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A Review of A Consumer’s Guide to A Brave New World

A Consumer’s Guide to A Brave New World is a new book on bioethics by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith. It is available here Goats with milk full of spider-web silk. Mice with heads made of human brain cells. Human children with genomes so altered, they are not really “human.” All of this and more can be expected Read More ›

Death Plays the Name Game

ASSISTED SUICIDE/EUTHANASIA activists are sure a restless bunch. They never seem able to settle on the right terminology to convince people to support legalizing mercy killing. First, it was euthanasia, a perfectly fine word that had a meaning generally akin to today’s concept of hospice before being hijacked by the right-to-die crowd in the early 20th century. When “euthanasia” didn’t Read More ›

How to Find Osama

Having just finished reading the report of the September 11 commission, I was shocked; shocked to learn major U.S. government bureaucracies are incompetent. Washington being Washington, most of the solutions proposed revolved around reorganizing and creating more bureaucracies. It seems not to have occurred to anyone there are market solutions for many information problems the intelligence community faces. Two examples Read More ›

None Dare Call It Cloning

“British scientists have been given permission to perform therapeutic cloning using human embryos for the first time,” reported the August 11, 2004, BBC News. What a remarkable statement. Not the fact that the UK will permit researchers to create human cloned embryos-that has been on the drawing board for some time. What made this report so startling was that the Read More ›

The Growth Agenda

Would you expand your stock market holdings if you knew taxes would be increased on businesses’ most valuable employees? Business depreciation allowances would be reduced? Tax disadvantages of U.S. multinational corporations would increase relative to their foreign competitors? And the tax rate on capital gains and dividends would rise? Well, this is exactly what John Kerry proposes, and that is Read More ›

Is Intelligent Design Science or Creationism 2.0?

Scott Rank is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Knoxville. He is the opinion editor of the Daily. Hold on to your copies of “On the Origin of Species,” Iowa State. Whether you know it or not, the battle for the future of how to teach evolution in public schools is happening right here at our university. This Read More ›

fossil trilobite imprint in the sediment
fossil trilobite imprint in the sediment

The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories

On August 4th, 2004 an extensive review essay by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture appeared in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (volume 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239). The Proceedings is a peer-reviewed biology journal published at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Dr. Meyer argues that no current materialistic theory of evolution can account for the origin of the information necessary to build novel animal forms. He proposes intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the origin of biological information and the higher taxa. Read More ›

Was Starlight Deflection Important for the Acceptance of General Relativity?

A criticism has been posted on several places on the Internet concerning our claim in The Privileged Planet that total solar eclipses were important to the confirmation and rapid acceptance of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Critique The basic criticism is as follows. Observations of the deflection of starlight near the Sun during total eclipses were not very important for Read More ›

Time flies. Red vintage alarm clock falling down into blue and white paint with splash effect. Abstract art background.
Time flies. Red vintage alarm clock falling down into blue and white paint with splash effect. Abstract art background.

The Gods Must Be Tidy!

When as a boy I read “The Scouring of the Shire” near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I could not understand why Tolkien felt the need to tack on such an anti-climactic and shabby bit of evil. Only later, as I began to notice modernity’s penchant for ugliness in the world beyond Middle Read More ›

Making the World Better

There are a lady barber and a finance minister, both of whom, in very different ways, are making their homelands better, in part, because of their American experience. It has long been recognized the remittances foreign workers send to their homelands dwarf official foreign aid in both size and effectiveness. What is often not recognized is how foreign visitors and Read More ›