Free Republic

SEATTLE - Updated Friday 10:15 p.m. The front edge of an expected very strong windstorm was beginning to batter the Washington Coast late Friday evening. Gusts as of 10 p.m. -- just the early beginnings of the storm -- were 56 mph in Hoquiam, 44 in Forks, and 42 mph in Friday Harbor. Gusts as high as 70-75 mph are possible along the coast overnight.

The debate concerning intelligent design and evolution has revealed some confusion about the concept of religious faith. What constitutes religious faith? Traditionally, religious faith refers to a belief in a particular revelation, a specially delivered message, something we couldn't figure out by reason alone. Thus, the Jewish people have faith in the revelation they believe was given to Abraham and is contained principally in the Torah. Muslims believe in the message given to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel and recorded in the Quran. Buddhists believe in the revelation that came to Siddhartha Gautama and will lead them along the eightfold...

Just as a pocket watch requires a complex system of gears and springs to keep it ticking precisely, individual cells have a network of proteins and genes that maintain their own internal clock -- a 24-hour rhythm that, in humans, regulates metabolism, cell division, and hormone production, as well as the wake-sleep cycle. Studying this "circadian" rhythm in fruit flies, which have genes that are similar to our own, scientists have constructed a basic model of how the cellular timekeeper works. But now, a new report in this week's issue of the journal Science turns the old model on its...

WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he gave a convincing account of how life has evolved over billions of years from simple microbes to the complexity of the Earth's biosphere to the present. But he pointedly left out how life got started. One might as well speculate about the origin of matter, he quipped. Today scientists have a good idea of how matter originated in the Big Bang, but the origin of life remains shrouded in mystery. Although Darwin refused to be drawn on how life began, he conjectured in a letter to a friend...

In December 2004 New Mexico Public Television scheduled, advertised and then, under pressure, canceled a documentary explaining the scientific case for a theory of biological origins known as intelligent design. In the same month, a renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing among other factors, evidence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule. Also in December, the ACLU filed suit to prevent a Dover, Penn. school district from informing its students about the theory of intelligent design. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that an evolutionary biologist with two...

THE first court trial over the theory of intelligent design is now over, with a ruling expected by the end of the year. What sparked the legal controversy? Before providing two weeks of training in modern evolutionary theory, the Dover, Pa., School District briefly informed students that if they wanted to learn about an alternative theory of biological origins, intelligent design, they could read a book about it in the school library. In short order, the School District was dragged into court by a group insisting the school policy constituted an establishment of religion, this despite the fact that the...

In 1995, a solar eclipse he saw in India made him think about Earth’s unique place in the universe — a place designed to be able to study such phenomenon. Though there was no “Eureka!” moment, Gonzalez felt strongly that chance couldn’t explain Earth’s privileged position. And last year, Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, another fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, published The Privileged Planet. Currently, Gonzalez has been busy fighting intellectual battles on campus (See sidebar.) and continuing his own research on the Galactic Habitable Zone — the part of the galaxy that seems to have...

EAST CHICAGO — A bomb explosion on Cline Avenue near Interstate 94 rocked the area Wednesday night and tied up traffic for hours. No injuries from the blast were reported. Police were notified of a possible bomb in the back of a car about 7:45 p.m. at Cline Avenue north of Columbus Avenue. Authorities cleared the expressway and the surrounding area before attempting to detonate the device about 9 p.m. Lake County police were still gathering information late Wednesday. Police spokesman Mike Higgins said East Chicago police received a call about a domestic disturbance involving a weapon. During a traffic...

Dr. Henry “Fritz” Schaefer, the Graham Perdue professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia, gave a presentation Tuesday night about the convergence of science and Christianity. Schaefer is a five-time Nobel Prize nominee, according to The U.S. News and World Report. He is the sixth most-cited scientist in the world, and he is the author of more than 1,000 scientific publications. He lectured on the Big Bang Theory, Stephen Hawking and God to a crowd of nearly 800 people at the Seretean Center Concert Hall.

