Intelligent Design Creationists reveal their top story of 2016

Yesterday I posted an article on: Creationists list the top ten stories of 2016 . Some of you may have noticed that there were only nine stories. That's because Evolution News & Views didn't post their top story until today. I was pretty sure what it would be.

Let me remind you of the main point I made yesterday. Intelligent Design Creationists claim to have scientific evidence of intelligent design. They claim their movement is focused on demonstrating intelligent design but not on proving anything about who the designer might be.

But that's not what the movement is all about. Most of their writings and speeches are focused on attacking evolution. They hope that by discrediting evolution and science they will, by default, support the case for gods (false dichotomy). They also hope that by promoting gaps in our knowledge they will lend support to those who want to insert gods into the gaps.

You don't need to take my word for it. Just look at what they think are the top stories of 2016. Most of their top nine stories were critiques of science in one way or another. There wasn't a single top story that advanced the case for intelligent design.

So, what about the #1 story? Is it going to be different?

Creationists list the top ten stories of 2016

Intelligent Design Creationists are still trying to promote their views. They consistently claim to have positive evidence of intelligent design and they consistently complain whenever we point out what they actually do; they attack evolution/science. Their main talking point relies on the fallacy known as "false dichotomy." They assume that by casting doubt on evolution/science they lend support to their religious viewpoint.

Each year, the IDiots on Evolution News & Views (sic) publish their top ten stories. The series is linked to a fund-raising campaign so it's safe to assume they think these stories advance their cause. Let's see how many of the top stories promote intelligent design and how many are just criticisms of evolution/science. That should be revealing ...

Revisiting Michael Behe's challenge and revealing a closed mind

It's been twenty years since Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box and Intelligent Design Creationists are flagellating themselves over the fact that it had so little impact on creationism. The USA is becoming more secular with each passing year. Religion is on the decline.

In their attempt to deal with their defeat, the main ID blog has been publishing "Behe's Greatest Hits," which is a euphemistic way of saying "Behe's Greatest Failures." The latest one caught my eye. It's Best of Behe: An Open Letter to Professors Kenneth Miller and PZ Myers.

It takes you back more than two years to July 21, 2014. That's when Michael Behe issued his challenge to PZ Myers and Ken Miller. The challenge was based on his book The Edge of Evolution and specifically on the development of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum. Behe starts with the assumption that cloroquine resistance is extremely rare—it occurs with a probability of roughly 10^-20. He concludes that resistance requires at least two different mutations that must occur simultaneously in an individual suffering from malaria while being treated with chloroquine.

The first assumption is approximately correct. Chloroquine resistance is rare. He was criticized for the second assumption; namely, that the overall probability of chloroquine resistance is just the probability of two mutations occurring simultaneously (e.g. 10^-10 × 10^-10 = 10^-20).

Atheism is a catastrophe for science according to Michael Egnor

Michael Egnor doesn't like atheists. He got a bit upset about a recent post by PZ Myers so he responded on Evolution News & Views (sic) with: Atheism Is a Catastrophe for Science.

Modern theoretical science arose only in the Christian milieu. Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Faraday, Pasteur, Maxwell and countless other pioneers of the Scientific Enlightenment were fervent Christians who explicitly attributed the intelligibility in nature to God's agency, and even 20th-century scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg and Schrodinger and Rutherford and Planck attributed nature to intelligent agency. Einstein famously explained his quest: "I want to know God's thoughts..."

Vanishingly few great scientists have attributed the world to "undirected processes." Atheism, in fact, has a dismal record in science. For much of the 20th century, a third of humanity lived under the boot of atheist ideology. What was the great science produced by atheist scientists in the Soviet Union? What are the scientific contributions of Communist China and Cuba and Vietnam and Albania? Compare the scientific output of East Germany (atheist) to that of West Germany (Lutheran and Catholic). Compare the scientific output of North Korea (atheist) to that of South Korea (Christian and Buddhist).

The fact is that during the 20th century atheist ideological systems that "assum[ed] that the world is a product of natural, undirected processes" governed a third of humanity. What's the scientific "track record" of atheism? Atheism had its run: it heralded a scientific dark age in any nation unfortunate enough to fall under its heel. Atheism is as much a catastrophe for science as it is a catastrophe for humanity. The only thing atheist systems produced reliably (and still produce reliably) is corpses.

