Posted by Nick Matzke on January 01, 2005 | Comments (48) | TrackBack (18)

Discovery Institute Fellow Jonathan Witt has a post over on his blog (“Darwinism and Demarcation: Ducking the Debate”, see also his comments on that post and his subsequent post, Comments on Ducking the Debate).

Witt is quite confident that modern biology is totally wrong, but it’s clear that he doesn’t even understand the basics. 

“Micajah,” a commenter on Witt’s blog, cites this press release about the cover story of this week’s issue of Cell.  The Cell article, “Accelerated Evolution of Nervous System Genes in the Origin of Homo sapiens, gives new insight into how the human brain evolved. 

Unfortunately, the comments by Witt in reply to “Micajah” and other posters indicate almost total unfamiliarity with the relevant science.  It is, I think, an example of “this is your brain on ID/creationism.”

Continue reading  “Brain evolution: Keeping your Witts about you”

Posted by Nick Matzke on December 31, 2004 | Comments (26) | TrackBack (1)

The new PNAS article “The descent of the antibody-based immune system by gradual evolution,” blogged by Carl Zimmer (“The Whale and the Antibody”) and Reed Cartwright at PT, brings to mind a famous old declaration by Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box:

“We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.”

(Darwin's Black Box, p. 138)

This wasn’t true in 1996, as was documented when PT contributor Matt Inlay reviewed Behe’s immune system argument in 2002 (see “Evolving Immunity” at TalkDesign.org and the hilarious response of ID advocates when challenged).  It is even less true now, due to the new PNAS article and other evolutionary immunology research published in 2004 and before.  In fact, the ID movement is in total denial about this body of literature, yet ID advocates continue to parade around as if they have some shred of scientific credibility behind their rhetoric.  They even have the gall to claim that the scientific mainstream is dogmatically oppressing them — it’s rather like a geocentrist arguing for a stationary earth without considering Foucault’s Pendulum.

I’ll take the liberty of making some predictions for 2005:

Continue reading  “Happy New Year, ID movement! (ID and Evol. Immunology)”

Posted by PvM on December 31, 2004 | Comments (32) | TrackBack (0)

I have collected an extensive, but hardly exhaustive, list of educators, scientists and religious people supporting evolution and/or speaking out against Intelligent Design.

I will move the list to PandasThumb once I finish the translation from HTML to BBCode and clean up the organization (such as alphabetizing the states and adding an index).

If you are aware of any additional links please add a comment and I will update the list to reflect the latest, most up-to-date list.

Read further at Wedgie World

Posted by Dave Thomas on December 31, 2004 | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

You can’t keep a good hominid down!  Not even if he’s had his legs chewed off by an Allosaurus.

Check out the latest from biblelandstudios.com :

Dinosaur Swallows Human?
Posted by bibleland on Friday, December 24 @ 08:59:14 EST (1405 reads)
Thank you for your patience and without further delay Bibleland Studios presents The Photos as promised of what appears to be a fossil of a Dinosaur Swallowing a Human. Do these photos provide the necessary evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted in our recent ancient past? From our latest poll many of you believe humans and dinosaurs did coexist. But just because we believe it does that make it so? Bibleland Studios is interested in objective; naked, pure unadulterated truth no matter where it leads. Do you believe as I do that the desire to know where we came from beats in the breast of everyman, woman and child? Did we come from an ape-like creature or a beautiful pair created in innocent splendor?
Let’s find out.

How I acquired these photos …

Apparently, you have to subscribe to the Bibleland Studios website in order to get the “real” story.  But, Panda’s Thumb readers can have the real scoop absolutely free!

Check out the original story, the cursory and detailed explanations, and even the Spanish translation!

Happy New Year, Dave Thomas

Posted by Reed A. Cartwright on December 31, 2004 | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)

Carl Zimmer has written another good post on his blog about the evolution of the immune system: The Whale and the Antibody.

You can find this same remarkable system in humans, albatrosses, rattlesnakes, bullfrogs, and all other land vertebrates. You can also find it in most fish, from salmon to hammerhead sharks to sea horses. There are some variations from species to species, but they’ve all got B cells, T cells, antibodies, thymuses, and the other essential components. But you won’t find it in beetles, earthworms, dragonflies, or any other invertebrate on land. Nor will you find it in starfish, squid, lobsters, or lampreys in the water. All these other animals rely instead on rudimentary immune systems that cannot learn.

For those who reject evolution, this sort of pattern tells them nothing. Like everything else in nature, they can only wave their hands and declare it the inscrutable work of a designer (lower case d or upper case D as they are so inclined on a given day). But immunologists and other scientists who actually want to learn something about the immune system find this view useless. Instead, they look at how animals with an antibody-based immune system are related to one another. And what they find is both straightforward and astonishing. All of the living animals with an antibody-based immune system descend from a common ancestor, and none of the descendants of that common ancestor lack it. That means that the antibody-based immune system evolved once, about 470 million years ago.

Posted by Reed A. Cartwright on December 31, 2004 | Comments (16) | TrackBack (1)

Republican Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania is probably the loudest political voice for incorporating tenets of “intelligent design” creationism into biology education.  He is infamous for introducing a Phillip-Johnson drafted amendment to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act Authorization Bill, which was later renamed the No Child Left Behind Act.  This amendment contained the following language:

It is the sense of the Senate that (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why the subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.

Although the amendment was passed by the Senate, the conference committee eventually stripped the language from the law after vociferous protests from the scientific community.  Even though his amendment failed, Santorum continues to support the anti-evolution movement.  The current Newsweek profiles him as a powerful voice, an emerging leader of the “new faith-based GOP,” and potential candidate for president. According to the article, “[e]volution, he says, should be taught in public schools, but only as a still-controversial scientific theory that ‘has holes.’”

With creationist shenanigans happening in his own back-yard, he could not resist speaking out in support of them.  However, Santorum’s op-ed drastically misrepresents what’s going on in Dover.

Continue reading  “Santorum Spreading Santorum”

Posted by Ed Brayton on December 30, 2004 | Comments (29) | TrackBack (0)

In the wake of a deadly earthquake-triggered tsunami that has killed at least 77,000 people in southern Asia, brave scientific dissenters are standing up to the Wegenerian Orthoxody that has for so long censored and belittled anyone who dares to question the validity of Naturalistic Seismology. For decades, scientists have told us that they understood the processes that cause earthquakes. In high school science textbooks, they dazzle unsuspecting students with tales of tectonic plates shifting and so-called “continental drift”. But new evidence shows that these processes are infinitely more complex than the guardians of science would have you believe, and a growing number of scientists are dissenting from this dogmatic Wegenerism.

Continue Reading Are Tsunamis Intelligently Designed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Posted by Steve Reuland on December 29, 2004 | Comments (71) | TrackBack (4)

On the heels of Hugh Hewitt’s foray into the wonderful world of ID, we have the redoubtable Phyllis Schafly, who weighs in with an amusing piece on Townhall.com.  Anyone familiar with the evo/cre debate will instantly pick out several egregious errors that are inexcusable for anyone writing a serious piece about evolution.  Let’s take a look and see how bad it gets…

Continue reading  “Is ID Unfairly Censored?”

Posted by Timothy Sandefur on December 28, 2004 | Comments (34) | TrackBack (3)

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who also happens to have been my Constitutional Law professor in law school, has a post here criticizing a Washington Post article about the Dover, Pennsylvania creationism case.

Continue reading  “Is ID unfairly portrayed?”