In Asia, questioning Darwinism on scientific grounds is no problem

From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In Korea, a mainstream publisher of popular and science texts, Book 21 Publishing Group, has brought out an edition of Explore Evolution, a textbook presenting both sides of the evolution debate. The translation was done by a pair of Korean academics, Seung Yup Lee and Eung Bin Kim, whose scientific specialties are respectively in biomimetics and environmental microbiology. Both teach at universities, Sogang and Yonsei, ranked in Korea’s top ten.

Dr. Lee’s research fuels his questions about macroevolution. His work on the amazing “natural design” of the South American Hercules beetle and its humidity-sensing shell was highlighted in Nature. In the Preface to the Korean Explore Evolution, Lee advocates investigating “alternative theories” to undirected Darwinian evolution.

Korea also has its own Research Association for Intelligent Design, with an impressive masthead of biologists, chemists and other scientists at top research institutions. Sogang University in Seoul hosts an Annual Symposium on Intelligent Design. The event has included presentations on William Dembski and Robert Marks’s Law of Conservation of Information and on protein translation as evidence of intelligent design.

China, of course, is Asia’s biggest market for ideas. Illustra Media has had considerable success distributing DVDs of prime ID-related titles there.

[…]Producer and director Lad Allen had Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Privileged Planet dubbed into Cantonese and Mandarin, moving a hundred thousand copies into China via Hong Kong. He estimates that three or four times that many DVDs were illegally pirated and copied.

[…]Illustra has completed a Japanese translation of The Privileged Planet, lip-synced by Japanese actors in Tokyo. But Unlocking the Mystery of Life is Illustra’s most-translated film, with editions in Khmer (Cambodian), Thai, Sri Lankan, and Mongolian as well as a variety of European languages.

On the book-publishing side, Center for Science & Culture senior fellow Paul Chien has been largely responsible for introducing intelligent design to China. A biologist at the University of San Francisco, Chien has translated Phil Johnston’sDarwin on Trial and Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box among other titles.

He recently finished work on Denyse O’Leary’s By Design Or By Chance?, to be followed by Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell.

It’s good that there are still some places left where a person can ask questions about what natural causes can do and what intelligent causes can do.

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