Further to “Top ten stories of 2013 from science news media,” focusing on the ones that especially interest us: Evolution News & Views has been running a Top Ten list of stories, counting down to New Year’s Day, and readers may as well give the first seven a look.
#4: Ball State President Imposes Gag Order on Intelligent Design
Gag order? Intelligent design? Will “design” stop being a swear word if we just keep using it?
#5: Introducing a New Intelligent Design Curriculum, Discovering Intelligent Design
Will the Ball State police arrest people for reading and discussing the new ID curriculum on campus?
#6: How “Freethought” Bullies Threatened College into Cancelling Intelligent Design Course
Bullied? At Amarillo College? Aw, poor widdle buweaucwats. Like we said at the time, who knew so many wusses even lived in Texas?
#7: New Scientific Volume Challenges Neo-Darwinism, Survives Censorship Attempt
We’ve been introducing the chapters here (all links listed). Also, what would happen if someone started teaching a MOOC on the Cornell papers from her laptop—at Amarillo?
#8: Lenski’s Long-Term Evolution Experiment, 25 Years and Counting
Counting the cobwebs, actually, as the bacteria just do not evolve much. Did they ever? Isn’t the whole point of being a bacterium that you make up in numbers what you lack in complexity? If they started growing feet and then wearing shoes, … okay, that’s evolution. Thing is, it never happens and never will.
#9: Science Nationalized: Unleashing the Next Generation Science Standards
Doing for education what Obamacare does for health insurance? Gotta hand it to Big Government. Hand it back.
#10: Michael Denton’s Peer-Reviewed Paper on the Fitness of the Biosphere
Another scholar with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, biochemist Michael Denton … revives and extends the thought of a leading biochemist of the early 20th-century, Harvard University’s Lawrence Henderson.
Denton once wryly described his own views to me as “pre-Darwinian,” on the Platonic model of Darwin’s antagonist Louis Agassiz (who also taught at Harvard). Henderson wasn’t pre-Darwinian, but his 1913 book The Fitness of the Environment runs counter to Darwinism’s tendency to undermine an ancient idea: that the universe was designed to be inhabitable by man. In The Fitness (as Denton refers to it), Henderson shows how the ensemble of key biochemicals seems wonderfully, eerily, and specifically fit to support life on Earth.
Designed?
What ya think? Will “designed” stop being a swear word if we just keep using it?
– O’Leary for News