A Successful PSSI Lecture Tour in Spain

Over an eight day period last January, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (aka DoctorsDoubtingDarwin.com, a rapidly growing, 277-member, physician group from 17 countries) sponsored a lecture tour in Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Leon and Vigo. It was titled “Lo Que Darwin No Sabia,” or “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” Tom Woodward, Ph.D. (author of Doubts About Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back) and myself (author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links) lectured on eight occasions to exceptionally large audiences. Santiago Escuain was our translator extraordinaire. Rich Akin, the CEO of PSSI, put in enormous hours into making this trip a huge success. We were originally scheduled to give ten lectures (two per city), but the University of Leon Read More ›

Anti-Freedom Activists Try to Censor Science Education in Florida

TALLAHASSEE — “Academic freedom is not ‘smelly crap.’ It’s the foundation of a free society,” says science education expert Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at Discovery Institute. “That’s why Florida’s proposed Academic Freedom Act on evolution is so important.”Florida legislators recently introduced SB 2692, the Academic Freedom Act, to protect teachers and students from retaliation for discussing the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory.Opponents are already trying to scare the public about what the Act is meant to do, falsely claiming it is an attempt to put religion in the classroom. Some have gone so far as to call academic freedom “smelly crap.”

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss “evangelize” for Evolution at Stanford

I had the pleasure of hearing Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss engage in a fireside chat at Stanford this past weekend. For the most part, they agreed with one-another on nearly everything. If I could summarize their conversation in 2 words, it would be “fear” and “evangelism.” First, it’s clear that they fear intelligent design. They equated intelligent design proponents with “con-men” who are “slimy,” “well-funded,” and promote “ignorance.” (Incidentally, each of these claims is incorrect.) They also appeared to greatly fear religion, as both Dawkins and Krauss held that teaching young children about religion in Sunday School is equivalent to “child abuse.” Dawkins even said that his goal is “to kill religion.” (Dawkins later tried to qualify this argument, Read More ›

More Propaganda in the Classroom

Recently Channel One News decided to tackle the evolution debate and focused on the Florida state board of education’s decision to revise science standards to proclaim Darwinian evolution as the foundation of biolgoy. If you’re not familiar with Channel One it probably means you’re not a high school student. Channel One is the self-poroclaimed “news and public affairs content provider to teens” and claims to reach six million students across the country every single day.

Mr. Dunford’s Concession: Antibiotic Resistance Is Irrelevant to the Intelligent Design/Darwinism Debate

Zoology graduate student and Darwinist Mike Dunford at Panda’s Thumb has replied to recent posts in which Dr. Jonathan Wells and I pointed out that Darwin’s theory is irrelevant to medical research on antibiotic resistance, and that antibiotic resistance itself is irrelevant to the debate about intelligent design and Darwinism. Remarkably, Mr. Dunford, referring to a recent advance in research on antibiotic resistance, concedes both points. He writes: The scientists worked in a lab. They artificially replicated a set of conditions (an antibiotic-rich environment) that occur in nature. Finally, they placed the bacteria into this environment – something that happens spontaneously outside the lab…We’ll pretend that anything that happens in a lab must be artificial selection, and that it is Read More ›