Back to School With the NSF: Targeting “Young Children” to Believe In Evolution

On September 2nd, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released an announcement regarding its new “Evolution Readiness Project,” whose self-stated goal is: to teach young children how Darwin’s model of natural selection explains the observation that organisms are adapted to their environment When they say “young children,” they mean fourth-graders. And when the project says “teach,” it really means to get students to believe in evolution. The project’s website explains that a main concern driving the project is that “it is unacceptable that 150 years after the birth of the theory of evolution only four out of ten Americans believe in it!” Given this express admission that they seek to get students to believe in evolution, what should we make of Read More ›

Inconsistent Reasoning Governs Evolutionary Interpretations of Feathered Dinosaurs

Nature news is reporting another feathered dinosaur. The title of the Nature news article says, “Crested dinosaur pushes back dawn of feather.” This dinosaur is from around 130 mya, but feathers are already known from the bird Archaeopteryx around 150 mya. So how does it push back the origin of feathers? Their reasoning is that the feathers on this new species, dubbed Concavenator corcovatus, appear in a different lineage than the one that supposedly led to birds. Since “such structures [feathers] are unlikely to have evolved separately in both groups” they use evolutionary reasoning to infer that “the common ancestor of the two predatory dinosaur branches, ‘could have been feathered’.” This pushes the origin of feathers back to “Middle Jurassic Read More ›

Fr. Robert Spitzer to Debate Stephen Hawking Tonight on Larry King Live

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. From The Catholic Register: Friday, Sept. 10, Father Robert Spitzer, president of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith and author of New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, will defend God’s existence against physicist Stephen Hawking’s belief that God isn’t the creator of the universe on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Father Spitzer already refuted Hawking’s claim on the Magis Center website. Fr. Spitzer isn’t the only one to respond to Dr. Hawking, but the debate at 9pm EDT will be worth watching.

Derbyshire: “Mommy, You’re Stupid! You’re Stupid, Mommy!”

John Derbyshire at National Review was AWOL for a while but I’m glad to see he’s back in action, abusing us in his accustomed style. He is one of those Darwinists like PZ Myers who’s always at least an enjoyable read notwithstanding that part of the enjoyment lies in the way the actual content tends to boil down to something little above the level of “Mommy, you’re stupid! You’re stupid, Mommy!” (This is our three-year-old Saul’s current best shot at a counterargument when crossed.) Thus it’s a relief to find that on his vacation from Darwin advocacy, John has learned nothing. On James Lee, briefly famous gunman and hostage-taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters, Derbyshire chides those who took a Read More ›

NDM-1 Superbug the Result of Bad Policies, Not Compelling Evidence for Evolution’s Creative Powers

Recently, the media has been discussing the micro-evolution of a new antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria, dubbed the “NDM-1 superbug.” This seems to be a very sad case of one of those things that evolution is pretty good at doing — making small, incremental improvements upon an enzyme through a step-by step process. That, plus the tendency of bacteria to collect multiple antibiotic resistances, makes this gene a real problem. However, it by no means provides evidence for the ability of evolutionary processes to produce new functions within a cell. The problem is that antibiotics are frequently used — and abused. Beta-lactamases, the enzymes that degrade penicillin and penicillin-like antibiotics (they are all characterized by a “beta-lactam” ring) were around Read More ›