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NOTE: This is a rush transcript of the Nightline interview with Dr. Stephen Meyer of Discovery Institute on August 8, 2005. The interview took place in Discovery Institute’s office in Seattle, Washington. The transcript was prepared from an audio tape of the interview and has not been corrected by Dr. Meyer or the other participants. Click here to download and Read More ›

Click here to listen to an MP3 recording of the radio appearance by George Gilder and Richard Dawkins, or click here for a RealAudio version. Seattle — Minutes before a scheduled NPR radio debate with Discovery Sr. Fellow George Gilder today, Oxford-based Darwinist Richard Dawkins advised the producers he would not debate after all, but only present his views, which appeared Read More ›

Should government regulate business? I expect most people would answer “yes” to that question, but if you ask them why, I expect these same people will have a harder time giving an answer that makes sense.

Some may say, “in order to prevent businesses from engaging in fraud or misrepresentation.” But we do not need regulation to do that; there are already many federal, state and local statutes against fraud and misrepresentation, and businesses that behave badly can be dealt with through normal civil and criminal legal means. Others who are a bit more sophisticated might argue that we need to regulate business in order to protect people from “market failures.” However, the empirical evidence is that there are far fewer “market failures” than commonly imagined, and many of these so-called market failures are actually a result of misguided government policy or regulation.

For a minute, try to imagine a world without government regulation, but where all of the standard laws against theft, fraud, misrepresentation and bodily injury still exist. Under such a scenario, what do you think would happen if we had no food and drug administration to tell us what was safe to consume? No financial regulators to protect us from bank failures and financial scams? No health and safety regulators to protect us from unsafe products? Would we all die? Not likely, because the judicial system, coupled with private standard setting associations, would likely give us an equal, if not a higher, level of protection than we have now.

Over the past several months, there has been a growing public debate about the theory of intelligent design, whether it is science, and whether it should be taught in public schools. President Bush’s recent endorsement of teaching about different ideas when studying evolution, including intelligent design, is sure to add fuel to the controversy.

Unfortunately, all the attention has not necessarily led to greater public understanding of the theory of intelligent design or the views of the scientists who support it. Indeed, as intelligent design has become more prominent, foes and friends alike have latched onto it to promote their own agendas. For foes, intelligent design is merely the latest tactic by the “religious right” to use government to impose “creationism” on unsuspecting students and teachers. These critics of intelligent design typically depict scientists who support the theory as zealots determined to twist the findings of science to support their faith in God. If foes are guilty of misappropriating intelligent design, however, so are some of its newfound friends.

As intelligent design has become a household term, a few well-meaning but misguided public officials have conflated the theory of design with creationism or tried to impose it by legislation.

This article, published by Chron, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Stephen C. Meyer: In a Freudian slip of biblical proportions, the reporter misquoted Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, an advocacy group for ID. The rest of the article can be found here.

This article, published by Times, mentions Discovery Institute: Since the 1987 decision, a devoted band of mostly religious Christians, including hundreds of scientists, engineers, theologians and philosophers, has written papers and books, contributed to symposiums on the perceived problems with Darwin’s theory. The headquarters for such thinking is the Center for Science and Culture at a nonpartisan but generally conservative Read More ›

Animal-rights and animal-liberation advocacy has, over the years, become a radical and subversive enterprise. To see this phenomenon at work, one need look no further than the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the movement’s leading advocacy group. PETA’s latest campaign blitz, the “Animal Liberation Project” (ALP), is a case in point, blending moral relativism with extremist rhetoric.

It comes on the heels of PETA’s pro-vegetarian “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, which claimed that the worst crimes of the Shoah were morally equivalent to eating meat and wearing leather; that one set off a firestorm of criticism and condemnation from Jewish groups and the media. It took two years, but PETA leader Ingrid Newkirk finally issued a non-apology apology for the indefensible comparison.

But, of course, defend she did; PETA hadn’t changed its mind about the campaign’s essential message. Enter ALP, which again asserts a moral equivalency between using animals and some of history’s worst crimes. ALP’s overarching theme is: “We are all animals.” While this is biologically true, PETA isn’t merely stating a scientific fact. Rather, by the statement PETA means that humans and animals are moral equals. Hence, everything we do with and to animals should be judged morally as if the same things were being done to people.

For the past week, unnoticed by much of the American media, South Koreans have been battling in the port city of Inchon over an important American icon in East Asia — General Douglas MacArthur. Inchon is the site of MacArthur’s greatest military masterpiece — a daring amphibious landing in 1950 that decisively turned the tide of the Korean War and Read More ›