Tag: Stuart
Exotic Science and Theology in Rome
This week’s conference in Rome on Darwin and evolution, nominally sponsored by the Gregorian University and Notre Dame “under the High Patronage of the Pontifical Council on Culture,” has a public relations budget to promote some conclusions that would seem to vary from the positions of Pope Benedict. The Council on Culture has little or no funding of its own for such science conferences and has had to accept non-Vatican funding — and the guidance and other strings that go with it. Intelligent design scientists not only are not present, as a consequence, but their views were misrepresented and trashed ahead of time by the conference organizers. Instead, alongside some rather interesting speakers, you will hear a parade of atheists, Read More ›
Making Hash of Evolutionary Psychology
Stuart Derbyshire, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Birmingham, has an absolutely scathing review (at Spiked) of the latest nonsense emanating from evolutionary psychologists. As Derbyshire has it in the first line: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World is an unbearably stupid book. The authors, Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, ‘explain’ war and violence by treating human beings as machines programmed by evolution to grab resources, form in-groups and pass on their genes. Women, according to the authors, are naturally more passive because they must invest more effort into rearing offspring, and men are naturally more aggressive because they can produce lots of offspring by being dominant. Read More ›
Flock of Dodos, or Pack of Lies?
EDITORS NOTE: This is an updated and expanded version of a previous post. Darwinist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson showed “Flock of Dodos” in Seattle on Wednesday, February 7. Although the film sacrifices truth in order to tell a good story, it fails even at that. As entertainment, it’s a flop. But I’m less interested in the film’s cinematic shortcomings than in the way it misrepresents the truth — and in the way Olson is dealing with criticisms of those misrepresentations.
Professor of Design and Nature at Bristol University says Intelligent Design is Valid Scientific Theory
Professor of Design and Nature Stuart Burgess of Bristol University (UK) was interviewed in yesterday’s The Independent. This is a man who knows something about design. He argues that intelligent design is as valid a scientific concept as evolution. Current scientific philosophy is to rule out completely the possibility that a creator was involved. But there is no scientific justification for making such a sweeping assumption. Science should always be open-minded. Newton, Kelvin, Faraday and Pascal had no problem with a creator and with design. There is no reason why a modern scientist cannot take the same position as these eminent scientists. Three hundred years ago, there was so much support for intelligent design that life could be difficult if Read More ›