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Berlinski in The Deniable Darwin: Science Needs Its Own Critics
NewsBusters has a great interview with David Berlinski by Kevin Mooney, who praises The Deniable Darwin as “a series of mind-bending essays.” Proving once again that he is a skeptic’s skeptic, Dr. Berlinski addresses the lack of criticism in science: “In the U.S. you have the separation of powers that keeps different branches in check, but this is not true for science, where there is now a lot of corruption,” he observed. “Science needs its own critics. The same skepticism that is used in research now needs to be turned back onto science itself.” Dr. Berlinski’s essays go a long way toward rectifying this situation, while his observations and insights quickly reveal how ridiculous the anti-ID crowd can be: But Read More ›
Epperson v. Arkansas: It’s Illegal to Ban Evolution, How About Intelligent Design?
Epperson v. Arkansas was the first case regarding the teaching of evolution to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was handed down in 1968, where the Court effectively declared it illegal to ban the teaching of evolution. 1. Summary An Arkansas statute descended from the Tennessee “Monkey Law” made it a criminal misdemeanor for teachers in state-supported schools to teach evolution and to use textbooks that taught the theory.28 Despite this law, in 1965 the Little Rock, Arkansas School Board gave biology teacher Susan Epperson a new textbook containing material on evolution.29 To avoid criminal penalty and dismissal, she sought a declaration that the Arkansas statute was unconstitutional.30 The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Epperson and held that the Read More ›
More People Flock to Second Day of Colorado Conference to Hear Behe and Berlinski
More than a thousand people attended the second day of the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference this weekend in Castle Rock, Colorado. Saturday morning started off with a strong talk by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who synthesized the main points of his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Behe, in his usual winsome and accessible style, drove home just how much empirical evidence has accumulated in recent years demonstrating the sharp limits to the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations. During the question period that followed, two people offered long-winded “questions” to Behe that seemed to come straight from the talking points of the National Center for Science Education.
Free Speech Prevails as Stephen Meyer Speaks on Intelligent Design to Huge Crowd at Colorado Conference
Updated photo from Friday night: Castle Rock, Colorado — Despite the first major snowstorm of the season, and unrelenting efforts by malicious Darwinists to prevent people from registering, a huge crowd of around 1,000 people showed up Friday night to hear Dr. Stephen Meyer present the DNA evidence for intelligent design based on his new book Signature in the Cell. Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and myself are in Colorado to speak at the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference sponsored by Shepherd Project Ministries. On Saturday, Michael Behe will present the evidence against modern Darwinism from his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution; David Berlinski will talk about The Devil’s Delusion and The Deniable Darwin; and I Read More ›
Lewontin and Numbers: Day One of Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago
“Go to hell!” said Ron Numbers cheerfully to me, as we greeted each other at the front of Rockefeller Chapel last night. “Hey, did I say that loud enough?” he asked, looking around at the various evolutionary biology and history and philosophy of science worthies — Lewontin, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Dennett, Richards, and so on — milling about. Ron’s smiling insult was a mocking attempt to redress the widespread criticism that he had let me off easy in our notorious Bloggingheads conversation. A spirit of raillery was in the air, given a vigorous kick at the beginning of the evening by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. Little of the secular sanctimony of the 1959 Darwin centennial (see below) was in evidence. Read More ›