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Darwin or Design Interviews Comprehensive and Informative
There’s a new resource for those wanting to learn more about the ID debate. Jason Rennie, an Australian podcaster, has a series of 25 podcasts, called “Darwin or Design?“ Rennie has compiled 25 interviews with prominent thinkers on both sides of the ID debate into a sort of “audiobook” which gives the listener a chance to hear each individual in their own words (and voice!). Interviews include Mike Behe on irreducible complexity, Guillermo Gonzalez on The Privileged Planet, Joey Campana on ID research, and Denyse O’Leary on ID and the media. On the critics’ side, evolutionists like Sean Carroll and PZ Myers gave their two cents.
Francisco Ayala, “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology,” says “Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer”
Fancisco J. Ayala is an esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was dubbed the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” by the New York Times. Ayala is not only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), but he helped found, chair, and organize the AAAS Dialogues on Science, Ethics, and Religion. He’s widely acclaimed by the Darwinian scientific community as a guru on science and religion. So what does Ayala say about evolutionary biology and religion? In May, 2007 Ayala published an article in the prestigious journal Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences USA entitled “Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer,” explaining that “evolution conveys chance and necessity jointly enmeshed in Read More ›
Kenneth R. Miller’s “Random and Undirected” Testimony: An Update
Last summer I reported how theistic evolutionist and biologist Kenneth Miller gave some inaccurate testimony during the Dover trial when he wrongly claiming that the phrase “[e]volution is random and undirected” exists only in the third edition of his textbook. Miller claimed, “[T]hat statement was not in the first edition the book, it was not in the second edition, it was not in the fourth edition.” The problem is that the phrase “[e]volution is random and undirected” was in the first, second, and fourth editions. As I noted, “The facts are very different from Miller’s testimony. All of the first four editions of his ‘elephant’ Biology textbook contain the phrase ‘[e]volution is random and undirected.’” Now, I have recently discovered Read More ›
Misrepresenting ID Arguments and Rewriting the History of Junk-DNA
Orac over at Scienceblogs is starting to develop a reputation as someone more interested in calling his opponents names than in accurately representing their positions. His latest misrepresentation involves ENV contributor Casey Luskin and his post on junk-DNA, which Orac called “breathtakingly idiotic” (perhaps like Judge Jones calling ID “breathtakingly inane,” as anything which poses a challenge to the status quo must be to a Darwinist?). Orac explained to his readers that Luskin’s argument was that “‘junk DNA’ somehow disproves evolution.”This is a blatant mischaracterization of Luskin’s argument. According to Luskin,
Mathematician Makes Hopeful Predictions about the Future of Evolution Education
Mathematician and intelligent design supporter Granville Sewell has posted an article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” where he makes some interesting predictions about the future state of teaching science. He asks whether intelligent design will be taught and says, “probably not in my lifetime.” In Sewell’s view, “in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious ‘natural’ process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day.” Sewell continues to explain that this result would not be opposed by the Discovery Institute, which is not trying to push ID into schools: But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current Read More ›
