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Intelligent Decline, Revisited

This article, published by Tech Central Station, Discovery Institute Board Member William Dembski:

Mr. McHenry also criticizes the reasoning we use to infer design in nature. He finds it intangible and asks, “Has the ID party discovered a scale by which this question [of complexity] can be answered?” The answer is “yes,” of course! This is exactly what philosopher and mathematician William A. Dembski addresses in his theoretical work The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. It is a challenging but must read for all critics and would-be critics of ID.

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All American History Pivots On Events Of Our Civil War

We Americans celebrate several important anniversaries and commemorate a number of others, most recently the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. But a significant date went by last month with very little notice, in the press or otherwise. April 9 marked 140 years since Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, commander Read More ›

Q&A with Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith

This article, published by National Review, contains an interview with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith:

As the House of Representatives Tuesday votes on possibly expanding federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research — legislation the president has promised to veto — there are some real concerns about how far we’ve already stepped into a “Brave New World.” With those concerns in mind, and a big-picture look at all the issues involved in this new world, Wesley J. Smith, a lawyer and consumer activist (friend and collaborator of Ralph Nader even!) recently produced A Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World. He addressed some of these issues Monday in an interview with NRO editor Kathryn Lopez. Bottom line: All is certainly not lost. However ….

National Review Online: With the news out of South Korea last week, are we all one step closer to designer babies?

Wesley J. Smith: Absolutely. Apparently the South Korean researcher Wu Suk Hwang has learned how to reliably create human cloned embryos. Human cloning is the essential step toward biotechnologists learning how to genetically engineer progeny, a new eugenics project that enjoys great support among futurists, bioethicists, and some within the science establishment. For example, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, is a big booster of creating designer babies who have been enhanced for intelligence, health, looks, etc. There is even a nascent social movement that has formed around creating a post human species known as transhumanism. Princeton biologist Lee Silver put it this way in his book Remaking Eden: Without cloning, genetic engineering is simply science fiction. But with cloning, genetic engineering moves into the realm of reality.

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Where’s the Leave-My-Money Alone Coalition?

This article, published by National Review, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: “Here in California,” says Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, “we are sacrificing present medical needs as our emergency rooms and trauma centers are shutting down for lack of funds as we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars each year to pay corporate welfare to Read More ›

Not The Flat Earth Myth Again!

University of Houston evolutionary biologist Dan Graur wrote in a May 19 letter to Nature [1]that he was “disturbed” by the magazine’s April 28 News Feature, “Who has designs on your students’ minds?”   Graur objected to the fact that “the proponents of ID are mostly portrayed as a persecuted minority. They are said to be afraid to reveal their identity and Read More ›

Smoot Hawley, Chinese Style

In his insightful new book, The World Is Flat, Tom Friedman of The New York Times, though generally disdainful of anything conservative, somehow brings himself to cite an exemplary Heritage Foundation study of U.S. companies with facilities in China. These firms are not an unhealthy set of “Benedict Arnolds,” as they were quaintly dubbed by Sen. John Kerry during the Read More ›

Demagoguery Dangers in Deutschland

It is common for politicians in trouble to seek scapegoats for their own incompetence and wrong-headedness, but when this begins getting widespread popular support, both the people’s liberties and pocketbooks are in danger.

Given its history, one would think Germany’s people would be particularly resistant to demagogy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Recently, Franz Muntefering, head of Germany’s left-wing Social Democratic Party (the SPD), which also is the lead party in the governing coalition, accused business leaders of being “anti-social” and like “swarms of locusts.” Rather than denounce him for attacking businesspeople and “international capital,” other SPD leaders joined in the denunciations.

Attacks on a despised minority or class in all societies tend to gain support during times of economic stress. Germany has gone from being the economic miracle of Europe to a poster child of what not to do. In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Germany grew much faster rate than the U.S., and by 1980 had almost caught the U.S. in terms of real per capita income. But with the Reagan revolution in the early 1980s, U.S. economic growth soared, while Germany’s slid to less that half the U.S. rate.

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A Brand X Bump?

Discovery Fellow Bret Swanson’s recent posting on Disco-tech, the Institute’s blog on technology and public policy, is noted in the July 14, 2005 edition of The Wall Street Journal; Page A10 Yes, stocks in biotechnology and other seemingly unrelated areas are also up in this period, as are small-cap indexes in general. But tech-stock trackers like Bret Swanson of the Read More ›

Underrepresented Minorities

May is Asian Pacific American History Month, designated by President George H.W. Bush. So perhaps it is a fitting occasion to bring up one of my pet peeves:

We are not a biracial nation.

