response to criticism

A 1982 poll found that only 9% of Americans believed that humans developed through purely natural evolutionary processes. Two years later, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued its first Science and Creationism booklet, stating that science and religion occupy "separate and mutually exclusive realms." ¹Public skepticism of evolution remained high — a 1993 poll found that only 11% of Americans believed that humans developed through purely natural evolutionary processes.

Modern biology has discovered that cells are like miniaturized factories that function using micromolecular machines. In Darwin’s Black Box (1996), Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe proposed that many of these molecular machines exhibit irreducible complexity and therefore could not have been produced by an undirected Darwinian process. Instead, they appear to be the product of intelligent design. Behe’s book initiated a firestorm of controversy both inside and outside of the scientific community, and the debate continues to rage. As the responses below demonstrate, Behe’s arguments have not been refuted. Indeed, the case for the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum and other molecular machines has continued to grow.

This article is written in response to Matt Young’s “How to Evolve Specified Complexity by Natural Means” which appeared in Metanexus. The mathematician George Polya used to quip that if you can’t solve a problem, find an easier problem and solve it. Matt Young seems to have taken Polya’s advice to heart. Young has taken Shannon’s tried-and-true theory of information Read More ›

Public tirades by dogmatic Darwinists about intelligent design theory are always useful. Such acts expose any remaining pretenses of their objectivity. Science writer Robert Wright’’s response to the New York Times story (April 8, 2001) on design theory is particularly delightful. In sum, Wright argues that ID is just a marketing strategy, its advocates are simpletons who don’t understand the Read More ›