Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual Read More ›
The discovery of a nearly 7-million-year-old skull has been hailed as “a small nuclear bomb” for evolution, “the most important fossil discovery in living memory,” and a “challenge to human origins.” Time said that the fossil might be “your very first relative.” An international team of scientists uncovered the mostly intact craniumnicknamed Toumai (meaning “hope of life”)along with two jawbone Read More ›
The National School Boards Association enlisted Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch to criticize intelligent design bullet point fashion. Here I want to respond to these bullet-point assertions. I would repeat the entire article, but copyright restrictions prevent me. The article is available at http://nsba.org/sbn/02-jul/070202-8.htm. The article begins by asking whether intelligent design (or ID) has a legitimate place in the Read More ›
Talk delivered at CSICOP’s Fourth World Skeptics Conference in Burbank, California, 21 June 2002, at a discussion titled “Evolution and Intelligent Design.” The participants included ID proponents William Dembski and Paul Nelson as well as evolutionists Wesley Elsberry and Kenneth Miller. Massimo Pigliucci moderated the discussion. This conference focuses on skepticism’s prospects over the next 25 years. I want in Read More ›
When my book Icons of Evolution was published in 2000, critics greeted it with rave reviews. I have been truly amazed at the outpouring of warmth from some of my fellow scientists, who have been trying to outdo each other in the superlatives they bestow on my work. In my case, however, “rave review” doesn’t mean extravagant praise, but wild Read More ›
A recent Zogby International poll found that 65 percent of Ohioans believe “Biology teachers should teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it.” Only 19 percent favored biology teachers teaching just Darwin’s theory and only that evidence which supports it. What do these numbers mean? On the most obvious level, for every one Ohioan who wants Read More ›
For more information about David Berlinski – his new books, video clips from interviews, and upcoming events – please visit his website at www.davidberlinski.org. Stephen Jay Gould was the most important paleontologist of his generation, the impact of his life best measured by the wide-spread sense of loss occasioned by his death. Gould wrote widely on a variety of topics in Read More ›
As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madmans arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy In the struggle to survive, the fit win, and so it is also the fit who Read More ›
Are students learning the whole truth about Darwin’s theory of evolution? According to a growing number of scientists, the surprising answer is no. They claim that many of the most famous “Icons of Evolution” — including Darwin’s “Tree of Life”, finches from the Galapagos Islands, and embryos that look remarkably similar — are based on outdated research and sloppy logic. Read More ›
Contact: Mark Edwards — 206.292.0401 x107 — medwards@discovery.org SEATTLE–After months of debate, the Ohio State Board of Education has adopted science standards that require Ohio students to know why “scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” The Board unanimously approved the science standards this morning. Calling this provision in Ohio’s science standards “historic,” Dr. Stephen C. Read More ›