If you’ve ever wondered how much of high-stakes science is politicized, reflecting the ideological views of the scientists involved despite all their insistences to the contrary, look no further than this. A blockbuster paper in the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, reported increased mortality associated with the “controversial” malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, being tested for use against COVID-19. Why would a malaria drug, of a value that has yet to be determined, be controversial? You already know the answer: it’s because of the identity of the medicine’s biggest cheerleader. He Looked Them Up on LinkedIn In briefest terms, scientists drew on shady data from a previously obscure company, Surgisphere, operated by a skeleton crew with a questionable …
In a free online Zoom webinar on Saturday, June 13, biochemist Behe will review the biochemistry of viruses in general and COVID-19 in particular. He will use these topical examples to illustrate a fundamental principle: Darwinian and other unintelligent evolutionary mechanisms can change life marginally, in ways that are medically important, yet they cannot explain life’s complex structure. Rather, the elegant molecular structures of life required purposeful intelligent design. Join us from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. Registration is required! Find more information and a link to register here. The event is graciously sponsored by the Colorado, Houston, and Southern California Chapters of Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Network. Photo credit: Michael Behe, by …
They used to just ignore us. That worked for many years. Rare appearances of the loathsome words “intelligent design” in scientific journals were quickly squashed, as Richard Sternberg can attest. Occasional payouts to avoid lawsuits, like at the California Science Center, could be dismissed as inconvenient hush money, quickly settled and ignored by the press. Meanwhile, Darwinism marched on, confident and triumphant. Largely unimpeded by any need for debate, evolutionary biologists and psychologists, safe in the accepted custom of methodological naturalism, could spin their just-so stories without fear of contradiction. The media were willing accomplices, keeping the public submissive and quiet, satisfied with the daily illusions pouring forth from the ministry of …
What do scientists spend more time thinking about — sex, or the theory of intelligent design? Scientific research famously gives a range of answers to the question of how many times per day men think about sex (from 19 times to 7,200 times). If one European researcher is correct, scientists in the United States (who are mostly male) spend one-fifth of their waking time thinking about how to “combat intelligent design.” Despite incessant declarations that “there is no controversy” about evolution, ID is evidently on the mind of many biologists, to the point of obsession! Evolution News recently commented on an article in an Italian philosophy journal that took intelligent design (ID) arguments with refreshing seriousness. Now another European journal has published its own …
How can Tibetans survive high altitudes that leave lowlanders gasping? The answer is found in broken genes. A new paper on the Tibetan genome vindicates what Michael Behe said in Darwin Devolves: evolution breaks things, but sometimes, like in the case of polar bears, the result can allow organisms to thrive in specific environments. Yes, this follows on the heels of last week’s Behe vindication; see here. A team of 16 scientists, writing in PNAS, sought to understand the genetic basis for Tibetan high-altitude adaptation in more detail. Tibetans and Nepalese, many of whom serve as guides for lowlanders wanting to conquer Mount Everest, routinely carry heavy burdens at altitudes above 14,000 feet, the average elevation on the Tibetan plateau. In its entry on Sherpa people, …
When Michael Behe’s book Darwin Devolves came out last year, critics were quick to pounce. Skeptic Magazine wrote that “In Darwin Devolves, Michael Behe continues to dig himself further into the hole he opened 20 years ago with Darwin’s Black Box.” Three Quarks Daily stated that Behe’s central thesis in the book, “is clickbait, the book title misleading, and the argument long since rebutted.” That thesis is what Behe calls the “first rule of adaptive evolution,” namely that Darwinian processes tend to “Break or blunt any functional gene whose loss would increase the number of a species's offspring.” A review in the journal Science called Behe’s arguments “quixotic” and charged that “here are indeed many examples of loss-of-function mutations …
Your support for the Center for Science & Culture has allowed us to reach an enormous audience. Now, because of our impact, the censors have turned their gaze on Evolution News. An article in the journal BioEssays demands Internet censorship of sources sharing evidence of design in biology. The author of the article says that if Big Tech entities (Google, Facebook) shy away from prejudicial treatment of ID, then the government should step in and “Make them.” ID scientists, from their personal experience, would have told you it was only a matter of time. The upcoming Memorial Day weekend is a time for reflection about sacrifice. While heroes of the U.S. Armed Forces have given their lives, the scholars who critique scientific atheism and advance the theory of ID offer of …