There is a belief among media commentators that intelligent design is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable or untestable: no empirical evidence can count against it. Though common, this charge is demonstrably false. Of course there’s no way to falsify a mere assertion that a cosmic designer exists. This much we are agreed on. But contemporary design arguments focus not on such vague claims, but on detectible evidence for design in the natural world. Therefore, the design arguments currently in play are falsifiable.

FORT WORTH -- A series of explosions rocked a chemical plant Thursday, injuring at least three people and sparking a fire big enough that its black cloud could be seen 30 miles away in Dallas.

SEATTLE — More than 400 scientists have signed onto a growing list from all disciplines who are “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” “Darwin’s theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought,” said Dr. David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher of science with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC). “It is large, almost completely useless, and the object of superstitious awe.” Discovery Institute first published its Statement of Dissent from Darwin in 2001 and a direct challenge to statements made in PBS’...

The July 9th, 2005 issue of the New Scientist is titled “The End of Reason: Intelligent Design’s Ultimate Legacy.” For this issue, I was interviewed at length for the article titled “A Skeptic’s Guide to Intelligent Design” (for this article, go here). The issue as a whole and the article in particular were disappointing, not because the issue was critical of ID but because it gave such a shallow picture of it. I expected much better, the reason being that on June 20th, 2005 I received the following email from one of the reporters who co-authored “A Skeptic’s Guide to...

If there’s one dominant voice advocating for S.C. schools to teach more than Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, it’s state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville. Fair says he plans to mount a major push during the next legislative session to win colleagues’ support for his latest idea to modify standards for teaching science, particularly in high schools. Public school students, he said, should be told a “full range of scientific views ... exist” when it comes to explaining how fauna, flora and man came to inhabit the earth. Fair is lead sponsor of a bill filled June 1, a day before...

A classic belief found in genetics and evolution textbooks since the 1930s has been overturned by powerful new techniques combined with the willingness to question dogma. Researchers from the University of Chicago report in the January 4, 2002, issue of Science that, contrary to expectations, the tiny fourth chromosome of the fruit fly, believed to be identical in every member of the species, actually has several regions that vary. "This classic conviction of genetics and evolution, this rock-bottom-solid conclusion, which has become a textbook example of natural selection's propensity to eliminate variation from closely linked genes, just doesn't hold up,"...

The work of an Iowa State University assistant professor has made its way into the Smithsonian Institute. A 60-minute documentary titled "The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe" will premiere at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on June 23. The film is based on a book co-authored by Guillermo Gonzalez, an ISU assistant professor of astronomy and physics. "I am very pleased that it is going to be shown at such an important locale," Gonzalez said. Gonzalez's theory in "The Privileged Planet" creates a link between the design for life and scientific discovery. The rare...

If you have been following the intelligent design (ID) controversy, you could paper a wall with announcements by boffins that ID makes no testable or falsifiable predictions. Of course, many of the same people do their best to keep ID-friendly papers out of journals. But now and then they slip up, and a paper gets published. In his recent paper in Rivista di Biologia, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?”, Jonathan Wells makes the following testable predictions regarding his hypothesis that the centrioles of cells generate a polar ejection force: Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force? A. It...

The more scientifically sophisticated we get, the stronger the argument for intelligent design. Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros. The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the...

May 12, 2005 Dr. Steve E. Abrams, ChairKansas State Board of EducationC/o Kansas State Department of Education120 SE 10th AvenueTopeka KS 66612-1182Fax: (785) 296-7933 Dear Dr. Abrams: I have been following the controversy over the adoption of new science standards in your state with interest. I am writing—as a member of the National Academy of Sciences—to voice my strong support for the idea that students should be able to study scientific criticisms of the evidence for modern evolutionary theory along with the evidence favoring the theory. All too often, the issue of how to teach evolutionary theory has been dominated...

"Intelligent design." It's been in the news a lot lately. Lawsuits over textbook stickers, the presentation of evolution and the legality of presenting alternatives, have thrust the term into public awareness. But just what is intelligent design? To hear some folks talk, you'd think it's a scam to sneak Genesis into science classrooms. Yet intelligent design has nothing to do with the six days of creation and everything to do with hard evidence and logic. Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the ancient observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. Indeed, as early...