There may be one or two Americans left in the country who don’t know that we are currently living in an anti-Establishment, anti-professional, anti-politician era. Nationally we have voted someone into the Presidency whose primary claim to high office is that he has never held office. (In my own state, we have had a smaller version of the exact same phenomenon.) In virtually every Congressional and state-level campaign beyond the Presidential elections, we have candidates (including incumbents) engaged in an ever-escalating rhetorical battle to claim the low ground of experience. In Politicians: The Worst Kind of People to Run the Government, Except for all the Others, Bruce K. Chapman argues that this disdain for long-serving public servants has to stop. Keep reading.
Now offered for the fourth year in a row in Seattle, WA, we invite you and your students to our Intelligent Design Education Day, hosted by Discovery Institute on Wednesday, March 20. This is a special opportunity for private school teachers, home educators, and parents to bring students on a day-long field trip event to learn more about intelligent design and interact with leading scientists and scholars in the ID movement. At the end of each session, students will be given a chance to ask questions of the speakers. Read More ›
Artist’s impression of exoplanet orbiting two stars
We are living during a golden age of discovery in astronomy. Arguably, it began with the dawning of the space age in 1957. By 1989 our probes had visited every planet in the Solar System (in 2015 New Horizons visited the former planet Pluto). Then, in 1995 we discovered the first planet around another star (an exoplanet). Read More ›
Historian of science Michael Keas explodes the myth that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science, as science popularizers such as Neil deGrasse Tyson make him out to be. Bruno was indeed burned at the stake in 1600 for disagreeing with the Roman Catholic Church — which Keas heartily agrees was a bad move on the Church’s part. But Bruno was not executed for his view that we live in a vast universe with vast numbers of planets. Read More ›
Presidents Day is unique among American holidays in providing the opportunity to remember and appreciate why George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — whose birthdays fall in February — were the two greatest U.S. presidents. While Washington was the founding father of the United States, Lincoln would later save the nation from division and collapse — bringing an end to the Read More ›
On a cold but sunny Sunday afternoon on Martin Luther King Day weekend, I found myself deep in the heart of Texas. I was visiting the town of Athens, 73 miles southeast of Dallas, for a screening of my documentary Human Zoos at First Baptist Church. The film has just been posted to YouTube after previously being shown on cable television and released on DVD, Blu-ray, and Amazon Prime. Human Zoos communicates Read More ›
Even before the release of Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves, the scientific dialogue between its detractors and defenders has begun. Here we collect some of the most noteworthy criticisms and responses by Michael Behe and others. Find the most comprehensive coverage and most recent responses of Darwin Devolves at Evolution News. Responses to Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski Regarding “A biochemist’s crusade to overturn evolution Read More ›
By some estimates, the cost of government regulation in the U.S. exceeds $2 trillion. An amazing number. And while we’re paying a fortune for existing regulations, major new ones are coming out at the rate of 3,000 per year, so fast that the White House can only do a cost-benefit analysis on less than one half of one percent of them.
But there’s hope. This week on "The Bill Walton Show," Wayne Crews of CEI joins me to explain how to return the U.S. to the path of greater freedom and why “walling off the future” is critical to preserving as much liberty as possible. Read More ›
Today is Darwin’s Day, the birthday of the venerated Charles Darwin, whose theory is a fact beyond question. Right? The journal Nature assures its readers, “Scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact.” Or as philosopher Michael Ruse wonderfully put it, “Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!” The insistence on this point encourages a certain Read More ›
This event has passed. For the past few years, the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture has hosted “ID Education Days” in both Seattle and Dallas. These events offer home and private school students and educators a chance to meet and hear from some of the leading scientists and scholars in the ID movement. Just as importantly, it’s a chance Read More ›
In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe argues that evidence of evolution’s limits has been right under our noses, but its undoing is evident at such a small scale that we have only recently been able to see it. The field of biochemistry, begun when Watson and Crick discovered the double-helical shape of DNA, has unlocked the secrets of the cell. There, biochemists have unexpectedly discovered a world of Lilliputian complexity. As Behe engagingly demonstrates, using the examples of vision, bloodclotting, cellular transport, and more, the biochemical world comprises an arsenal of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts. For Darwinian evolution to be true, there must have been a series of mutations, each of which produced its own working machine, that led to the complexity we can now see. The more complex and interdependent each machine’s parts are shown to be, the harder it is to defend Darwin’s gradualistic paths. Behe surveys the professional science literature and shows that it is completely silent on the subject, stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life. Could it be that there is some greater force at work?