Google is my friend. I found a Wikipedia article on List of nonreligious Nobel Laureates. Here are the Nobel Laureates in science who didn't believe in any gods. This is part of the "scientific track record of atheism."

Chemistry
Svante Arrhenius
Paul D. Boyer
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie
Richard R. Ernst
Herbert A. Hauptman
Roald Hoffmann
Harold W. Kroto
Jean-Marie Lehn
Peter D. Mitchell
George Andrew Olah
Wilhelm Ostwald
Linus Pauling
Max Perutz
Frederick Sanger
Michael Smith
Harold Urey

Physics
Zhores Alferov
Hannes Alfvén
Philip Warren Anderson
John Bardeen
Hans Bethe
Patrick Blackett
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Niels Bohr
Percy Williams Bridgman
Louis de Broglie
James Chadwick
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Marie Curie
Pierre Curie
Paul Dirac
Albert Einstein
Enrico Fermi
Richard Feynman
Val Logsdon Fitch
James Franck
Dennis Gabor
Murray Gell-Mann
Vitaly Ginzburg
Roy J. Glauber
Peter Higgs
Gerard 't Hooft
Herbert Kroemer
Lev Landau
Leon M. Lederman
Albert A. Michelson
Konstantin Novoselov
Jean Baptiste Perrin
Isidor Isaac Rabi
C. V. Raman
William Shockley
Erwin Schrödinger
Jack Steinberger
Igor Tamm
Johannes Diderik van der Waals
Eugene Wigner
Steven Weinberg
Chen-Ning Yang

Physiology and Medicine
Julius Axelrod
Robert Bárány
J. Michael Bishop
Francis Crick
Max Delbrück
Christian de Duve
Howard Florey
Camillo Golgi
Frederick Gowland Hopkins
Andrew Huxley
François Jacob
Sir Peter Medawar
Jacques Monod
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Herbert J. Muller
Élie Metchnikoff
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Hermann Joseph Muller
Paul Nurse
Ivan Pavlov
Richard J. Roberts
John Sulston
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Nikolaas Tinbergen
James Watson

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"The Soul of the Matter"

Meet Bruce Buff. He's a big fan of the Discovery Institute as he explains in this video.

Bruce Buff has written a novel (fiction) called The Soul of the Matter. The Intelligent Design Creationists are all over it. So far they've put up two posts advertising the novel: Excerpt: The Soul of the Matter, Chapter 3; Excerpt: The Soul of the Matter, Chapter 4.

Here's the description from the publisher's website ...

A scientist’s claim that he’s found the secrets of the universe's origin encoded in DNA sparks a race against time to uncover the truth in this fast-paced thriller of science and faith, power and murder, loss and redemption.

Dan Lawson, a former government cyber-intelligence analyst, is surprised to be contacted by his estranged friend Stephen Bishop, a renowned geneticist. Stephen says that he’s discovered amazing information within DNA, including evidence of a creator, and needs Dan’s help to protect his findings. Dan is skeptical and wonders whether he is being manipulated, or if the recent illness of Stephen’s only child, Ava, has caused his childhood friend to fall back on religion for answers to questions best left to science. Spurred by his desire for proof that life has meaning, however, Dan puts aside his doubts and agrees to help.

I haven't read the book but there may be a clue on the cover. I think the amazing information might be that the DNA helix is left-handed instead of right-handed [On the handedness of DNA ]. It's a little hard to tell from the image on the cover.

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Understanding Michael Behe's edge of evolution

It's been about twenty years since Intelligent Design Creationism rose to prominence. Just last week the Center for Science and Culture celebrated it's 20th birthday [Twenty Years Ago Today, Did This Change the Evolution Debate Forever?]. In all that time, the best that ID proponents can come up with is some work by Michael Behe that attempts to discredit evolution.

The first book by Behe was Darwin's Black Box where he developed the notion of irreducible complexity. The definition of irreducible complexity has changed over the years but the basic idea is that some biological structures are very complex and the removal of any one part will render the complex nonfunctional. This presents an enormous problem for evolution, according to Behe, because all the presumptive intermediates will be nonfunctional.

The conclusion is that it's impossible to evolve an irreducibly complex structure. Evolutionary biologists have no problem accepting the existence of irreducibly complex structures. They see them all the time. What they object to is the idea that irreducibly complex structures cannot have arisen by evolution. Behe's conclusion has been shown to be false and he has admitted on multiple occasions that irreducibly complex structures can arise by purely natural means (evolution).

