It is well known, and accepted in scientific circles, that the conditions on our planet are extremely fine-tuned for life: the Earth is just the right size, it is just the right distance from its sun, our sun is the right type of star, our atmosphere has many rare and lucky features — the list goes on and on. A few of these fine-tuned features are documented in Episode 4 of Science Uprising. Of course materialists have an explanation for it all: there are many planets in the universe, only a very few are suitable for life, but we are here because our Earth is one of these rare planets. It is also well known, and documented in the same Science Uprising episode, that not only is our Earth an ideal planet for life to thrive, but our whole …
Please join us for the third in a series of webinars on Covid-19 from an intelligent design perspective, organized by our U.K. sister, the Centre for Intelligent Design. In this free lecture, Thursday, July 30, at 12 pm Pacific time or 8 pm British, Dr. Hugo van Woerden, a public health physician, explains why he does not believe that philosophical and methodological naturalism can give a holistic explanation for some of the features of the coronavirus, including its coherence and complexity. Find the webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfnk0ii9XCc You can watch archived versions of the two previous classes in the series, taught respectively by biologists Michael Behe and Jonathan McLatchie, below: “The Biochemical Basis of Covid-19”“The Molecular Biology of …
Just when you thought Darwinists had exhausted their imagination and couldn’t come up with any silly new put-downs of intelligent design, along comes science historian Adam Shapiro. He has an article at American Scientist, unveiling a brand new zinger. Give him credit for novelty if not for coherence. His argument is that ID, a disreputable and unscientific theory, could have redeemed itself in the coronavirus pandemic by proclaiming that the virus is no lab-designed bioweapon. He offers the usual bouquet of misrepresentations. There is the Judge Jones trope, whereby a federal judge in Harrisburg, PA, is fit to determine that “intelligent design’s appeal to nonnatural explanations or supernatural creators is not scientific.” But ID is not an “appeal” to the …
Last week, many of you tuned in for a YouTube livestream featuring Dr. Mike Behe on the subject of the biochemical basis of COVID-19 (you can still view the recording here). The event was organized and hosted by the British Centre for Intelligent Design. Tomorrow, Thursday, at 3 pm Eastern time (8 pm British time), I am going to be delivering the second presentation in the three part series. My presentation will last around 40 minutes and will be followed by a live Q&A. Click this link to join me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hfUAWEC200 I will give a brief introduction to virology, including a discussion of the classification of viruses (e.g., naked versus enveloped; types of viral genomes), viral structure, and the human virome (including the domestication of …
“We are being lied to about everything.” That was the entire anguished text of a tweet that struck me the other day. It was from a young woman whose top interests, to judge from her Twitter feed, include the science experts’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It came on the heels of a remarkable public statement from another young woman, Bari Weiss, resigning her job as a journalist at the New York Times. She explained that she was sickened by the ruling “orthodoxy” at the newspaper, a “predetermined narrative,” “bullying,” “online venom,” smears, lies, and vicious false labels directed at the ideologically non-compliant. Yes, she sounded like she was describing the world of academic Darwinism! A Time of Crisis Americans are waking up and …
Editor's note: The link for Dr. Behe's webinar has been UPDATED. The United Kingdom's Centre for Intelligent Design will host a series of YouTube livestreams, beginning this Friday, July 17, featuring scientists associated with the intelligent design community. The theme is “Design in Virology?” and the livestreams will explore the biological and biochemical dimensions of COVID-19 and the implications of what we know about the virus. The dates, guest speakers, and topics are as follows: Friday, July 17 — Dr. Michael Behe on “The Biochemical Basis of COVID-19”Thursday, July 23 — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie on “The Molecular Biology of Coronaviruses”Thursday, July 30 — Dr. Hugo van Woerden on “Beauty, Coherence, Semiotics, and the Coronavirus” Each of the above …
I got involved in the intelligent design movement before I became a Christian, although the insight that ID offered became important in my conversion. I had been an atheist, or at least an agnostic. I took a Randian (as in Ayn Rand) perspective on religion: religion was just another form of rent-seeking for priests, a way of making a living by plying a lie. I thought God didn’t exist, not because I had worked out the arguments and came to that conclusion (like most atheists I understood virtually nothing about the real arguments), but because, as Laplace reportedly said to Napoleon about God, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” Life was in need of explanation, and Darwin provided it. Man, and all living things, evolved by variation and selection, from some primordial …
On a new episode of ID the Future, biochemist Michael Behe reviews the Long Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) at Michigan State, where Richard Lenki’s team was initially excited to see what they thought was a new species forming in their flasks of E. coli. Download the podcast or listen to it here. As Behe has written at Evolution News, one flask of E. coli in Lenski’s experiment evolved the ability to metabolize (“eat”) citrate in the presence of oxygen. But along with it came multiple mutations breaking genes, degrading genetic information, and ultimately increasing the bacteria’s death rates. It all goes to support Behe’s thesis in Darwin Devolves: evolution is good at creating niche advantages by breaking things; it isn’t good at building fundamentally novel …
In my previous article, I provided a description of biological information and its implications for design arguments. I sacrificed on the technical details to make the content more accessible to nonexperts. Now, to provide a deeper understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of information-based arguments, I will delve into the underlying mathematics. Measuring Specified Complexity One of the central requirements of design arguments is to evaluate the probability of patterns emerging through undirected processes. Examples of evaluation schema have included Behe’s irreducible complexity, Ewert et al.’s algorithmic specified complexity (ASC), and Hazen et al.’s functional information. In my previous article, I focused on the last measure. …
From June 16-30, we are holding an Intelligent Design YouTube Festival by highlighting 15 Center for Science & Culture YouTube videos that have received more than 100,000 views each. Here is video #3, “Revolutionary.” https://youtu.be/7ToSEAj2V0s The year 2016 marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of biochemist Michael Behe’s pathbreaking book Darwin’s Black Box, as well as the 20th anniversary of the founding of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. To celebrate, we wanted to do something special, and we came up with this documentary telling the story of Michael Behe and the people he influenced. We hope you will learn things you didn’t know before. Be sure to watch to the end for the timeline of key events in the history of …
A few years ago, a college student despaired when his professors insisted that pursuing science required embracing materialism. Then the student discovered YouTube videos featuring Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and other researchers at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC). Those videos threw him a lifeline, and he embraced intelligent design. Today he is enrolled in a science PhD program at a top-tier research university. Before midnight tonight, people around the globe will have watched another one billion hours of videos on YouTube. Many of those videos will change their lives — inspiring hope, or provoking despair. Videos That Give Hope That’s why the CSC has invested so much time and effort in recent years to expand its YouTube presence. We want …
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 …
