Free Republic

Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday. In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin. The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers said. Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases...

The collapse of reason By Cathy Young  |  May 29, 2006 AT A TIME when conservatives dominate all three branches of government and hold an increasingly large share of the Fourth Estate, the academy remains the last liberal stronghold. You would think, then, that liberal intellectuals would offer some thoughtful and productive critiques of conservative policies. But instead, argues one leading liberal intellectual, the academic left is making itself irrelevant by embracing ideological extremism and trying to purge its ranks of those who are not politically correct.

Welcome to Science Court The ruling in the Dover evolution trial shows what the legal and scientific processes have in common--intellectual rigor Chris Mooney; January 9, 2006 Legally speaking, Judge John E. Jones III's ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District--Pennsylvania's much-discussed lawsuit over the teaching of "intelligent design"--can only be called conservative. The decision draws upon and reinforces a series of prior court precedents, all of which barred creationist encroachment upon the teaching of science in public schools. In another sense, though, Jones' ruling is revolutionary. We live in a time when the findings of science themselves increasingly...

In the past decade or two, a group of scientists, biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, and other thinkers have marshaled powerful critiques of Darwinian theory on scientific and mathematical grounds. Although they generally don't dispute that evolution of some sort has occurred, they vigorously contest the neo-Darwinian claim that life could arise by an undirected, purely material process of chance variation and natural selection.

It's odd there should be so much "science abuse" in popular discourse today, attacks based on the proposition that science might be wrong and should be "debated" with faith. Science is the basis of our public education system; everything we teach in school is based on science, not on faith. The U.S. Constitution prohibits teaching based on faith, for the very good reason that in a democracy there's no way to choose which faith the education might be based on. Rejecting what de Tocqueville called the "tyranny of the majority," i.e., majority rule, against which the Bill of Rights is...