A refreshing admission on Uncommon Descent

Some of us have been debating Intelligent Design Creationists for many years. Some of us have even visited the creationist blogs like Uncommon Descent where we discover that no facts and no logic will ever shake their obsession with proving evolution wrong and promoting their gods. That's why it was refreshing to read the following comment by William J. Murray in his post on "The Benefit of Arguments at UD." I only had time to read the first few lines but you get the gist ...

Probably one of the most daunting aspects of carrying on debates either about proper critical thinking, theism vs atheism, or intelligent design and its implications is the seeming implacable nature of those we debate here and elsewhere. It most often seems that no amount of logic, evidence or even reasonable discourse makes one iota of difference ...

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Do Intelligent Design Creationists still think junk DNA refutes ID?

I'm curious about whether Intelligent Design Creationists still think their prediction about junk DNA has been confirmed.

Here's what Stephen Meyer wrote in Darwin's Doubt (p. 400).

The noncoding regions of the genome were assumed to be nonfunctional detritus of the trial-and-error mutational process—the same process that produced the functional code in the genome. As a result, these noncoding regions were deemed "junk DNA," including by no less a scientific luminary than Francis Crick.

Because intelligent design asserts that an intelligent cause produced the genome, design advocates have long predicted that most of the nonprotein-coding sequences in the genome should perform some biological function, even if they do not direct protein synthesis. Design theorists do not deny that mutational processes might have degraded some previously functional DNA, but we have predicted that the functional DNA (the signal) should dwarf the nonfunctional DNA (the noise), and not the reverse. As William Dembski, a leading design proponent, predicted in 1998, "On an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function."

I'm trying to write about this in my book and I want to be as fair as possible.

Do most ID proponents still believe this is an important prediction from ID theory?

Do most ID proponents still think that most of the human genome is functional?

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Fun and games with Otangelo Grasso about photosynthesis

Otangelo Grasso just posted another one of his screeds. This time it's on photosynthesis. All of his "essays' conform to the same pattern. He looks for some complex set of biochemical reactions, usually in complex animals, then claims that it couldn't possibly have evolved because the whole thing is irreducibly complex according to his understanding of biochemistry and evolution.

It's a classic argument from ignorance.

In this case it's photosynthesis in flowering plants. He posted this figure from the Kegg database ....

Then he says,

In photosynthesis , 26 protein complexes and enzymes are required to go through the light and light independent reactions, a chemical process that transforms sunlight into chemical energy, to get glucose as end product , a metabolic intermediate for cell respiration. A good part of the protein complexes are uniquely used in photosynthesis. The pathway must go all the way through, and all steps are required, otherwise glucose is not produced. Also, in the oxygen evolving complex, which splits water into electrons, protons, and CO2, if the light-induced electron transfer reactions do not go all the five steps through, no oxygen, no protons and electrons are produced, no advanced life would be possible on earth. So, photosynthesis is a interdependent system, that could not have evolved, since all parts had to be in place right from the beginning. It contains many interdependent systems composed of parts that would be useless without the presence of all the other necessary parts. In these systems, nothing works until all the necessary components are present and working. So how could someone rationally say, the individual parts, proteins and enzymes, co-factors and assembly proteins not present in the final assemblage, all happened by a series of natural events that we can call ad hoc mistake "formed in one particular moment without ability to consider any application." , to then somehow interlink in a meaningful way, to form electron transport chains, proton gradients to " feed " ATP synthase nano motors to produce ATP , and so on ? Such independent structures would have not aided survival. Consider the light harvesting complex, and the electron transport chain, that did not exist at exactly the same moment--would they ever "get together" since they would neither have any correlation to each other nor help survival separately? Repair of PSII via turnover of the damaged protein subunits is a complex process involving highly regulated reversible phosphorylation of several PSII core subunits. If this mechanism would not work starting right from the beginning, various radicals and active oxygen species with harmful effects on photosystem II (PSII) would make it cease to function. So it seems that photosynthesis falsifies the theory of evolution, where all small steps need to provide a survival advantage.

I responded on Facebook, pointing out that the cytochrome bc complex and ATP synthase pre-date photosynthesis [Facebook: Photosynthesis]. I also pointed out that there are many living species that use only simpler versions of photsystem I or only photosystem II to carry out photosynthesis [e.g. A Simple Version of Photosynthesis]. Those nasty little facts don't seem to fit with his claim that, "In these systems, nothing works until all the necessary components are present and working."

