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Correcting Kirk Fithzhugh’s Misunderstandings About Intelligent Design
In my prior post, I noted that for years I’ve owned a graduate assignment on evolutionary classification by LA County Museum of Natural History scientist Kirk Fitzhugh. After completing this “Classification” project, he went on to earn his PhD in biology and today is Curator of Polychaetes at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). Fitzhugh was part of the internal discussions at NHMLAC that I’ve been writing about, in which participants at one point planned to tell the California Science Center (CSC), “We urge you to cancel this event.” Fitzhugh, however, is not nearly so private about his disagreement with ID as some of his NHMLAC colleagues. It’s important to note that Dr. Fitzhugh should have every Read More ›
Meet Pakicetus, the Terrestrial Mammal BioLogos Calls a “Whale”
In a previous post, we noted some fish-related problems with BioLogos’s page discussing the fossil record. But these aren’t the only marine mistakes on the page. BioLogos says regarding the evolution of whales: Recently, a 52-million-year-old whale fossil, Pakicetus, was found in Pakistan. It was clearly a small, wolf-sized whale, but it did not have the characteristic fat-pad, a structure that allows the whale’s jaw vibrations to be used for hearing. Also, its teeth were much like those of the terrestrial animals already thought to be related to whales. Aside from the fact that Pakicetus was discovered in 1983 (not exactly “recently”), there’s quite a bit more that should be said about this fossil. The claim that Pakicetus is a Read More ›
New Atheist Atheology
P.Z. Myers answered my eight questions about what New Atheists really believe. Myers provided his “fast and flippant” answers; yet he provides a fine synopsis of New Atheist atheology. More detailed book-length New Atheist apologetics (Dawkins, Harris, etc) are less fast but no less flippant. My original questions are followed by Myers’ answers, then by my reply. 1) Why is there anything?
Darwinism’s “Virtual Reality”: A Lepidopterist Explains
In explaining how the Darwinian “trick is done,” internationally famous lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera recruits a name I haven’t heard much about since college: the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. In the latest volume of d’Abrera’s epic Butterflies of the World series, titled Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, he gives us Foucault in a supporting role you wouldn’t have expected. The two make an odd pair. D’Abrera is the Australian butterfly expert and defender of traditional Linnaean taxonomy, Foucault the French Nietzschean and amoralist. But Foucault’s concept of the episteme, an a priori framework in which scientific and other thought is carried out, nicely describes the hermetically enclosed scientific world of the Darwinist as d’Abrera sees it. Read More ›
Something’s Fishy With BioLogos’s Description of Fish Fossil Record
In a prior post, I discussed how BioLogos’s website has a page titled “What does the fossil record show?” which is conspicuously missing any mention of the Cambrian explosion, or any other explosions in the history of life. The page also has other errors and omissions. In a section titled “Evidence of Gradual Change,” it states: “At 500 million years ago, ancient fish without jawbones surface.” Actually, the first known fossils of fish are from the lower Cambrian, meaning that their date is probably closer to 530 m.y.a., near the beginning of the Cambrian period. A Nature paper reporting this find was titled “Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China.” It noted: “These finds imply that the first agnathans may have Read More ›