Discovery News

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.

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. Responses to Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski Regarding “A biochemist’s crusade to overturn evolution misrepresents theory and ignores evidence” by Nathan H. Lents, S. Joshua Swamidass, and 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 ›

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 for these high school 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?

The period from 500 to 1500 is often dismissed as an intellectually barren time, but in his new book, science historian Michael Keas sets the record straight. Historian of science, Michael Keas, tackles this and other science and religion myths in his new book, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion (2019, ISI Books).

What is the degree of approximation of a brain to a computer? What can mathematics tell us about A.I. and creativity? Are there things in existence that are unknowable? Join us as we discuss these related questions. Our conversation will begin with a talk by Robert J. Marks II. He is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Read More ›

Critics of intelligent design think they’re clever when they draw comparisons between ID and belief in a flat Earth. Professor Jerry Coyne, for one, says that HarperCollins, publisher of Michael Behe’s forthcoming book, Darwin Devolves, “should be ashamed at [sic] itself for publishing the biology equivalent of flat-Earthism.” Professor Nathan Lents has ventilated a similar view.

In this technical philosophical treatise, Discovery Institute Fellow Robert C. Koons investigates an innovative philosophy of mind. Koons takes on two powerful dogmas in this wide-ranging philosophical work: anti-realism and materialism. In doing so, Koons develops an elegant metaphysical system that accounts for such phenomena as information; mental representation; our knowledge of logic, mathematics and science; the structure of spacetime; Read More ›

How much can the public trust confident claims by scientists? Especially about morally or politically or philosophically charged topics? Alas, not so much, as the New York Times Magazine reminds us once again in a recent article, “How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution.” The subtitle asks, “The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — …