Tag Archives: Darwinism

News

Ball State University sides with Darwinian Inquisition and against academic freedom

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Evolution News reports:

In a blatant attack on academic freedom and the unfettered consideration of scientific viewpoints, the president of Ball State University (BSU) in Muncie, IN, has imposed a gag order on science faculty forbidding their discussion of the theory of intelligent design (ID) in science classrooms.

Ball State has been the focus of media attention since an extremist atheist group, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, demanded an investigation into whether Ball State physicist Dr. Eric Hedin had informed his students about the theory of ID. Dr. Hedin’s interdisciplinary honors course “Boundaries of Science” included a “Partial Bibliography” listing books favorable to, and others critical of, intelligent design.

Now BSU’s President Jo Ann Gora has declared that ID is a “religious” idea at variance with “the consensus of science scholars” and may not be discussed in science classes, since that would be a violation of “academic integrity.”

“Students and the public are owed a genuine evaluation of the merits of ID, touching as the theory does on ultimate questions of life’s origins,” responded Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. “However, when scientific discussion is censored by a university, fair-minded evaluation becomes impossible.”

Dr. Meyer is the author of the recent New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt, a rigorous summary of the current state of the argument for intelligent design.

“In the Orwellian world of Ball State’s president, academic freedom apparently means only the ‘freedom’ to support the majority’s view,” said Dr. John West, associate director of the Center for Science & Culture. “This is exactly how the academic ‘consensus’ against the theory of intelligent design is maintained — by intimidation, fiat, and legal threats.”

ID theorists hold that a variety of features observable and testable in living creatures and in the fossil record are best explained as the product an intelligent cause rather than an unguided process such as natural selection. Dr. Meyer’s book, for example, begins by examining the abrupt origin of complex, diverse animal life in the Cambrian era, 530 million years ago.

Not unexpected, given what we knew about the panel charged with evaluating Dr. Hedin’s course.

But I do have some good news today. Tune in at 2 PM to read my report on yet another new peer-reviewed paper hostile to Darwinism.

Related posts

Podcasts

Cell biologist Michael Denton interviewed on the merits of the design argument

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The latest ID the Future podcast is short (11 minutes) and sweet.

The MP3 file is here.

Quick biography of Dr. Michael Denton:

Michael Denton is a Senior Research Fellow in Human Genetics in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Dr. Denton studied medicine at Bristol University and developmental biology at Kings College, London University, where he gained a PhD in 1974. He trained in Pathology at the Post-Graduate Medical School, London, and at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He has held university lectureships in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. For many years his main research focus has been on the genetics of human retinal disease, and he wrote the book Nature’s Destiny.

He is critical of Darwinism, but his own theories about the design of the cell tend more towards higher order physical laws than direct intervention by an intelligent agent. But he does acknowledge design arguments in three areas, see below.

Topics:

  • The mechanistic reductionist view of cells has broken down
  • Now, people are more looking at the higher order organization of matter
  • A better explanation is that there are higher order laws that organize base matter
  • These are not mysterious, these are higher order physical laws
  • The focus used to be on genes are everything – the building blocks
  • The form of the cell is more important
  • The machine analogy is failing at the higher order level – that’s the first area of design
  • Another area of design is at the lower level
  • At the lower order level, there are machines like the ribosome
  • These machines have complex specified information, and they need an explanation too
  • The origin of life, the origin of ribosomes, are another area that looks designed
  • A third area of design is the fine-tuning of the universe for biological organisms
  • The argument made by Stephen C. Meyer about the origin of life is correct
  • Origin of life research is declining because it cannot be explained without design
  • Design is the best explanation for the OOL we have right now, based on the data we have

See below for other recent ID the Future podcasts.

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News

Carson Weitnauer reviews the new DVD on hummingbird flight

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Here is a review of a new DVD from Illustra Media about birds and flight. (H/T Apologetics 315)

Excerpt:

First, the film features interviews with a variety of scientists, a philosopher, and a wildlife photographer. The full list includes Carsten Egevang, Thomas Emmel, Ann Gauger, Paul Nelson, Timothy Standish, and Dylan Winter. While some of the interviews felt a bit repetitive, they were generally woven together with skill, suggestively making the case for intelligent design. (One of the weakest moments is when one of them admits he wants to “make a shrine” to honor the birds).

I don’t see why anything is wrong with that! These are birds we are talking about – not cats.

He continues:

That’s the power of the ‘argument’ in the film: they don’t quote any holy books, they don’t make up any “Christian” facts, they just explain, in some detail, how the different component parts of a bird makes avian flight possible. From the development of the egg, to the first flight of a new bird, to a microscopic view of the feathers, to the unique functionality of the hummingbird’s tongue and the distinct nature of its flight, to the extraordinary coordination of the massive starling murmuration, and the unbelievable migration pattern of the artic tern, the question is raised: how could this have come about by an unguided process of survival of the fittest, random mutation, and lots of time?

Flight is an “all or nothing proposition.” Either you can fly or you can’t. But to fly, birds require numerous, highly sophisticated systems to work in coordination: the rapid beating of the heart, the huge breast muscles to power the wings, an efficient respiratory system, a lightweight digestive system, navigational systems for migration, an internal gyroscope for stable flight, acute vision to identify food, and more. How could all of these interconnected systems have emerged, without any foresight or plan, to create the new ability to fly?

Furthermore, it is clear that hummingbirds are a very unique kind of bird, with, for example, wings that can beat more than a hundred times a second and a heart that can beat more than 1,250 times a minute. Hummingbirds eat so much, the equivalent amount of daily food for an adult human would be 150 pounds a day! To accomplish this feeding frenzy, the tongue extends and withdraws a unique mechanism in less than one-twentieth of a second, thousands of times a day.

The second line of argument is the comparison of birds with award-winning, groundbreaking examples of intelligently designed flying machines. That is, when you compare a Boeing 747 or the “Nano Air Vehicle” (an experimental surveillance drone), it is evident that the flying systems of birds are more advanced. Why, the film asks, if we so readily accept ‘intelligent design’ for 747s, are we averse to using this same explanation for birds?

[…]The third feature is a wide range of computer animations that provide detail and insight into various biological components. I was worried these might be cheesy or overwrought, but they are instead illuminating and interesting. Nor are they stuffed into the film to show off some fancy computer graphics, but inserted with purpose, to more emphatically make distinct points. The professional standards make these animations a strong addition to the overall effect of the film.

I already have this DVD, and I am going to watch it this weekend, and this review makes me even more interested in doing that. Sometimes I quote something from a review here and think “now the readers don’t need to read it” but I really do recommend clicking through and reading this review of the Flight DVD. He’s not just reviewing the DVD, there are a lot of opinions and ideas in there!

I noticed that Carson had some words of caution about Paul Nelson and Tim Standish because they are young Earth creationists, but I don’t think that is a problem because there is a huge difference between a Ken Ham or a Ken Hovind and a Paul Nelson or a Tim Standish. Paul Nelson has a PhD in philosophy of science from the University of Chicago and Tim Standish has a PhD in biology from George Mason University. They are also both involved with the intelligent design movement. These are not outsiders.

By the way, I posted previously about how scientists are trying to reverse engineer the design of the flight feature in the hummingbird system, for use in nanorobotics.

UPDATE: Eric Chabot of Ratio Christi has another review of it here.