Bad science and religion

by Greg Mayer Michael Zimmerman, of the Clergy Letter Project, has written a piece at the Huffington Post attacking the Tennessee creationism bill, and earlier wrote there in support of an attempt to repeal a similar, already enacted, statute in Louisiana. Zimmerman stresses the importance of bringing the weight of scientists’ and teachers’ expertise to […]

New genes arise quickly

What role does the appearance of new genes, versus simple changes in old ones, play in evolution? There are two reasons why this question has recently become important. The first involves a scientific controversy.  Some researchers—the most prominent being evo-devotee  Sean Carroll—maintain that most important evolutionary change, at least in body form, involves changes in […]

New Gallup poll: America still creationist (surprise!)

A new Gallup poll released three days ago confirms that America is still stuck on creationism, and that the numbers have barely budged in thirty years.  Here’s the upshot in a graph (click to enlarge): Four in ten Americans are still straight-out creationists; those numbers have been pretty constant since 1982 though there’s a drop […]

An experimental evolutionist replies to Behe

My colleague Jim Bull at the University of Texas at Austin conducted several of the phage experiments that creationist Michael Behe mentions in his recent Quarterly Review of Biology paper on experimental evolution.  As you may recall, Behe reviewed short-term studies of adaptive evolution of bacteria and viruses in the laboratory, and concluded that nearly […]

The Gaskell affair

You may have heard of the Martin Gaskell case (P. Z. Myers posted a summary of the situation last week).  Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Texas, applied for a job running the observatory at The University of Kentucky.  Questions arose about whether his evangelical Christianity, and apparent embrace of creationism, would render him […]

Boudry et al. on irreducible complexity

Coincidentally, the latest issue of Quarterly Review of Biology, which contains Michael Behe’s paper on microbial evolution in the lab, also has a strong critique of Behe’s ideas about “irreducible complexity” by a group of Belgian philosophers headed by Maarten Boudry.  Their paper is called called “Irreducible incoherence and intelligent design:  a look into the […]

IDers already distorting Behe’s new paper

Over at the intelligent-design site Uncommon Descent, the ever befuddled Denyse O’Leary has already glommed onto the review I wrote yesterday of Michael Behe’s new paper. And, exactly as I predicted, she distorts Behe’s conclusions: So, not only must the long, slow process of Darwinian evolution create every exotic form of life in the blink […]

Behe’s new paper

The latest issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology has a paper by intelligent-design advocate Michael Behe, “Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and “the first rule of adaptive evolution.” It’s a review of several decades’ worth of experimental evolution in microbes (viruses and bacteria), with an eye toward revealing exactly what kinds of mutations have occurred […]

Behe gets published

According to Panda’s Thumb, cdesign proponetist Michael Behe has a paper upcoming in a respectable journal: The Quarterly Review of Biology. Checking their website, it’s sure enough true: Note also that philosopher Maarten Boudry and his colleagues have an attack on ID. This article is online and Nick Matzke says it’s “quite good.” The Behe […]

US National Science Board tries to suppress knowledge of Americans’ scientific illiteracy

by Greg Mayer Today’s issue of Science contains a news article (first pointed out to me by Matthew) about a clumsy (and now failed) attempt by the US’s National Science Board (NSB) to suppress a finding by a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey that Americans’ knowledge of evolution and cosmology remains poor, and well behind […]