Aftershocks of the human genome announcement rippled through San Francisco all weekend as the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science brought thousands of thinkers here to mull the surprising fact that humans have only a few more genes than mice. But to my mind, the most memorable moment in these last few weeks of genetic Read More ›
On Valentine’s Day, 2001, the Kansas Board of Education voted to change the state’s science teaching standards to emphasize evolution and the Big Bang theory in the teaching of how life began on earth. The current board members have overturned a 1999 set of science standards that were passed by a more conservative board. The conservative board, in an effort Read More ›
Although scientists have been debating the science of evolution since Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the subject, “On the Origin of the Species,” was published in 1859, one of the more recent developments in this debate has been the emergence of a new concept called “intelligent design.” According to Darwin, humans developed from lower forms of animals over a period Read More ›
http://slate.msn.com ——————————- CRSC response: Ms. Shulevitz’s bigoted rant (note the religious insult in the opening sentence) is such a gem that it requires little comment, except to mention regrettably that Slate has already begun editing out her gaffs. The original story had the following: “The fossil record is full of evidence that some primitive gizmo, such as the eyespots on Read More ›
In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that Read More ›
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Scientists, attorneys and teachers who support intelligent design instead of naturalistic evolution presented their side of the debate at a day-long symposium Saturday. More than 350 people attended a national symposium called “Darwin, Design and Democracy: Teaching the Evidence in Science Education” at Rockhurst High School. It featured presentations by biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, biologist Dr. Read More ›
In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe argues that evidence of evolution’s limits has been right under our noses, but its undoing is evident at such a small scale that we have only recently been able to see it. The field of biochemistry, begun when Watson and Crick discovered the double-helical shape of DNA, has unlocked the secrets of the cell. There, biochemists have unexpectedly discovered a world of Lilliputian complexity. As Behe engagingly demonstrates, using the examples of vision, bloodclotting, cellular transport, and more, the biochemical world comprises an arsenal of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts. For Darwinian evolution to be true, there must have been a series of mutations, each of which produced its own working machine, that led to the complexity we can now see. The more complex and interdependent each machine’s parts are shown to be, the harder it is to defend Darwin’s gradualistic paths. Behe surveys the professional science literature and shows that it is completely silent on the subject, stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life. Could it be that there is some greater force at work?
Read More ›The good news this month is the appearance of Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, published by the Free Press. As far as I know, it is the first outright anti-Darwin book to have been published by a major New York house for decades; perhaps since the 1920’s. Behe (pronounced “Bee He”) is an associate professor of Biological Sciences at Read More ›
Getting There First: An Evolutionary Rate Advantage for Adaptive Loss-of-Function Mutations Michael J. Behe Biological Information: New Perspectives, edited by R. J. Marks II, M. J. Behe, W. A. Dembski, and B. L. Gordon. World Scientific Publishing, Hong Kong, 450-473. Abstract: Over the course of evolution organisms have adapted to their environments by mutating to gain new functions or to Read More ›