Whales — Time to Put Evolution’s Exhausted “Poster Child” to Rest

biology, Bioscience, critics, Darwinists, deformity, disease, Ellen Coombs, Evolution, filmmaker, fossil record, Jackson Wheat, Jerry Coyne, Long Story Short, milk carton kid, Neo-Darwinism, population genetics, poster child, scientists, The Conversation, The Rocks Were There, whales, Wikipedia, YouTube videos
The argument about whales turns on two points: “Population genetics calculations say no,” and “New fossil find throws the series into disarray.” Source
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White Fragility — A Free Pass for Scientists?

Africans, Alexander H. Stephens, blacks, Carl Bergstrom, Caucasians, Christopher Rufo, city employees, Civic Biology, Confederacy, Cornerstone Speech, Culture & Ethics, Darwinists, Ethiopian, eugenics, Europe, Evolution, genocide, human evolution, Human Zoos, John West, North American, Origin of Species, racial injustice, Robin DiAngelo, scientific racism, Scopes Monkey Trial, Seattle, Second Reich, self-talk, The Biology of the Second Reich, The Descent of Man, thought-policing, United States, University of Washington, White Fragility, whites
“White Fragility” is the phrase of the moment. It refers to an unwillingness on the part of white people to admit “complicity” with racism. Source
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Elk Goes Down; Darwin Breathes a Sigh of Relief

abolitionist movement, Afghan Hound, Black Lives Matter, Border Collie, Bronx Zoo, Charles Darwin, Christians, civil rights, Creativity, Darwinists, dominance, elk, Evolution, Human Zoos, John West, Judeo-Christian tradition, New York Times, Oregon, Ota Benga, pastors, Portland, priests, protesters, pseudoscience, racial hierarchy, Racism, scientific racism, scripture, statues, Wesley Smith
What is the evolutionary argument against unapologetic racism and the supremacy of whatever race can climb to the top? Source
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Weekend Reading: Heretics and Inquisitors

BioEssays, censorship, creationism, crime, Culture, Darwinists, Douglas Axe, establishment, Evolution News, free speech, Günter Bechly, Heresy, history, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, Italy, Middle Ages, mystery, novels, Politics, Richard Sternberg, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, William of Baskerville
Years ago, reading Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, I got bogged down early on and stopped. Rereading it now, I can’t imagine what I found boring. It’s great! A learned crime-mystery about murders in a 14th-century Italian abbey, it deals in part with the relationship between heretics and inquisitors. What Eco relates (via his protagonist William of Baskerville) has a lot of contemporary relevance. Intelligent design is a heresy against the backdrop of conformist evolutionary thinking, and ID proponents must ever beware of Darwinist inquisitors. (See the recent threat of censorship from the biology journal BioEssays.) Eco observes that inquisitions generate heretics, rather than stamping them out. That is true. Many of the leading ID scientists (Axe, Sternberg, Bechly, and others) came to us because they were…
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“Nobody Expects the Darwinist Inquisition”? I Do

academic freedom, BioEssays, biologists, bullies, censorship, Center for Science & Culture, cosmos, Darwinism, Darwinists, Dave Speijer, Discovery Institute, Evolution News, Facebook, free speech, ideology, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, John Zmirak, nihilism, The Stream, Twitter, Worldview
As a reader and supporter of Evolution News, you must have noticed the same thing I have. It’s an ominous sight to observe the two waves approaching each other. On one side is an intensifying drive to police social media, where countless people get most of their information. On the other are biologists who (according to a Darwinist scientist!) spend a fifth of their time fretting about how to “combat intelligent design,” as we reported here the other day. One prominent scientific journal, BioEssays, has already brought the waves together. They have called for Internet censorship of intelligent design, identifying Discovery Institute by name as being in need of special attention by the censors. If giants like Facebook and Twitter don’t follow through on the threat, then says biologist Dave…
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Lewontin’s Confession and Mamet’s Principle

atheists, Big Bang, black holes, censorship, Darwinists, David Mamet, free will, Harvard University, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, materialists, mind, morality, nature, neuroscience, Richard Lewontin, Singularity, teleology
Jerry Coyne and his Darwinist/materialist/atheist brethren make public assertions that are nonsense on their face: they claim to be mindless meat machines, they deny the indisputable evidence for intelligent design in biology and for teleology in all of nature, they deny the obvious evidence for the supernatural in cosmological singularities such as black holes and the singularity at the origin of the Big Bang, and they deny the manifest corruption of modern science by materialism and arrogance and egotism. Materialists tout determinism and deny free will, despite the fact that determinism in physics has been quite decisively refuted and the fact that free will is well supported by neuroscience and that denial of free will negates the ability to make a truth claim of any sort (if a materialist’s opinion…
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Is Joe Blow “Anti-Intellectual”?

