On February 12, followers of Charles Darwin around the world will reverently celebrate his birthday, which they have christened “Darwin Day.” Known to most Americans as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12 has become for some people the secular equivalent of Christmas. Read More ›
Critics of intelligent design (ID) sometimes argue that if the human body were designed, it would be perfect. Among other things, we would not suffer from diseases such as cancer. Defenders of ID point out that this criticism is misplaced. Design does not imply perfection. Many things we know to be designed (such as cars) are imperfect. The “argument from imperfection” against ID is implicitly a theological argument, namely, that God is the designer... Read More ›
Charles Darwin wrote in the first edition of On the Origin of Species that North American black bears had been seen “swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure... Read More ›
Imagine yourself in Moscow in 1950, taking part in a March for Science. Science in the Soviet Union had been suffering for many years under Trofim Lysenko, a third-rate biologist who promoted unsound agricultural policies. Lysenko’s ideas appealed to Joseph Stalin, who elevated him to a high position. Eventually, all criticisms of Lysenko were prohibited. Thousands of scientists lost their jobs. Some were even imprisoned or executed. Read More ›
I am a scientist, but I won’t be joining the worldwide March for Science April 22. That’s because it’s really a march for something that undermines good science. March organizers say “our diversity is our greatest strength.” They say “a wealth of opinions, perspectives, and ideas is critical for the scientific process.” Read More ›
In June 1999, Paul Nelson and I flew to Kunming in southern China to attend an International Symposium on The Origins of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Record, held at Fuxian Lake Hot Springs Resort. According to the invitation letter, the symposium would take "an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the study of the origin and evolution of animal body plans. Read More ›
I did not watch the sixth episode of Cosmos on April 13, but I’m told that it included animations to illustrate the molecular workings of a chloroplast — the organelle that carries out photosynthesis in a plant cell. In a review of the episode posted on the blog of the censor-everything-but-Darwinism National Center for Science Education, Josh Rosenau called the animations “cartoonish industrial machinery, rather than the messy complexity of the real molecular... Read More ›
Review: The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution byRichard Dawkins (New York: Free Press, 2009) Some years ago an anonymous well-wisher sent Richard Dawkins a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth.” The T-shirt inspired Dawkins with the title for his latest book... Read More ›
Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. In Why Evolution is True, he summarizes Darwinism — the modern theory of evolution — as follows: “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species — perhaps a self-replicating molecule — that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism Read More ›
According to the online critique of Explore Evolution by the National Center for Science Education: (A) EE claims that natural selection produced only oscillations in beak size in Galápagos finches, but “in the course of a few years, the size changes within species were large enough to explain the differences among the various species... Read More ›
