“I’m not sure I fully understand what exactly intelligent design means,” explained Ohio’s hapless governor, Bob Taft, recently. At least he was honest. A lack of knowledge about intelligent design hasn’t stopped many politicians and pundits from condemning it. Howard Dean, for example, has asserted that “there’s no factual evidence for intelligent design,” although it’s doubtful he knows anything about Read More ›
REYKJAVIK, Iceland.
Why is this cold, rainy land with its stark volcanic landscape, without much in the way of natural resources, one of the wealthiest places on Earth?
Small states, in the past, were most often poorer on a per capital income basis than large states, but in the last half-century many have become much richer then their large neighbors. Among the wealthiest places on the planet, in addition to the United States, we now find Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland, none with many natural resources.
In a just-concluded meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Iceland, some leaders of small states that have developed very successful economies met with some of the worlds’ leading free-market economists and policy institute professionals, partly to discuss what lessons the rest of the world can learn from these small states. Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, was the principle architect of his country’s remarkable economic transformation from impoverished vassal of the Soviet Union into one of the world’s freest (No. 4 in the world according to the 2005 Index of Economic Freedom) and most dynamic economies. Mr. Laar said he succeeded by following the teachings of Nobel Prize-winning economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.
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Transportation continues to be a serious issue for Washington, and judging by the number of news articles on the subject it will be a topic of conversation for weeks to come. AAA remains concerned about the safety of highway users and the growing congestion in our major metropolitan areas, which frustrates motorists and contributes to unsafe conditions. Several actions during Read More ›
In a blatant attack on academic freedom a small number of faculty at Iowa State University have organized a petition denouncing intelligent design as unscientific and urged the university community to essentially ban the theory from campus. “The Darwinist inquisition is spreading,” said Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading think-tank researching the theory of intelligent design. “Darwinists Read More ›
Original Article In the thinly disguised play based on the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, the Clarence Darrow character (Drummond) cross-examines the William Jennings Bryan character (Brady). To prove how intolerant Brady is in defending the law that forbade the teaching of evolution, Drummond asks Brady to suppose that Mr. Cates, the Scopes character, “had enough influence and lung power Read More ›
We are animals in our appetites, and animals again in our instincts and emotions. We are animals in biology. Blood is blood, tissue is tissue, and cells are cells; and when everything is stripped away, we are animals in the organization of our genes, mindful now that but for a few alterations of the human genome, we might well be Read More ›
This essay was originally published in Uncommon Dissent (ISI Books, 2004) edited by William Dembski.
Evolutionary theory has had a major impact on the development of biology since the appearance of On the Origin of the Species in 1859. Over the century following publication of that book, experiments and field observations led to successive refinements of the Darwinian theory of evolution, and it was confidently proclaimed as the foundation of biology in the Darwin Centennial year of 1959.
Such confidence is not warranted today. New technologies developed in the past four decades have revealed to us the chemistry underlying biological processes. These technologies have revealed that life is far more complicated than was imagined in 1959, and that much of its complexity cannot easily be addressed by existing evolutionary theory. Indeed some of the major discoveries in the life sciences presented in this article were hardly anticipated by evolutionary theory, but instead came out of advances in experimental technologies.
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