A sturdy bicycle built of recycled cardboard and sold to the world’s poor for $20 apiece? This story broke in 2012, complete with a YouTube video of inventor Izhar Gafni toodling around his Israeli settlement town on a beautiful white prototype, the cardboard rendered surprisingly strong through an innovative combination of origami-style folds, glue, and varnish. But two years later, Read More ›
Just when you expect President Obama to moderate his domestic economic policies, which have stifled job growth and fostered an anemic recovery following the passage of his two signature pieces of legislation — the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Affordable Care Act — it gets worse. Now, after bringing banking and health care — about Read More ›
When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors Read More ›
If the publication in 2013 of Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, tells us anything, it’s that the evolution debate in fact continues. More than that, like a storm, it is gathering strength and advancing steadily. Darwin’s Doubt was a major step forward. Now the controversy has advanced still Read More ›
The environmental movement has long indulged a tinge of misanthropy at the fringes. For example, advocates for a “deep ecology” argue that each facet of the natural world (including humans) are equal, and must be given “equal consideration” when reaping the bounty of the land. Deep ecologists adamantly oppose our materially prospering from the exploitation of natural resources. Indeed, they Read More ›
Self-starvation has become the latest craze among the “death with dignity” crowd. This has been coming on for some time. Removing feeding tubes from cognitively disabled people who can’t swallow has been allowed for decades, under the right to refuse unwanted “medical treatment.” But what about people who can eat and drink by mouth? Assisted suicide advocates argue that it isn’t fair that they can’t die too.
Mark L. Plummer, the distinguished economist and former Discovery Institute fellow who co-authored (with Charles C. Mann) Noah’s Choice (Knopf, 1995), has died of cancer in Federal Way, near Seattle. He and Mann earlier co-authored The Aspirin Wars, a riveting and amusing chronicle of the famous analgesic. But it was Noah’s Choice that famously explained the perversities of environmental regulations that sometimes use law and the Read More ›
That the New York Times is a subversive cultural force can readily be seen in its unremitting assault on human exceptionalism, the philosophical backbone of Western civilization. In the old view, every human being has intrinsic dignity and equal moral worth. The United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and Read More ›
This article, published by The New York Times, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder: As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush flew in Ivy League social scientists for daylong seminars with his staff and carved out time for immersive brainstorming sessions he called “think weeks.” A voracious reader, he maintains a queue of 25 volumes on his Kindle (George Gilder’s Read More ›
[This article was adapted from a series of articles originally published on Evolution News & Views. For the original articles, please see: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.] Part 1: Introduction Writing for The Daily Beast about his 2014 debate with Stephen Meyer, theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson commented: I showed pictures of Read More ›