discovery institute

Is evolution in trouble?

Jennifer Raff8 Comments

According to a recent article in the Daily Beast by Dr. Karl Giberson, 2013 was a terrible year for evolution for several reasons:

“The year ended with the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Doubt as Amazon’s top seller in the “Paleontology” category. The state of Texas spent much of the year trying to keep the country’s most respected high school biology text out of its public schools. And leading anti-evolutionist and Creation Museum curator Ken Ham made his annual announcement that the “final nail” had been pounded into the coffin of poor Darwin’s beleaguered theory of evolution.
Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.”

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The Discovery Institute challenged me. Here’s my response.

Jennifer Raff43 Comments

Casey Luskin, a blogger for the Discovery Institute, recently took issue with my proposal that when reading a scientific paper, one should check the institutional affiliation and credentials of its authors. I believe the part that he particularly objected to was my statement that one might not wish to use the Discovery Institute as a “scientific authority on evolutionary theory.”

Luskin wrote:

“In other words, study a paper carefully, but if the authors work with Discovery Institute, disregard everything they are saying from the outset. That’s the ground rule that comes before any other tips. It’s a great way to keep yourself carefully in the dark about things you know nothing about. And she calls us “agenda-driven”?

Imagine how journal editors would behave if they followed Raff’s advice. Or better yet, imagine what would happen if Raff herself were a journal editor. Someone affiliated with Discovery Institute (or any group friendly to ID) submits a paper, and you immediately toss it in the trash without even taking it seriously. More than a few such editors probably share her philosophy. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the peer-review system, even though of course there are already plenty of reasons to lack such confidence.”

It’s a very telling reaction on his part. Continue reading →