AIDS, anti-intellectual, babies, climate change, conception, Darwinists, DDT, eugenics, Evolution, fossil fuels, gender, global cooling, global warming, Jeffrey Epstein, life, malaria, materialism, men, moral purity, Paul Ehrlich, polar bears, polar ice caps, schoolchildren, schools, science consensus, scientists, Skeptics, Steven Novella, truck driver, women, Y2K, Yale University
It’s a common claim among Darwinists that people who question “expert” scientific opinion on such topics as evolution, global warming, and the mind-brain relationship are “anti-intellectual” science deniers. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and credulous Darwinist and materialist makes the claim in a recent post: As science-communicators and skeptics we are trying to understand the phenomenon of rejection of evidence, logic, and the consensus of expert scientific opinion.  Ironically, Novella, who considers himself a skeptic, decries the skepticism of people who don’t agree with him. Purity and Consensus How can it be, scientific experts ask, that so many people doubt scientific experts? Novella: There is, of course, no one explanation — complex psychological phenomena are likely to be multifactorial. Decades ago the blame was placed mostly on scientific illiteracy, a…
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Evolutionist Thinks He Is Clickbait

atheists, Brad Pitt, clickbait, Darwinist community, Darwinists, Discovery Institute, Drudge Report, eugenics, Evolution, Faith Versus Fact, Granville Sewell, Intelligent Design, Internet, Jerry Coyne, Meghan Markle, Michael Egnor, miracles, P.Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins, theology, University of Chicago, wardrobe malfunction, zombie drug
I adore Jerry Coyne, the atheist evolutionist and University of Chicago emeritus biology professor. At Why Evolution Is True, he goes after Granville Sewell for a post here, “Jerry Coyne Asks a Good Question.” In his theologian mode, Coyne demands to know why God doesn’t do “ONE BIG MIRACLE, of the type I describe in Faith Versus Fact (p. 119) — a miracle that was taped and documented worldwide.” To be honest I didn’t fully read Coyne’s latest, but I noticed his claim, which he’s made repeatedly in the past, that intelligent design proponents, especially at Evolution News, write about him because he is clickbait. What’s that? Clickbait is defined as “a sensationalized headline or piece of text on the Internet designed to entice people to follow a link to an article…
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Himmelfarb and Her Haters

10 Books That Screwed Up the World, Adrian Desmond, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Dickson White, Bea Kristol, Benjamin Wiker, Borneo, Bridgewater Treatises, Charles Darwin, Charles Gillispie, Charles Kingsley, City University of New York, Cornell University, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Darwinists, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Dyak headhunters, Edward T. Oakes, Encounter (journal), Ernst Mayr, Eugenics Record Office, Evolution, Francis Galton, George Will, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harry Bruinius, history, Jacques Barzun, James D. Watson, James Moore, Jeffrey Shallit, Jewish Women, John William Draper, Julian Huxley, Leo Strauss, Mein Kampf, P.Z. Myers, Panda's Thumb, Uaupés River Valley, Victorian England
Editor’s note: Historian and Darwin skeptic Gertrude Himmelfarb died on Monday, December 30, 2019. While mourning the passing of this great scholar, we are pleased to republish Professor Flannery’s 2009 essay, below. See also Flannery’s tribute, ‘Farewell to Gertrude Himmelfarb, Brutally Honest Historian of the “Darwinian Revolution.’” “If you have no enemies, it is a sign fortune has forgot you.” — Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732  Noted physician Thomas Fuller was an expert on “eruptive fevers,” and so it seems fitting to open this essay with his wry but telling observation on enemies in public life, for perhaps no contemporary historian has spawned more “eruptive fever” over an analysis of the reigning secular creation myth demigod, Charles Darwin, than has the present subject of this essay. If Fuller is any judge,…
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Advance the Tipping Point: End-of-Year Video Message from Stephen Meyer

Bruce Chapman, bullies, censors, Center for Science & Culture, Darwinists, David Gelernter, ID Education Day, Intelligent Design, John West, origin of life, Scientific Dissent from Darwin, Stephen Meyer, Steve Buri, Summer Seminar on ID
The other day Steve Meyer and I sat down to review the year’s accomplishments by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. It’s pretty amazing. As our Discovery colleague Rob Crowther pointed out, there were things Meyer talked about that neither Rob nor I had heard about before. Take a look at this: How Discovery’s scientists and scholars manage to do it all is a wonder. I’m not going to try to name any portion of them, lest I forget someone. But surely our leadership at DI should be singled out: Steve Buri, Bruce Chapman, Steve Meyer, and John West. We are going to be enjoying a staff appreciation lunch today, and at these events I always feel it’s our leaders who get shortchanged on the appreciation. So let me…
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