I met geneticist and evo-devo guru Wallace Arthur at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s, where he spent some time during a sabbatical. He had begun dissenting from standard neo-Darwinian theory, and was running new ideas about evolution by scientific audiences. In the years since, Arthur’s books and articles have featured a steady stream of provocative ideas, plainly expressed.
The myth that anti-ID proponents are religiously neutral is one that the anti-ID proponents like to play up. And yet they are as eager as any side in this debate to use religion to their advantage. MORE.
Want to know more about one of the weirdest planets in the universe? Physicist David Mobley has a good review of The Privileged Planet film here.
Why doesn’t Joe Engineer buy Neo-Darwinism? Dembski has the real-life story here.
Discovery Institute fellow Francis Beckwith travels to Harvard to mix it up with the Darwinists here. And over at World magazine historian Richard Weikart describes how Germany moved from Darwin to Hitler.
Yesterday’s Nature has, on page 24 of the advertisement section, an announcement requesting grant proposals for the John Templeton Foundation’s “Purpose in the living world” research programme, titled “The Emergence of Biological Complexity” (for more go here and here). Purpose? Biological complexity? Evidence of fine-tuning in biological complexity? All in one breath? This may not be full-fledged ID, but it certainly isn’t “the literal interpretation of Darwin.” MORE.
ID theorist (and IDthefuture contributor) Steve Meyer had a friendly debate with Darwin defender Will Provine at the National Press Club in Washington DC today. Rob Crowther and Logan Gage give a report on the event over at the Evolution News blog.
George Will has written an evocative Newsweek essay on the late Pope John Paul II, Terri Schiavo, and the secularist program of willing consciousness and free will into oblivion:
A bemused John Paul II, no stranger to materialism, dialectical and otherwise, might have responded: There you go again—that word “consciousness.” What is the grandeur in the spectacle, however interesting, of the blind, brute, violent necessity of physical laws at work? Is consciousness of an existence supposedly governed by such laws really much of a privilege?
Our colleague Steve Meyer spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC yesterday on DNA and intelligent design. Heritage is so well organized that they already have the lecture video available (free) at their website. To view it, go here.
In a previous post, I remarked that John Paul II “seemed to sign off on conventional evolutionary theory save for the divine infusion of souls at the origin of humanity.” This is not quite accurate. As a friend and colleague who knows the Catholic world much better than I do noted to me by email:
I don’t think any of us should be promoting (or at least going along with) the canard that John Paul II accepted “evolution” in some inappropriate sense. The 1996 Message on evolution was, indeed, a weak document,… MORE
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