In the News

Stephen Hawking has recently declared that philosophy is dead, and that science is the only reasonable method for securing knowledge. In response, Professor Cavadini will argue that philosophy is rooted in man's wonder about the universe, and that scientific inquiry is only one aspect of true wisdom and should not be privileged over others.

The event is at the University of Chicago.

Be there Feb. 2nd...

In ENV...David Klinghoffer writes...A severe intellectual sclerosis in scientific and popular media is one big reason that arguments for intelligent design meet with such resistance there. When it comes to the evolution debate, scientists and journalists alike are afflicted by a tendency to think in terms of simple stereotypes and crude clichés -- about what ID theory says and what kind of people ID advocates are.

That's one reason ENV keeps coming back to Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary theory's co-founder.

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Michael Flannery adds a concluding reflection on his debate with Michael Shermer ("Resolved: If He Were Alive Today, Alfred Russel Wallace Would Be an Intelligent Design Advocate").

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At ENV, Michael Flannery is currently debating Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer, and with his customary eloquence and learning. They tackle the question: If he were alive today, would evolutionary theory's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, be an intelligent design advocate?

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A guest blog in Scientific American by Rob Dunn casts some doubt on the long-standing idea that the appendix is vestigial along the twisted road of Darwinian Evolution. Instead, it could be a live-saver.

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This post by Denise O'Leary, in Uncommon Descent, summarizes IDs challenges in the past few years and indicates what is to come.

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On IDtheFuture, Dennis Wagner highlights the Top 10.

podcast link...

This post, in ENV,by Michael Behe again indicates the limits of Darwinian Evolution in the macroscale.

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Access Research Network has just released its annual "Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories" for 2011.

Gaining top honors on the list was the publication of the 50th peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific paper. A major criticism of the intelligent design movement over the past decade has been the lack of scientific research and peer-reviewed scientific papers. The establishment of two ID research labs, Biologic Institute and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, along with a peer-reviewed scientific journal Bio-Complexity, where the scientific merit of intelligent design claims can be examined, have helped accelerated the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature for ID. According to Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director "Together, these labs along with individual researchers have published peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers in journals such as Protein Science, Journal of Molecular Biology, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Quarterly Review of Biology, Cell Biology International, Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum, Physics of Life Reviews, Annual Review of Genetics, and multiple others. Collectively, this body of research is converging upon a consensus: complex biological features cannot arise by Darwinian mechanisms, but require an intelligent cause."

Biomemetics, the field of science where man tries to mimic designs found in nature, made the top 10 list again this year with inventors from Harvard building a prototype butterfly and researchers in China reverse-engineering the woodpecker in order to build a better shock-absorbing system. "In order to reverse-engineer a system," Wagner pointed out, "it has to be engineered in the first place. The butterfly and the woodpecker are just two examples of biological designs that are so complex, they defy the limited capabilities of Darwinian mutations and natural selection."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2011 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.