Jerry Coyne Defends Haeckel’s Embryos: Why Darwinism Is False

Note: This is Part 4 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. So evolutionary theory needs better evidence than the fossil record can provide. Coyne correctly notes: “When he wrote The Origin, Darwin considered embryology his strongest evidence for evolution.” Darwin had written that the evidence seemed to show that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar,” a pattern that “reveals community of descent.” Indeed, Darwin thought that early embryos “show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult state.”15 But Darwin Read More ›

Melanie Phillips Gets It Right: Why Intelligent Design Is Not Creationism

Having one’s position repeatedly mischaracterized by those who refuse to be corrected is an annoyingly common problem for intelligent design. While some people are just sincerely mistaken in thinking that it’s creationism, some — like Ken Miller — know better, but as UK columnist Melanie Phillips points out in “Creating an insult to intelligence,” it’s beneficial to damage people’s reputations by confusing the two: Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly Read More ›

Shoddy Engineering or Intelligent Design? Case of the Mouse’s Eye

We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better — so they tell us. The problem with this story of supposed unintelligent design is that it is long on anthropomorphisms and short Read More ›

Benjamin Wiker on the Problem of Evil

This week Inside Catholic republished an absolutely brilliant essay by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Wiker on the problem of evil. This essay is one of the most thoughtful replies to the problem of evil — that the existence of evil evidences against God’s existence — I’ve seen packed into a short essay. It is a must read. Wiker describes how, in a feat of fuzzy thinking, evolution typically plays into dialogue on the problem of evil. Evolutionary answers to the problem, he argues, are more likely to do away with evil than explain it. And among the many important questions Wiker poses is whether we really want all evil purged from the earth. Take a look to see his Read More ›

When “Junk DNA” Isn’t Junk: Farewell to a Darwinist Standard Response

In the Darwinist repertoire, a standard response to evidence of design in the genome is to point to the existence of “junk DNA.” What is it doing there, if purposeful design really is detectable in the history of life’s development? Of course this assumes that the “junk” really is junk. That assumption has been cast increasingly into doubt. New research just out in the journal Nature Genetics finds evidence that genetic elements previously thought of as rubbish are anything but that. The research describes tiny strands of RNA, previously thought to be junk, that now turn out to play a role in gene expression. Another finding by Dr. Geoff Faulkner shows that “retrotransposons,” a further variety of “junk” as the Read More ›