O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
” How many fingers am I holding up, Winston ? “
” Four. “
” And if the party says that it is not four but five – then how many ? “
It’s that time again, the silly season.
RUTHLESSLY PERSECUTED by the jack-booted Thought Police of the Darwintern, who ceaselessly conspire to suppress the publication of leading-edge alchemy, New Age astrology, and post-modernist Intelligent Design in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the Discovery Institute valiantly battles on to bring the TRVTH before the general public in easy to digest layman books and, in a new venture, movies for the hard-of-thinking. We understand Hollywood is keenly interested in Dr. Michael Behe’s new tome, The Edge of Evolution, which will hopefully be finding its way to a theatre near you soon:
True, the reviews of the book itself were disappointing (links available from the NCSE at Behe’s latest scrutinized), but Robert Crowther has boldly stepped into the breach with some glowing commentary in his piece on the DI’s blog, California Literary Review Interviews Michael Behe on The Edge of Evolution. Mr. Crowther usefully provides a link to the original article, and quotes Dr. Behe from therein:
THE DISCOVERY INSTITUTE IS ALL ATWITTER over a French game show. The audience was polled on which heavenly body orbits the earth, the sun or the moon. To the misfortune of the contestant, the majority of the audience was pre-Copernican.
I’m not sure what problem this poses for DI, because the question can only be resolved by empirical methods eschewed by the Discoverers. I have been assured by proponents of Intelligent Design that all frames of reference are equivalent, and the earth could well be the center of the universe. Science is a reading imposed by white Anglo -Saxon males, and just the other day I learned that, “Science and higher math (beyond simple arithmetic) are the same in China, Pakistan, Iran, Brazil, Canada and the United States, precisely because they were spread by Western style institutions”.
LAST WEEK, John Farrell posted a great rant denouncing his fellow conservative’s willingness to let anti-science ignoramuses run roughshod over them, and who are not just shrinking the GOP tent, but are effectively pulling out the stakes holding it up. Anyone concerned about the direction of the Republican party or the country as a whole has an obligation to read it.
VIA JOHN PODHORETZ at The Corner comes the news that Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies and former editor of Reason magazine, will be shortly beginning chemotherapy for breast cancer treatment. In typical Postrel fashion, she selflessly just adds the news at the end of an otherwise irreverent blog post, as if denoting that it is just one of life’s hassles, and that we shouldn’t worry about her when there are so many other things in life to be thankful for. And for many of us here at Darwin Central, Postrel herself is one of those things. Although Reason has since literally and figuratively gone to pot with her departure, when Postrel was editing it, it was by far the most intellectually simulating journal around, and influenced the thinking of many of us, conservative and libertarian alike. Not only did Postrel champion the magazine’s subheading of “free minds and free markets” during her tenure, but she has continued to write on behalf of a truly rational and nuanced approach to political and cultural issues, demonstrating the futility of trying to pigeonhole one’s self into categories of “right,” “left,” or “centre”. We wish her lots of luck and love, and look forward to more of her writing once she wins the good fight.
A thread has been started in the DC forums offering Postrel best wishes, and all are invited to contribute. Others who have offered support include Glenn Reynolds, Rand Simberg and Rod Dreher, who provides the best comments of them all.
IN MEMORIUM: Mr. Whippy (1996-2007)
MR. WHIP E. COLI, THE CELEBRATED PERITRICHOUS BACTERIUM, has collapsed and died in the course of a lecture delivered by Dr. William Dembski on 17 September 2007 in Oklahoma.
Better known by his stage name of “Mr. Whippy”, he was incubated in a “Black Box” by Dr. Michael Behe in 1996, and from a tender age drew acclaim for his magnificient flagellum, the excellence of which reduced Dr. Behe and some others to a state of Irreducible Perplexity.
Sold to the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Discovery Circus, Mr. Whippy and his astounding flagellum was exhibited alongside the Mysteriously-Invisible Peer-Reviewed Publication, the Incredibly-Ancient Argument from Ignorance, and other amazing sideshow marvels purporting to herald the end of materialist science and finally ‘whip’ the godless Darwinists into submission. Three times a day, Mr. Whippy would step forth on stage to spin his flagellum at an incredible 17,000 rpm while his barker would challenge spectators to explain how such a marvel of nano-engineering could have been assembled by blind and random chance alone.
FROM OUTER SPACE TO SALIVARY GLANDS, is there any topic beyond the ken of Dr. Michael Egnor, prolific blogger for the Discovery Institute? A scant 24 hours after rehashing the hoary ‘Argument from Incredulity’ in a blog piece on SETI research, he has developed a novel argument in his offering for today, Spit-Brain Research (18 September).
Dr. Egnor’s remarkable fugue is his response to some recent research published by UCSC, Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans’ mouths water (9 September). The paper notes findings that
Humans have many more copies of this [salivary amylase] gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural selection favored individuals who could make more starch-digesting protein.
FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL, man has sought the answer to the Great Question of Life, “From whence do we come?” And for nearly six happy millennia, parents have passed down the wisdom of the ages to their inquiring offspring and told them the simple, beautiful truth: “My child, the Stork left you in the cabbage patch.”
But today, dedicated perverts, in the name of ‘science’, seek to displace this ancient verity with an outlandish, materialistic ‘just so’ story. In our public schools, a child is no longer taught he is a cherished gift bestowed on us by a benevolent avian emissary, but rather, the meaningless product of a mythical process called Natural Conception.
DEVOTEES OF MELODRAMA SUFFERING WITHDRAWL PANGS awaiting the next season of Desperate Housewives, relief is at hand! Simply tune in to the magnificent soap opera generously offered by Evolution News and Views, one of the blogging arms of the Discovery Institute, for a thrilling pot-boiler of bizarre antics and improbable plot twists worthy of Wisteria Lane itself!
But be warned: it’s fast-paced stuff. It would be a full-time task to run down every quotation quarried out of context or factoid spun right out of orbit abounding in the sheer volume of episodes.
NEVER MIND THE “MISSING LINK”, here at Darwin Central we’re more intrigued at the moment by the strange saga of the Discovery Institute’s very own Darwinist, who moreover appears to have gone ‘Missing in Action.’
One may be forgiven for having missed an item in a local freesheet, Seattle Weekly: Rural School Board Candidate Hasn’t Been Forthcoming About His “Intelligent Design” Agenda (29 August), which reported that Discovery Institute Fellow John Angus Campbell was a candidate in a pending North Mason County school board election. The article reports that Professor Campbell does not include in a biography on his campaign website any mention of his Fellowship at the Discovery Institute, nor refer to the details of his submitted testimony to the Kitzmiller et. al. v. Dover case.
More remarkably still, the article reports the rather astonishing news that Dr. Campbell, a professor of rhetoric, characterises himself as a “Darwinist.” As there can be no question whatsoever that Professor Campbell’s declaration here is in utmost good faith, one is left with something of a conundrum: has the Discovery Institute, which has promoted such works as Philip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial (1991) and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (1997), or Richard Weickart’s From Darwin to Hitler (2004), been infiltrated by a Darwinist mole?