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What Is It About Butterflies that Drives Men to Doubt Darwin?
I’ve written here before about novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. An erstwhile butterfly researcher and curator at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History, Nabokov thought that butterflies possess powers of mimicry inexplicable on Darwinian assumptions: “Natural Selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. In the same tradition of butterfly-induced Darwin heresy, meet Bernard d’Abera. A kind of latter-day Audubon of lepidoptera, D’Abrera is a philosopher Read More ›
Responding to LA County Natural History Museum Scientist Kirk Fitzhugh
In a prior post, we saw how the LA County Museum of Natural History (LACMNH) contributed to the pressure on the California Science Center to cancel a pro-ID event sponsored by American Freedom Alliance. But there’s a little story to tell here about a fairly vocal anti-ID scientist at the LACMNH. When I was an undergraduate, a friend gave me a packet titled “Classification: Graduate Student Project,” which explained various methods of building phylogenetic trees. The packet is a three-ring binder collecting the pages of a project completed in 1983 by a then-graduate student at George Washington University, Kirk Fitzhugh. His name came up as I was reviewing e-mail correspondence related to the California Science Center’s cancellation of its contract Read More ›
BioLogos’s Fossil Record Page Conspicuously Missing the Cambrian Explosion
The BioLogos website has a static page titled “What does the fossil record show?,” which would naturally lead one to expect that if you read the page, then you’ll learn what the fossil record shows. What’s odd about the page is that the page makes no mention whatsoever of the Cambrian explosion. This is despite the fact that Robert L. Carroll calls the Cambrian explosion “[t]he most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution”: The most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution was the dramatic origin of major new structures and body plans documented by the Cambrian explosion. Until 530 million years ago, multicellular animals consisted primarily of simple, soft-bodied forms, most of which have been identified from the fossil record as cnidarians Read More ›
Randy Isaac on the “Two Book” Model
In two previous posts, I have discussed Randy Isaac’s essay, “Science and the Question of God,” published at the BioLogos Foundation website. The final section of Isaac’s essay is called “The Two Book Model.” This phrase normally refers to the traditional Christian view that God reveals himself in history and Scripture, which is his “special” revelation, as well as in the created order, which is “general” revelation. So we have two complementary books of revelation: the book of Scripture and the book of nature. Though we can’t learn everything about God from general revelation that we learn from God’s special revelation, we can learn something.
Theologians nice to Myers…naaasty little Theologians…
P.Z. Myers was at his hissing best in reply to my recent philosophical questions for New Atheists: …the graveyard of rotting ideas that the Discovery Institute calls a blog…a particularly crusty and dogmatic alchemist stirring beneath the cobwebs of his dead discipline …imposing the cracked and cloudy lens of his superstition… Imagine my surprise when a couple of days later Myers pens a post lavishly extolling…theologians(!): I would never deny that there are many smart people among the believers, some are incredibly brilliant and thoughtful scholars. Theology is also awesomely sophisticated and complex… “Awesomely sophisticated…”? Myers goes on with an unusually long post, part man-crush on Aquinas, part hissing rage, alternately praising theology and excoriating it for twenty five paragraphs.