Design and Evolution
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Press Club was the setting today for a Discovery Institute sponsored and hosted debate about evolution and design. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, CSC director, championed the theory of intelligent design while Dr. William Provine, the Charles Alexander Professor of Biology at Cornell University, stood up for evolution. Of the forty or so people in attendance approximately half were journalists, and the rest of the crowd was comprised of a number of high school students, and various parties interested in the ongoing national debate over evolution. The best parts in my mind were the discussion beforehand between Meyer and Provine, and CSC senior fellow Dr. David Berlinski who attended, and our lunchtime discussion after the event Read More ›
AP Story Gets it Wrong: The Kansas Hearings are About the Weaknesses in Neo-Darwinism
An AP story on the upcoming hearings on Kansas science standards contains a crucial error. According to the lead, the hearings “will have as many as 23 witnesses speaking in support of teaching public school children intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution.” In fact, few if any of the featured scientists are pushing for design theory in the curriculum. That’s not even on the table in the science standards. Indeed, some of those speaking, like Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, aren’t even design theorists. They’re simply calling for students to learn the strengths and weaknesses in Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather than the air-brushed presentation of evolutionary theory they currently get. Why are some Darwinists so keen to obscure this Read More ›
UPDATED: Alt-Ctrl-Scopes or How the Newshour Repeated Every Other Story on the Debate Over Evolution
Last year the producers of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer were seeking out the people hunkered down at ground zero in the debate over evolution: the National Center for Science Education.As soon as the call to the Darwin defenders at the NCSE was placed and the interviews booked the Newshour turned their sites on the NCSE’s counterparts, the anti-Darwin scientists at the Center for Science Culture. But not without scheduling a lot of interviews and camera time with biblical creationists — and their dinosaur theme parks — in between. After months of discussion with the producers of the Newshour about whether or not they would fairly represent the theory of intelligent design, and the larger debate over how to teach Read More ›
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 ›