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The California Science Center’s Convenient Excuses: “Contractual Issues” or Viewpoint Discrimination?
Sometimes excuses just sound too convenient. Take, for instance, the California Science Center’s excuse for abruptly cancelling a showing of Darwin’s Dilemma last fall. According to top California Science Center (CSC) officials, the event was cancelled “because of issues related to the contract.” But emails obtained by Discovery Institute pursuant to CSC’s settlement of our lawsuit against them strongly show that CSC officials illegally discriminated against intelligent design (ID) and then tried to cover their tracks by claiming “contractual reasons” for the cancellation. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those familiar with the culture of intolerance fostered by many critics of ID. In this case, it’s especially important since that culture is being funded by over millions of taxpayer Read More ›
Can Ruse’s View of Ethics Save Us from Hitler?
[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.] Michael Ruse recently criticized my work in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which examines the way that evolutionary ethics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined Judeo-Christian views of ethics, especially the sanctity-of-life ethic. Ruse opposes my claim that evolutionary ethics as proposed by Darwin and other evolutionists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exerted a powerful influence on Hitler’s ideology. Given Read More ›
Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik (Updated)
Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit • Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change • Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change • Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution • Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”? • Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem” • Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal • Part 9 (This Article): Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. The final Read More ›
On Yom Kippur, Considering the Moral Meaning of Theistic Evolution
Tonight is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, a wrenching time when we look back on our moral failures of the past year and ask God to accept our repentance as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. In this space we’ve sometimes considered the theological implications of accepting a Darwinian picture of how human beings came to be. By the lights of so-called theistic evolution, God may have hoped for something like human beings to emerge from the otherwise blind, purposeless process of Darwinian evolution, but to see him as our creator or designer goes too far. What is the moral meaning of such an idea? One of the phrases in the Yom Kippur liturgy asks of God, Read More ›
Darwin’s Racism and Darwin’s Sacred Cause
[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.] Pointing out Darwin’s anti-slavery sentiments has been a favorite tactic for many years by those wanting to deny Darwin’s racism. However, Adrian Desmond and James Moore raised this discussion to an entirely new level by claiming in their 2009 book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, that abolitionism was the driving force behind Darwin embracing biological evolution. This is especially remarkable because Desmond and Moore stated in their earlier biography of Darwin: “Social Darwinism” is Read More ›