On April 12, 2001, Nature published a review of Jonathan Wells’s book, Icons of Evolution, by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne. (Nature 410, 745-746). About half of Coyne’s review consists of personal attacks on Wells, while most of the other half took exception with Wells’s criticism of the way Darwinists use distorted drawings of vertebrate embryos to Read More ›
The principal actors had appeared in the White House last June — Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics. Now they were back with a supporting cast and a more detailed analysis, in the Capital Hilton Hotel, with the TV lights glinting off the ballroom chandeliers, 250 journalists packed into the hot Read More ›
STEM CELLS are undifferentiated “master cells” in the body that can develop into differentiated tissues, such as bone, muscle, nerve, or skin. Stem cell research may lead to exponential improvements in the treatment of many terminal and debilitating conditions, from cancer to Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s to diabetes to heart disease. Indeed, break-throughs in stem cell research reported just in the Read More ›
To the Editor: In his review of my recent book, Icons of Evolution, in the February issue of The World & I, University of Kansas paleontologist Larry Martin concludes that although the book is full of sound and fury, it doesn’t signify much. But Professor Martin has ignored or distorted my main points. Icons of Evolution relies on published scientific Read More ›
Every student of biological evolution learns about peppered moths. The dramatic increase in dark forms of this species during the industrial revolution, and experiments pointing to differential bird predation as the cause, have become the classical story of evolution by natural selection. The same careful scientific approach which established the classical story in the first place, however, has now revealed Read More ›
Brave New World has arrived at last, as we always knew it would. On January 22, 2001, Britain’s House of Lords voted overwhelmingly to permit the cloning and maintenance of human embryos up to 14 days old for the purposes of medical experimentation, thereby taking the first terrible step toward the legalization of full-blown human cloning. Meanwhile, an international group Read More ›