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Education

ID in the News
March 30, 2005
PBS aired a segment on the anti-Darwinism controversy in the schools Monday (see PBS transcript).  Ken Ham and Stephen Meyer presented arguments for criticizing Darwin, while Eugenie Scott and others defended exclusive evolutionary teaching.  The Discovery Institute blog Evolution News analyzed the 14:32 minute segment, complaining that 90 minutes of Meyer’s interview received only 30 […]
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Bible and Theology

Easter Essay
March 27, 2005
Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; […]
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Education

NAS President Calls on Scientists to Defend Darwinism
March 24, 2005
The man who described a cell as “a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines” (see 02/10/2003 entry) now wants his fellow scientists to oppose efforts to attribute this factory to design.  Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of […]
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Education

Echoes of Columbine: Belief in God Brings Bullet
March 21, 2005
Grief counselors have been dispatched to Red Lake High School in Minnesota, says Fox News, after a rampage by a neo-Nazi student left 10 dead and 14 wounded.  In a manner reminiscent of Columbine, according to MSNBC News, 17-year old killer Jeff Weise admired Hitler’s views on racial purity and was deep into goth culture […]
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Education

Agnosticism Loses: Arkansas Science Must Be Atheistic
March 18, 2005
Updated 05/08/2005:  “What I’m trying to do here is not to deal directly with the existence or non-existence of God, but restore to science the agnostic viewpoint that there could be or could not be rather than the dogmatism that actually currently exists… that absolutely precludes the existence of God.”  These were the words of […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinian Law Protect the Unfit?
March 15, 2005
Eggheads at Vanderbilt import evolutionary ideas into legal policies that could negatively affect individual rights in devastating ways.
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Politics and Ethics

Mad Science: Stanford to Create Rat with Human Brain
March 10, 2005
Those who thought stem cell research was about helping people afflicted with disease may become alarmed over Stanford’s latest experiment, reported by the UK News Telegraph: the creation of a lab rat with all human brain cells.  The article quotes Wesley Smith of Centre for Bioethics and Culture warning, “biotechnology is becoming dangerously close to […]
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Politics and Ethics

Did Haeckel’s Defunct Recapitulation Theory Influence the Supreme Court?
March 8, 2005
One of our readers uncovered an amicus brief from the American Psychological Association (q.v. on American Bar Association website) encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn capital punishment for minors (see 03/04/2005 entry).  One of the key arguments in the brief is that “Neuropsychological research demonstrates that the adolescent brain has not reached adult maturity.”  Zeroing […]
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Politics and Ethics

Naturalistic Science Influences Criminal Law, Excuses Murder
March 4, 2005
Why was Science1 magazine happy about the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the death penalty for murderers under 17?  Because the decision was not made on the basis of the Constitution or on Judeo-Christian values, but rather on psychiatric, neuroscientific and behavioral studies: Eight medical organizations, led by the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP), […]
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Intelligent Design

Visual Aid: Chance or Design?
March 1, 2005
A TV commercial for the Honda Accord has been circulating around the net as a popular download (see Steel City’s Finest).  It shows the parts of a car, without human intervention, interacting in strange ways like a Rube Goldberg device, resulting in a finished car rolling off the ramp.  Garrison Keillor adds the punch line, […]
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Bible and Theology

New Date for Edom Fits Biblical Record
February 18, 2005
The critics were wrong, and the Bible was right, according to new dates established for the kingdom of Edom southeast of the Dead Sea.  This is the gist of a report from UC San Diego that found evidence of extensive copper mining in the area much earlier than previously thought.  The area studied had “been […]
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Politics and Ethics

Iraqi Marshlands on Slow Mend
February 18, 2005
The ecological disaster wrought by Saddam Hussein’s policy of drying up ancient marshes along the Tigris and Euphrates (see 08/18/2003 and 05/01/2003 entries) is still severe, reports Science,1,2 but groups are working hard on restoration.  It may take many years and will probably never be the same.  About 20% has been reflooded, with portions coming […]
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Education

SETI Outreach Director: “Teach Evolution”
February 11, 2005
Evolution is the foundation of biology, geology, and astronomy, claims Edna Devore, Director of Education and Public Education for the SETI Institute.  Writing in Space.Com, she finds it hard to believe evolution is controversial (see 12/14/2004 and 11/30/2004 entries).  Why, just look out the airplane window; it’s obvious.  “Evolution is fundamental to modern biology, geology […]
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Politics and Ethics

Stem Cell Research Launches into the Ethical Unknown, Full Steam Ahead
February 8, 2005
No one knows where stem cell research will lead.  Some hope for miracle cures.  Some fear horrendous abuses and ethical nightmares.  But states and nations, apparently more concerned over priority and prestige, are fighting to the head of the pack after the California Proposition 71 gun fired last fall.     With $3 billion in […]
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Politics and Ethics

Scientist Preaches Integrity to Fellow Scientists
February 6, 2005
Patrick Bateson (U. of Cambridge), concerned over reports of malpractice by scientists, wrote an essay in Science1 Feb. 4 to remind his fellow researchers about “Desirable Scientific Conduct.”  One mustn’t allow his or her affiliations or biases to influence results.  Performing tainted research feeds the postmodern conception that science is a cultural construct, for one […]
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