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It’s Settled, Then
So, Darwinists are admitting that up until Friday, Jan. 16 2009 @ 4:10PM, evolution was “mostly theory.” Interesting. I am now certain that dogs adapt to their environment, too. Last night my dog kept barking and I shook my finger and spoke very firmly to her and made her sit on her bed. She stopped barking. So, at 7:10 pm I had a perfect example of evolution. Or was it adaptation? Or was it bad parenting? Whatever, we now see that dogs evolve, which previously had been believed to be “mostly theory.” My peers, who were there reviewing the moment, are skeptical because they think my dog is asexual. Regardless, this is all speculation — except for poor Kali. She Read More ›
And Lo, Darwin Is With You Always, Even Unto the End of the Age
The NCSE would like to remind us that Darwin Day is approaching (it’s less than a month away — do you still need to buy Darwin presents?), and Glenn Branch wants you to take Darwin on your shoulder with you, wherever you go, whether “at the museum or in a pew, at a lecture hall or in a movie theater, out in the park or indoors on a badminton court — to learn about, discuss, and celebrate Darwin…” Here’s an even better idea: why not stand up for academic freedom and remember what Darwin said about fair results and balancing both sides of the question? And if you’re a student, see if you can win $500 while you’re at it.
Darwinism & Communism, Part I
Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one? Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view. He’s been having a good run with his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — that is, apart from being taken to task by a number of reviewers for applying a Darwinian framework to understanding market forces. In the current New York Review of Books, economist Robert Skidelsky chides Ferguson for purveying “false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection….These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naïve.” Ferguson describes Read More ›
Behe’s Take: Miller vs. Luskin
The back-and-forth between Casey Luskin and Kenneth Miller has been going on for a couple weeks now, both on this blog and over at Carl Zimmer’s blog, and now Michael Behe weighs in on the debate over what he meant when he wrote about the blood clotting cascade in Darwin’s Black Box: In Chapter 4 of Darwin’s Black Box I first described the clotting cascade and then, in a section called “Similarities and Differences”, analyzed it in terms of irreducible complexity. Near the beginning of that part I had written, “Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where details are less well known, the blood clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity… The components of the Read More ›
Louisiana Passes Rules Implementing Historic Academic Freedom Act
The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) voted unanimously to adopt rules today implementing the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), the landmark academic freedom bill passed last summer. The rules approved by the BESE effectuate the academic freedom bill’s purpose to allow teachers to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination. A subcommittee of the Board removed a provision prohibiting intelligent design before passing the rules unanimously. The legally redundant provision would have gone beyond the intent of the legislation and was dropped after the subcommittee heard testimony from supporters and opponents of the language. In adopting these rules, the BESE reiterated its support for academic freedom for teachers to teach controversial scientific Read More ›