In the News

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.

Year-end Donation Opportunity: Support ARN today and receive the Phillip Johnson Greatest Hits collection celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Darwin on Trial.

Greetings from the ARN Staff. In case you haven't heard, 2011 is the 20th Anniversary of Phillip Johnson's seminal book Darwin on Trial. With this book the Law Professor from UC Berkeley made it intellectually respectable to be a Darwinian Skeptic and helped launch the intelligent design movement. Discovery Institute is celebrating the occasion with a website honoring the man and the book. At ARN we are celebrating the occasion by releasing two Phillip Johnson archive DVDs, one containing 10 of his best video lectures, debates and interviews in digital format (.mp4 files), and the other containing 25 of his best audio lectures, debates and interviews in digital format (.mp3 files). For a listing of the contents of each DVD go to Phillip Johnson Greatest Video Hits and Phillip Johnson Greatest Audio Hits. These archives are designed to be played on digital media players such as your computer, iphone, ipad, ipod, etc., and most likely will NOT play on your standard DVD or CD player. Our standard products are still available for those formats, but with the digital age upon us, this is a great way to get Phil’s fabulous presentations available to a wider audience in a compact format. Even if you own some of the original DVD lectures, this archive set will certainly become a collector’s item in years to come.

Initially these two DVDs will only be available on a donation basis. We want to thank you for your support of ARN over the years. We depend on your product purchases and donations to make ARN one of the leading information portals on Intelligent Design. In appreciation for a $50 donation or more received by December 31, 2011, we would like to send you either the Video or Audio DVD Collection. For a donation of $100 or more we will be happy to send you both.

Donations may be made online at http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/donation.htm. Specify either Audio DVD or Video DVD in the comment field when you check out (or Audio & Video DVD if your donation is $100 or more). Credit card donations can also be made by phone by calling 888-259-7102 and leaving your information on our secure answering machine or with our office manager, Sarah. Of course old fashion checks are always welcome which you can send to ARN, PO Box 38069, Colorado Springs, CO 80937. Donations sent by mail must be postmarked by 12/31/2011 in order to receive a charitable contribution receipt for 2011.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the ARN Staff.
Dennis Wagner, Executive Director

Colorado Springs, CO - January 31, 2011

A new journal, BIO-Complexity, and a new computer game CellCraft, were two of the top 10 Darwin and Design resources for 2010 named on the annual list released by Access Research Network this week.

BIO-Complexity is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with the unique goal to become the leading forum for testing the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design is a credible explanation for life.

Those looking for slightly less cerebral resources might like the new online computer game, CellCraft that is designed to teach about cellular biology. This is a game crafted by people who love games and is enjoyable even if you learn nothing from it. It is a blend of real time strategy, tower defense, and city planning all cast within a cellular setting. But it is hard to play and not be impressed by the complexity and design of the cell.

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2010 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

Colorado Springs, CO - December 21, 2010

Access Research Network has just released its annual "Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories" for 2010.

Gaining top honors on the list was new research that revealed the optimal design of the human eye. Physicists from the Israel Institute of Technology have created a light-guiding model of the retina, which reveals that the glial (or Muller) cells provide low-scattering passage of light from the retinal surface to the photoreceptor cells, thus acting as optical fibers. Researchers concluded "The fundamental features of the array of glial cells are revealed as an optimal structure designed for preserving the acuity of images in the human retina. It plays a crucial role in vision quality, in humans and in other species." These findings open up potentially fruitful areas for biomimetics research and might find applications in more successful eye transplants and better camera designs.

The gold rush toward biomimetics research (human designs mimicking biological designs) was another top story this year. According to Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director "Dozens of articles appeared in the 2010 scientific literature reporting how scientists are learning how to 'reverse engineer' living systems." Examples include: 1) Caltech scientists who are studying jellyfish in order to build a better aquatic pump; 2) German engineers who are building a robotic arm inspired by the design of the elephant trunk; 3) a European team that is building a robotic arm with inspiration from a octopus's limb; 4) swim suits and ship hulls that are being patterned after shark skin; 5) students at the University of Texas, Dallas, that are trying to harness the chemical sensing capability of bacteria to build synthetic sensors for toxins; 6) researchers at the University of Queensland who are inventing navigation systems that can perform complex maneuvers by imitating the optical flow of honeybee eyes; and 7) researchers that are pursuing new lightweight and high performance materials based on a new spider species found in Madagascar that spins silk twice as strong and twice as elastic as any previously studied. This "toughest biomaterial ever seen" is 10 times stronger than Kevlar. Wagner observed, "Many of these research articles seem to miss the rather obvious point that in order to reverse engineer a system, it had to be engineered in the first place."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2010 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

On December 2, 2010 NASA staged a big press release to announce the discovery of an arsenic-based form of DNA that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. This week Slate dismissed the issue as shoddy science.