Yet, until recently, “America: black and white” had been a common title in discussions about race relations. Hispanics and Asians were often subsumed into a broad-stroke category of “minorities” along with blacks.

Hispanics have gained some attention of late, because of shifting demographics, particularly electoral demographics. President George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanic voters in the last election, up 9 percent from 2000. Some Republicans hope that increasing support among Hispanic voters will counter the overwhelming lock the Democrats have on black voters (over 90 percent in most elections).

Asians, however, are still invisible at the national level. So it is no big surprise that many Americans seem to be unaware of a subtle language shift in the racial dialogue. The operating catchphrase today is “URM” — “underrepresented minorities.”

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Doubting Rationalist

BERKELEY, Calif. — “The Washington Post is not one of my biggest fans, you know that.”

Hello?

The Washington Post reporter has just walked out of a spray of Pacific-borne rain into the living room of a modest bungalow west of downtown. There’s a shag rug, an inspirational painting or two and Phillip Johnson, dressed in tan slacks and a sweater and sitting on a couch. He pulls a dog-eared copy of a Post editorial out of his shirt pocket and reads aloud:

With their slick Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of ‘intelligent design’ — a ‘theory’ that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution — are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. … They succeed by casting doubt on evolution.

The 65-year-old Johnson swivels his formidable and balding head — with that even more formidable brain inside — and gazes over his reading glasses at the reporter (who doesn’t labor for the people who write the editorials).

“I suppose you think creation is all about unguided material processes, don’t you? Well, I don’t have the slightest trouble accepting microevolution as the cause behind the adaptation of the peppered moth and the growth of finches’ beaks. But I don’t see that evolutionists have any cause for jubilation there.

“It doesn’t tell you how the moths and birds and trees got there in the first place. The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can’t account for that.”

He’s not big on small talk, this professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school.

For centuries, scriptural literalists have insisted that God created Heaven and Earth in seven days, that the world is about 6,000 years old and fossils are figments of the paleontological imagination. Their grasp on popular opinion was strong, but they have suffered a half-century’s worth of defeats in the courts and lampooning by the intelligentsia.

Now comes Johnson, a devout Presbyterian and accomplished legal theorist, and he doesn’t dance on the head of biblical pins. He agrees the world is billions of years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth. Evolution is the bridge he won’t cross. This man, whose life has touched every station of the rationalist cross from Harvard to the University of Chicago to clerk at the Supreme Court, is the founding father of the “intelligent design” movement.

Intelligent design holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand — perhaps subtle, perhaps not — of an intelligent creator.

“Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you’re using naturalistic terms, I’ll agree with that.” Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha, as his words fly rat-a-tat-tat.

“That’s only,” he continues, “because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality.”

Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture. They point to the complexity of the human cell, with its natural motors and miles of coding. They document the scant physical evidence for the large-scale mutations needed to make the long journey from primitive prokaryote to modern man.

They’ve inspired a political movement — at least 19 states are considering challenges to the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

None of which amuses evolutionary biologists, for whom intelligent-design theory inhabits the remotest exurb of polite scientific discourse. Darwin’s theory is a durable handiwork. It explains the proliferation of species and the interaction of DNA and RNA, not to mention the evolution of humankind.

The evidence, they insist, is all around:

Fruit flies branch into new species; bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans. There are fossilized remains of a dinosaur “bird,” and DNA tests suggest that whales descended from ancient hippos and antelopes.

Does it make any more sense to challenge Darwin than to contest Newton’s theory of gravity? You haven’t seen Phillip Johnson floating into the stratosphere recently, have you?

William Provine, a prominent evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, enjoys the law professor’s company and has invited Johnson to his classroom. The men love the rhetorical thrust and parry and often share beers afterward. Provine, an atheist, also dismisses his friend as a Christian creationist and intelligent design as discredited science.

As for the aspects of evolution that baffle scientists?

“Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record — it’s always good to point this out,” Provine says. “It’s difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!”

Provine’s faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English scientist’s insights registered as a powerful blow — perhaps the decisive one — in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.

At which point a cautionary flag should be waved.

Scientists tend to be a secular lot. But science and religion are not invariable antagonists. More than a few theoretical physicists and astronomers note that their research into the cosmos deposits them at God’s doorstep. And evolution’s path remains littered with mysteries.

Is it irrational to inquire if intelligent life is seeded with inevitabilities?

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