Philosophers are making some important and interesting contributions to the conversation about biological origins. Earlier today we saw that philosopher Subrena E. Smith registered a harsh critique of evolutionary psychology in the journal Biological Theory, even saying that evo psych explanations are “impossible.” Now, a new paper in the Italian philosophy journal Humana Mente, “Residuals of Intelligent Design in Contemporary Theories about Language Nature and Origins,” observes that the arguments of intelligent design proponents are applicable to many explanations of the origins of language. The authors are cognitive scientists at the University of Messina, and although the English translation isn’t always easy to follow and some of their ideas about ID are both dated and …
William Dembski and Robert J. Marks developed the concept of active information to measure the extent to which a search function appears pre-programmed to find some target. Inspired by the theory of intelligent design, this metric has proved useful in exposing when genetic algorithms don’t truly model the power of Darwinian evolution, but rather “cheat” due to a programmer’s guidance, leading to a predetermined outcome. As explained here, active information works as follows: Exogenous Information (I‡) represents the difficulty of a search in finding its target with no prior information about its location. Active Information (I+) is the amount of information smuggled in by intelligence to aid the search algorithm in finding its target. Endogenous Information …
A parade of amazing designs from the living world has passed through these pages over the years, and it shows no sign of stopping. Here are some entertaining examples from recent news. Jump Like a Flea, Beetle Flea beetles, or Alticini, are high-jump champions among the coleopterans (beetles) in the insect world. There are some 9,900 species of flea beetles, a “hyper-diverse group” that inhabits environments from deserts to rainforests all over the world. The Pensoft blog shows a picture of one, saying, “Exceptional catapulting jump mechanism in a tiny beetle could be applied in robotic limbs.” The fascinating and highly efficient jumping mechanism in flea beetles is described in a new research article in the open-access …
Biology, cosmology, physics, mathematics, computer engineering, chemistry… You could have an interesting argument among proponents of intelligent design about which field of science will ultimately clinch the argument for ID. Famed chemist Marcos Eberlin claims the honor will go to chemistry. Chauvinism, you say? Perhaps. You could take that up with the three Nobel laureates who endorsed his recent book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. https://youtu.be/y4Jdyuh27b0 “The molecules speak for themselves,” says Dr. Eberlin here. “The molecules will speak louder and louder and louder and finally we will have to surrender to the message that the molecules are sending to us. They say clearly, ‘Intelligent design is the source of …
You’re not likely to see the phrase “intelligent design” in any typical science journal, except to mock it. A recent example by a doctrinaire evolutionist is, not surprisingly, intended to subvert the design inference for a molecular machine. Did his intention backfire? Read on. J.C. Phillips is a physicist at Rutgers University who has taken an interest in the concept of “self-organized criticality,” something that sounds as credible as “unguided excellence.” Phillips believes that unintelligent Darwinian natural selection moves molecular machines toward optimum performance. It’s kind of like how computers and other technology get more and more sophisticated the longer you leave them left outside to be buffeted by wind, rain, and ice storms. In his recent paper in …
Editor’s note: As biologist Jonathan Wells observes, “he measures being taken against the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic owe nothing to evolutionary theory.” Yet a persistent claim from evolutionists is that medical research would be crippled without a Darwinian framework. Evolution News presents a series of our previously published work addressing the myth of “Darwinian medicine.” Michael Egnor has criticized so-called “Darwinian medicine” as a useless concept, since medical science has had spectacular success without it. Darwinism is about the death of the unfit, focused on populations instead of individuals. Medicine is about healing individuals and anyone who needs help, including the unfit, the weak, and the vulnerable. How can the father of evolutionary theory, Charles …
Stephen Meyer has finished his next book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, and (here is a bit of insider information) is currently awaiting copyedits from his publisher. The wheels of book publishing do not grind hastily. I’ve read the book, and it’s fantastic. If you are impatient to get your hands on it, you can get a bit of a preview in a presentation Dr. Meyer gave at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. You can watch that right now: https://youtu.be/y02a28FrMKs It’s poignant to think that the conference, on January 25, was held just a few days after the first COVID-19 case in the United States was confirmed, in a man who had visited Wuhan. That was here in Washington State. In our present surreal, locked-down virus world, such an event of course could not be …
Right now, you may have more opportunities to interact with your children than you are accustomed to. I encourage you to use this time to educate them about intelligent design. For elementary school children (and up!), consider the Illustra Media nature films, including Flight, Metamorphosis, and Living Waters. As noted here already, during this time of social distancing Illustra is offering free streaming of their films. Then there is the Privileged Species collection with biologist Michael Denton. Join your children in wonder at the intricacies of the animal and plant life, pointing to design in nature. And don’t miss the book Yellow and Pink, by William Steig (of Shrek! fame), or if you come from a Christian background as I do, Melissa Cain Travis’s How Do We Know …