According to reviewer Dora the new online game CellCraft "is one part resource management, one part puzzle, one part strategy, and even one part funny. Oh, and did I mention? It's(*gasp!*)... educational!"

If you are looking for a fun way to teach your kids (or yourself) about the complexity and of the cell give this new online game a try. It can be played at the popular Kongragate website or you can download a copy to your computer from the CellCraft game website.

"I would never have predicted that an atheist would name a book about intelligent design as one of the top books of 2009, while another atheist would write a book defending intelligent design?" commented Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director, about the organization's Top Ten Darwin and Design Resource List for 2009. "This is a sign that open minds in the academic and scientific communities are beginning to take the evidence for intelligent design seriously," Wagner concluded. He was referring to the number one book on the list, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer and number three book Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design by Bradley Monton.

Kevin Wirth, ARN Director of Media Relations, pointed out that several other resources on the 2009 list show a growing international interest in intelligent design: "Hungarian scientists published an English version of their book, Nature's IQ, that documents over 100 irreducibly complex behaviors in nature, while a well-published British medical doctor documented his reservations about Darwinian evolution in the book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2009 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

"If you don't think viewpoint discrimination is alive and well in this country when it comes to Darwin's theory, then you must be living on another planet," said Dennis Wagner, announcing this year's Top Ten in Media News in the growing Darwin vs. design controversy. This year, top honors went to Texas and Louisiana for protecting students' and teachers' rights to examine and critique all sides of evolution and other controversial science issues.

"The theory of evolution has been elevated to the status of a sacred dogma in many parts of our modern culture" observed Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director. "Students, teachers and science professionals have suffered recrimination for challenging Darwin's theory, and political policies like those recently passed in Texas and Louisiana are now required to maintain academic freedom and freedom of speech. Critical thinking skills are key not only to the learning process, but more importantly to scientific progress," said Wagner.

Kevin Wirth, ARN Director of Media Relations, pointed out that several other stories on the 2009 Top Ten Media list indicate the growing need for this type of legislative protection: "Ben Stein was 'expelled' as the commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, Michael Behe was temporarily 'expelled' from Bloggingheads.tv, and the California Science Center censored the showing of a movie that was critical of Darwin’s theory. We thoroughly documented case after case of this type of viewpoint discrimination in the book Slaughter of the Dissidents and the list just keeps on growing."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2009 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

Access Research Network has just released its annual "Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories" for 2009.

Gaining top honors on the list was a peer-reviewed article by intelligent design theorists William Dembski and Robert Marks II in the September 2009 journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. The authors used computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of neo-Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information. This research provides validation for the core ideas in Dembski's 2001 book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. "For years the scientific establishment has tried to brush off intelligent design claiming that there are no peer-reviewed scientific articles supporting the theory and no research being done from the intelligent design paradigm," stated ARN Executive Director, Dennis Wagner. "This article is yet another rebuttal to both charges, and the research results put the monkey squarely on the back of the scientific materialists' to prove Darwinian processes can actually create new functional genetic information" Wagner concluded.

While there was a lot of hype in the media this year about the Darwin Bicentennial Celebration, Kevin Wirth, ARN Director of Media Relations, found it ironic that a several of the stories on ARN's top ten list this year were articles in scientific journals proclaiming that Darwin's theory should be abandoned because it no longer fits the data, or is severely limited in what it can do or explain. According to
Wirth "a cross disciplinary approach to biology is leading scientists away from reductionistic theories like Darwinian evolution toward more collective, holistic, systems approach." In one of the top ten articles on this topic Mark Buchanan states in Nature Physics "A coming revolution may go so far as to unseat Darwinian evolution as the key explanatory process in biology."

An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2009 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.

Today Tom Woodward interviews Dr. David Berlinski on our Darwin or Design radio show. You can listen live via the Internet on Saturday mornings (10AM E.T.) at The BridgeFM. To celebrate the occasion we are offer The "Berlinski Bundle" of books and DVDs by Dr. Berlinski.

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by Dr. David Berlinski has just been released in paperback after the hardback edition sold out in weeks. ARN is offering the Berlinski Bundle at a 20% discount off our regular prices which includes Devil's Delusion, his new collection of 32 stunning essays, The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays, and the entertaining and informative interview DVD, The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. Individually these items normally cost $70, but you can buy the Berlinski Bundle for a limited time for only $50 which includes free shipping anywhere in the US.