I probably should have known better. Otangelo Grasso's standard response to such criticism is to avoid dealing directly with his false statements and shift the goalposts on to some other topic. He then posts all kinds of links to websites that seem to back up his claims even if they have nothing to do with the criticisms. You can see him at work on the Facebook thread.

It's pretty frustrating. I probably shouldn't respond to kooks, especially those who think they are experts in biochemistry.

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You need to understand biology if you are going to debate an Intelligent Design Creationist

Last night's debate between Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer, and Denis Lamoureux was very entertaining. I finally got to meet Stephen Meyer in person. (My photographer wasn't very good at focusing.)

There were some interesting exchanges during the debate. I want to talk about one of them.

Krauss tried to hammer Meyer on the "ID is not science" issue using quotes from a judge based on things said by lawyers in the Dover trial.¹ Krauss tried to dismiss ID by saying that it never makes predictions but Meyer countered effectively by pointing out that ID predicts that most of our genome is functional and claiming that the prediction was confirmed by the ENCODE study.

The ID position is that Darwinists predicted that our genome would be full of junk while Intelligent Design Creationists predicted that most of our genome would be functional. ID was correct and Darwinism was wrong, according to this story.

Both Lawrence Krauss and Denis Lamoureux accepted the "fact" that ENCODE was right and most of the DNA in our genome has a function. Krauss was also hampered by his misunderstanding of evolution. It's obvious that he accepts the Richard Dawkins view of evolution so he tried to accommodate the ENCODE results by saying it's what you would expect of natural selection. This is the Richard Dawkins position.

Krauss tried to downplay the issue by saying that ID had not predicted what those functional parts of the genome would be doing but this was a weak rebuttal.

The facts are these ....

• "Darwinists"—those who claim that natural selection is the only game in town—were opposed to the idea that most of our genome is junk. They still are.
• Today, the majority of experts believe that most of our genome is junk in spite of the ENCODE publicity campaign from 2012.
• The ENCODE Consortium has backed off it's original claim and now agrees that they misused the word "function." Some of them blame the media for distorting their position.
• The ID "prediction" has been falsified.

A competent biologist would have known all this and could have challenged Meyer's statement. A biologist would have then demanded that Meyer explain how a genome that is 90% junk fits with Intelligent Design Creationism.

I talked to Denis Lamoureux after the debate to let him know that he was wrong about ENCODE and he was very gracious. I promised to send him more information. A genome full of junk DNA poses no threat to his version of Theistic Evolution.

Lawrence Krauss is an expert on cosmology but he's very weak on biology. I know it's common for physicists to think they are experts in everything but that's just not true. It was demonstrated in last night's debate.

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1. This is a bad strategy. It's better to accept that ID proponents are doing science but just doing it very badly. Meyer ignored the issue of whether ID counted as science. He just presented the scientific case for ID and forced Krauss to respond to his "evidence."

An intelligent Intelligent Design Creationist

One of the biggest problems with the Intelligent Design Creationist movement is their attempt to corral all creationist under the same big tent. This leads to a situation where Young Earth Creationists are afforded the same level of respect as those who accept common descent and an ancient Earth.

It means that dissent within the ID community is strongly suppressed in order to maintain the illusion that they all agree on the basics (i.e. goddidit). This leads to ridiculous situations where Young Earth Creationists defend Stephen Meyer's attack on the Cambrian explosion in Darwin's Doubt when they don't even believe that the Earth is 500 million years old!

There's no consistency in the arguments from ID proponents so it's almost impossible to have a serious discussion of the science behind their claims. I've criticized ID proponents for not applying critical thinking to their own movement. They almost never dispute each other's ideas for fear that it would weaken their movement.

That fear is justified, but what they fail to realize is that the movement doesn't deserve any respect at all if they don't apply the same standards to their own views that they demand of others.

To their credit, a few members of the movement have started to change this long-standing attempt to silence dissent within the movement. I think they realize that the respect they crave will only come from kicking a few people out of the tent.

One of those people is Vincent Torley. He has posted an excellent discussion of Denton's structuralist views on Uncommon Descent: Denton vs. Moran on structuralism. I don't agree with everything Torley says but I congratulate him for his courage in thinking critically about Michael Denton's position.

It will be interesting to see if the Intelligent Design Creationist movement can deal with critical thinking. I'm watching the comments on the blog post.

