Cambrian explosion

Upon learning of an employee’s defection to a rival company, one prominent CEO launched a chair across the room. Commenting on the incident in the Washington Post, eminent primatologist Frans de Waal noted that the CEO acted like an ape. But de Waal (and the Post for that matter) wasn’t kidding; he took this incident as further proof of common Read More ›

After months of debate, the Ohio State Board of Education unanimously adopted science standards on Dec. 10 that require Ohio students to know “how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” Ohio thus becomes the first state to mandate that students learn not only scientific evidence that supports Darwin’s theory but also scientific evidence critical of Read More ›

The believers in Darwinian evolution who currently dominate our educational establishment think that all students — even those headed for careers in auto mechanics or real estate — should believe, as they do, that all of us are descended from ape-like creatures through genetic accidents and survival of the fittest. Promoters of this doctrine have recently been urging the Ohio State Read More ›

Both Charles Darwin himself and contemporary neo-Darwinists such as Francisco Ayala, Richard Dawkins, and Richard Lewontin acknowledge that biological organisms appear to have been designed by an intelligence. Yet classical Darwinists and contemporary Darwinists alike have argued that what Francisco Ayala calls the “obvious design” of living things is only apparent. As Ayala, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has explained: “The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”

According to Darwin and his contemporary followers, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation is sufficient to explain the origin of those features of life that once seemed to require explanation by reference to an intelligent or purposeful designer. Thus, according to Darwinists, the design hypothesis now represents an unnecessary and un-parsimonious explanation for the complexity and apparent design of living organisms. On these as well as methodological grounds contemporary biologists have generally excluded the design hypothesis from consideration as an explanation for the origin of biological form.