Re:Sometimes (Score 1)

... Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse.

When I was taught Darwin's theory in college more than four decades ago, it was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those days to respect academic freedom, which is a good standard to apply in any field. In the 1990s, before intelligent design was added to the ideas studied at Discovery Institute, I learned about an assault on the academic freedom of Dean Kenyon, a biologist and author at San Francisco State University who had come to view Darwin's theory as flawed.1 At first, the effort to restrain him from teaching seemed like just another skirmish over political correctness.

Then, following the Kenyon case, I began to examine the account of life's development that I once had been taught so dogmatically. One after another of the demonstrations of the theory that supposedly were "certain" and "conclusive" when I was a student â" such as Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings that showed various animals looking almost identical in the earliest stages of life â" have been abandoned or replaced.2 What has not changed is the dogmatism.

I soon came to realize that differences over the development of life, unlike other disputes, spark so much controversy because the collateral stakes are higher than they seem. Where you stand on the origins question often influences your worldview on issues of human life, ranging from cloning to euthanasia. Are we ultimately the product of purpose and design? If so, we would seem to be heirs to a more-or-less settled moral reality. Or, is man the unguided "result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind," as Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote?3 In that case, perhaps we can conceive our own values.

Public discussion on evolution is complicated further by confusion over words that lack any constant and agreed meaning. Terms like "evolve" and "theory" have different definitions in science than they do in everyday speech. Even among scientists, they are subject to varying understandings.4

People frequently use the word "evolve" as a genteel way of saying "change," as in, "The Toyota Camry has not evolved much this year." But that makes no sense as a scientific expression. Cars don't "evolve" in the way most Darwinists mean â" an undirected process of small, incremental mutations acted on by natural selection to produce new species. Cars are designed. Intelligence is involved. Auto designs â" like ideas or fashions or cities â" don't "evolve."5 My own ideas on evolution didn't evolve; I changed my mind.

Unfortunately, people sometimes are told that Darwinian evolution simply demonstrates "changes over time." If that were so, how could any sensible person object to it? Even ardent critics of Darwinism accept "microevolution" â" change over time within species. Animal and plant breeding, after all, are kinds of human-guided microevolution. Nature, too, plainly conducts microevolution.

But classical Darwinists such as Francisco Ayala and Richard Dawkins assert much more. Dawkins, for example, acknowledges that living organisms "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."6 But, he argues that this appearance of design is completely misleading because undirected Darwinian processes â" random mutations and natural selection â" can produce the features of living systems that look designed. In Ayala's words, natural selection produces "design without a designer."7

Advocates of the theory of intelligent design see things differently. They think there are discernible features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process like natural selection. They don't dispute that life changes over time; they dispute that undirected processes produced all of that change. They see evidence of actual, not just illusory, design.

For example, my colleague, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, argues that digital code stored in the DNA molecule points to intelligent design. He notes that DNA stores information using sequences of chemicals that "function just like alphabetic characters in a written text or binary digits in a software code." This discovery has profound implications.

--exerpt from "An Intelligent Discussion about Life" By: Bruce Chapman

...I think this "nonsense" is worth further investigation