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Michael Denton discusses the "hierarchy of nature"

Here's a video where Michael Denton describes his view of biology. The main point is that he cannot think of a way for evolution to produce the "hierarchy of nature." Therefore goddidit there must be some other explanation.

The Discovery Institute made the video. David Klinghoffer describes it on Evolution News & Views (sic): Conversations with Dr. Denton: The Hierarchy of Nature. Klinghoffer says,

Darwinism, honestly regarded, should lead you to expect not an ordered, increasingly inclusive hierarchy of life but more like a disordered...smear of diversity. Such expectations are frustrated by reality. As biologist Michael Denton explains, life presents itself as a tiered formation marked by novelties or homologs. These taxa-defining novelties, such as the pentadactyl limb, are not lead up to by a series of forms increasingly like the final version.

That's strike one. Worse for Darwinism, it's typically the case that there is no way even to imagine how the novelty could be lead up to in such a manner. Strike two. Watch and enjoy.

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An Intelligent Design Creationist disputes the evolution of citrate utilization in the LTEE ... Lenski responds

Most of you are familiar with the long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) run by Richard Lenski. One of the cultures in that experiment evolved the ability to use citrate as a carbon source. Normally, E. coli cannot use this carbon source under aerobic conditions but the new strain not only utilizes citrate but can grow in cultures where citrate is the only source of organic carbon.

The pathway to this event is complex and requires multiple mutations [see On the unpredictability of evolution and potentiation in Lenski's long-term evolution experiment and Lenski's long-term evolution experiment: the evolution of bacteria that can use citrate as a carbon source].

Darwin's statue

A large statue of Charles Darwin was installed in the main foyer of the London's Natural History Museum in 1885—just a few years after Darwin's death. It was removed in 1927 and replaced by a statue of Richard Owen who was no fan of Darwin.

The museum came to its senses in 2009 and put the statue back in it's original position. (It had been in the cafeteria in the basement.) Read the story at: Moving Darwin.

Owen was the man who founded the museum and he was also known for his support of structuralism—the idea that basic body plans cannot be easily explained by evolution. Structuralism is the new buzzword among Intelligent Design Creationists. They don't understand the concept but they're certain it refutes evolution and supports goddidit.

Michael Denton is upset about the statue [see Conversations with Michael Denton: You Can Move the Statue if You Wish...]. Watch the video ...

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Ignorance + "body plans" + misinformation (lies) + god-of-the-gaps = Intelligent Design Creationism

Watch Paul Nelson combine his lack of knowledge of evolution and evolutionary theory with misinformation (i.e. lies) and a little bit of false developmental biology then stir the pot with a large dose of god-of-the-gaps to produce a smooth argument that refutes evolution.

There's lots of other stuff going on in this talk. I was especially amused by the discussion of methodological naturalism at the end. Paul Nelson argues that science is blind to all the evidence of a creator because the "rule" of science is that it can't even consider that evidence.

I'll say one thing about this talk: it's very clever. It would take a book to show that Paul Nelson is wrong about everything and the explanations would be far too complicated for the average creationist. For them, it's easier to believe that Paul Nelson is telling them the truth and evolutionary biologists are too stupid to understand their own discipline.

Otangelo Grasso has posted a transcript of the talk. Thank-you Otangelo.

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Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016), justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, died a few days ago. This creates a crisis in American politics because they have a strange set of Constitutional requirements guaranteed to maximize the probability of crises every time they need a new Supreme Court justice.

Scalia's death reminded me of the dissenting opinion in EDWARDS V. AGUILLARD (June 19, 1987). This was the case that invalidated Louisiana's "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act." Stephen Jay Gould was puzzled by the dissenting opinion so he wrote a wonderful essay to explain Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding.

It's worth reading the entire essay but here's the conclusion,

Following this theme, Scalia presents his most confused statement in the written dissent:

Creation science, its proponents insist, no more must explain whence life came than evolution must explain whence came the inanimate materials from which it says life evolved. But even if that were not so, to posit a past creator is not to posit the eternal and personal God who is the object of religious veneration.

True indeed; one might be a creationist in some vernacular sense by maintaining a highly abstract and impersonal view of the creator. But Aristotle's unmoved mover is no more part of science than the Lord of Genesis. Science does not deal with questions of ultimate origins. We would object just as strongly if the Aristotelophiles of Delaware forced a law through the state legislature requiring that creation of each species ex nihilo by an unmoved mover be presented every time evolution is discussed in class. The difference is only historical circumstance, not the logic of argument The unmoved mover doesn't pack much political punch; fundamentalism ranks among our most potent irrationalisms.

Consider also, indeed especially, Scalia's false concept of science. He equates creation and evolution because creationists can't explain life's beginning, while evolutionists can't resolve the ultimate origin of the inorganic components that later aggregated to life. But this inability is the very heart of creationist logic and the central reason why their doctrine is not science, while science's inability to specify the ultimate origin of matter is irrelevant because we are not trying to do any such thing. We know that we can't, and we do not even consider such a question as part of science.

We understand Hutton's wisdom. We do not search for unattainable ultimates.

We define evolution, using Darwin's phrase, as "descent with modification" from prior living things. Our documentation of life's evolutionary tree records one of science's greatest triumphs, a profoundly liberating discovery on the oldest maxim that truth can make us free. We have made this discovery by recognizing what can be answered and what must be left alone. If Justice Scalia heeded our definitions and our practices, he would understand why creationism cannot qualify as science. He would also, by the way, sense the excitement of evolution and its evidence; no person of substance could be unmoved by something so interesting. Only Aristotle's creator may be so impassive.

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Michael Denton discovers non-adaptive evolution ... attributes it to gods

Readers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of Evolution by Accident. I don't think that the history of life can be explained in strict Darwinian terms (i.e. natural selection) and I think that modern evolutionary theory includes Neutral Theory and a major role for random genetic drift.

This is the view of many modern evolutionary biologists. Their work and views have been reported frequently on Sandwalk over the past ten years but you can find it in all the evolutionary biology textbooks. I'm just the messenger here. It's evolutionary biologists who have made the case for non-adaptive evolution beginning long before The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.

This is what a strawman looks like

This is another post about the stupidity of Intelligent Design Creationists. Stop reading if you don't need any more convincing.

Today is Darwin Day. It's the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (Feb. 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882).

This is not a happy day for the Discovery Institute so they've put up a series of posts on Evolution News & Views (sic) to discredit Darwin and "Darwinism."

One of them is by the newly rejuvenated poster boy, Michael Denton: On Darwin Day, Darwinism Is Well Past Its "Sell By" Date. Here's the part I want you to see,

To understand the core weakness of the Darwinian worldview, it is important to understand what Darwinian natural selection requires. The process will work its magic, building up functional structures in organisms, only when two very strict conditions are met: First, the structure must be adaptive—that is, helpful to the organism in flourishing in its environment—and second, there must be a continuum of structures, functional all along the way, leading from an ancestor species to the descendent.

That is, the thing we are trying to explain must in some way help the creature survive, and between the creature and the creature's ancestor there must be a gradual change, each step of which is stable and enhances fitness, or success in reproduction.

Strictly speaking, that's a reasonable explanation of Darwinism as most evolutionary biologists understand it. But here's the problem. There aren't very many evolutionary biologists who are strict Darwinists these days even though there are many who tilt strongly in that direction.

What is "structuralism"?

The Intelligent Design Creationists are promoting Michael Denton's new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. The new buzzword is "structuralism" and it's guaranteed to impress the creationist crowd because nobody understands what it means but it sounds very "sciency" and philosophical. Also, it's an attack on "Darwinism" and anything that refutes evolution has to be good.

You can watch Michael Denton explain structuralism ... it only takes a few minutes of your time.

The most intellectual creationists explain why there are still Darwinists when Darwinism has been falsified

You are probably wondering why "Darwinism" persists after the creationists have thoroughly demonstrated that it is a failed theory. Lucky for you, the most intelligent and intellectual of all Intelligent Design Creationists, David Berlinski and Michael Denton, have gotten together to explain it in a short (15 mins) podcast.

It's moderated by David Klinghoffer who introduces it like this ... [Michael Denton and David Berlinski Discuss: How Does Darwinism Hang On?]

If the most brilliant Darwin critics, like David Berlinski and Michael Denton, are right, how then does Darwinism hang on? How does a failed theory maintain its grip on our science and on our culture? Why is there a sense of stalemate? On ID the Future, we posed these questions to Dr. Berlinski and Dr. Denton.

If you are interested in the conflict between Intelligent Design and science you owe it to yourself to see/hear the best they've got on their side.

ID the Future: More Berlinski and Denton.

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