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Science is typically praised as open-ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable, open to further inquiry, and revised as new data emerge. Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship, and persecution.

By these standards, Darwinists have become the dogmatists. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, supported by American taxpayers, are punishing one of their own simply for publishing an article about Intelligent Design.

Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote an article titled “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.” As Mr. Meyer explained it to WORLD, his article deals with the so-called Cambrian explosion, that point in the fossil record in which dozens of distinct animal body forms suddenly spring into existence. Darwinists themselves, he showed through a survey of the literature, admit that they cannot explain this sudden diversity of form in so little time.

Mr. Meyer argued that the need for new proteins, new genetic codes, new cell structures, new organs, and new species requires specific “biological information.” And “information invariably arises from conscious rational activity.” That flies in the face of the Darwinist assumption that biological origins are random.

Mr. Meyer submitted his paper to the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History. The editor, Rick Sternberg, a researcher at the museum with two Ph.D.s in biology, forwarded the article to a panel of three peer reviewers. In scientific and other academic scholarship, submitting research to the judgment of other experts in the field ensures that published articles have genuine merit. Each of the reviewers recommended that, with revisions, the article should be published. Mr. Meyer made the revisions and the article was published last August.

Whereupon major academic publications —Science, Nature, Chronicles of Higher Education — expressed outrage. The anger was focused not on the substance of the article, but on the mere fact that a peer-reviewed scientific journal would print such an article.

The recent reviews in your columns of books by Dennett, Dawkins, and Behe are testimony to the unflagging interest in controversies about evolution. Although such purists as Dennett and Dawkins repeatedly assert that the scientific issues surrounding evolution are basically solved by conventional neo-Darwinism, the ongoing public fascination reveals a deeper wisdom. There are far more unresolved questions than answers Read More ›

Starting today, the Kansas Board of Education will begin a six-day debate on the state’s science standards, specifically the teaching of Darwinian evolution. On one side there will be about two dozen skeptics of Darwinism and proponents of an alternative theory of evolution known as intelligent design. And on the other side there will be a trial lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, who has volunteered to defend Darwin.

If this seems one-sided, that’s because the Darwinian scientists have chosen to boycott the debate, which is surprising since Darwinian theory is still the accepted standard within the scientific community. Their reason for doing so, at least according to Mr. Irigonegaray, is that “[t]o debate evolution is similar to debating whether the earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.” But that’s not entirely fair. Nearly 400 scientists have signed a statement of dissent from Darwin’s theory. Moreover, Darwinian skeptics and ID theorists don’t question evolution, at least as it’s understood as species changing over time.

North Korea is at it again. After the armistice of 1953 that “ended” the Korean War, North Korea’s communist regime continued to harass South Korea as well as the American forces stationed there to protect South Korea. These efforts to destabilize South Korea and drive away the US forces from the Korean Peninsula intensified during the Vietnam War. While President Read More ›

Let’s call it “stealth human-cloning legalization.” It’s easy to do: First, write a proposed law that you claim outlaws human cloning. But then, engage in a little slight of hand here, some redefining of a few crucial terms there, and viola! — your supposed cloning ban actually authorizes human cloning, implantation, and gestation through the ninth month. That is what Read More ›

IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone human life. But Wilmut claimed not Read More ›

They wanted to understand the mind. To do that, Carver Mead and his associates, ensconced at Cal Tech, decided that they had to understand the brain. That search for knowledge led to madness and suicide, as one researcher delved too deep into pharmaceutically assisted research, and to unexpected discoveries. In the end, understanding the brain turned out to require understanding vision.

George Gilder’s “The Silicon Eye” (Atlas Books, 318 pages, $22.95) traces the history of Foveon, the ground-breaking digital imaging company that grew out of the Mead team’s efforts, and finds it to be nearly as tangled and interconnected as the axons and dendrites of the brain itself. The complexity accounts, in part, for the story arc of the book or, perhaps more accurately, for the lack of a story arc, for this is no straightforward tale of innovation. Mead’s group started out in the 1980s with neural networks, took a detour into check-scanning machines, made a good deal of money with touch-pad technology and wound up, around the turn of the millennium, producing the Foveon imaging chip, which itself may wind up in a different class of devices than its inventors imagined.

Foveon is itself a story in search of an arc. The chip — which can image all three colors in a single pixel instead of relying on the Rube Goldberg array of filters and post-processing techniques employed by conventional digital cameras — is far more elegant than the technology it’s slated to replace. In a conventional story, this superiority would translate into commercial success. But Foveon hasn’t managed to find it yet, and the application of its technology to cameras has turned out to have a lot of rough patches. The first consumer-grade camera employing Foveon technology was recalled last month for poor image quality.

The muddled nature of Foveon’s story, in fact, led me to wonder why Mr. Gilder chose to build a book around the company. I’m a digital photography fan (I own five digital still cameras, ranging from a superb but balky Nikon D70 to a rugged but mediocre Olympus 520, and two digital video cameras), and even to me Foveon seems an odd choice. The technology is great in theory but nowhere near as revolutionary as the book’s subtitle proclaims: “How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete.”

I recently attended my first “Blogger Bash” hosted by Andrew MacDonald of Sound Politics, intended as a gathering of all Puget Sound area bloggers. As someone new to the world of blogs — shorthand for “Web logs” — the event offered some insights into this new alternative media phenomenon. Blogging has received much attention lately. Names like RealClearPolitics, Instapundit and Read More ›

Which countries do you think have the best business environments? Economists, politicians and business people fiercely debate this question. There is obviously no one correct answer because there are many variables, depending on such things as whether a particular business is capital- or labor-intensive, import- or export-dependent, etc. Forbes magazine has just issued its list of the “2000 biggest, most Read More ›

This article, published by The Washington Times, is about Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow Richard Sternberg:

A former editor of a scientific journal has filed a complaint against the Smithsonian Institution, charging that he was discriminated against on the basis of perceived religious and political beliefs because of an article he published that challenged the Darwinian theory of evolution.

“I was singled out for harassment and threats on the basis that they think I’m a creationist,” said Richard Sternberg, who filed the complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel.