The DI site S&C says something sensible

We’re used to seeing all sorts of silliness at the Discovery Institute’s website “Science & Culture Today” (formerly called Evolution News). A staple of the site is an article describing how wonderfully well-adapted some feature of an organism is, with the implied conclusion that this could only have come from Design Intervention.

Recent posts there have continued their tradition of being even more astonishing than that. Here are three examples:

1. An expert on German literature, Neil Thomas, wrote on “The Monster in the Sky”: Revisiting Atheism’s Creation Myth, in which he said:

My hope in this endeavor is to throw additional light on the subject of Victorians’ reception of Darwin’s Origin of Species, asking specifically what factors might explain our ancestors’ acquiescence in accepting a theory bereft of empirical documentation.”

Yes, he really means that. See my earlier discussion of his views here

1. Emily Reeves, trained in nutritional biochemistry, discovered a remarkable feature of evolutionary change. In her post Merry Christmas! No. 8 Story for 2025: Optimization and “Evolution Before Our Eyes” she reported on studies on evolutionary tradeoffs in Darwin’s Finches, using the studies of Peter and Rosemary Grant and others. She finds the fatal flaw!

We see that, in the most classic example of “evolution happening before our eyes,” genetic variation was present before the adaptive radiation. Whether this is truly “evolution” is, then, a question worth discussing.

1. And just to round off a trifecta, Granville Sewell shows up, for the n-th time, summarizing his surpassingly silly old argument that there is something-like-a-Second-Law preventing chaotic physical processes from leading to adaptations, human achievements, and technology. This latest effusion will be found here

But occasionally there is a post that argues an important case for common sense. On January 7 of this year, their house bioethicist Wesley J. Smith made this agonized plea:

In a post on January 7, Wesley Smith wrote an impassioned plea for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not to defund animal research, as he has announced he will do. It will be found here

The article makes a plea for common sense. I am in agreement, and you should be too. Here is a major statement of his argument:

But scientists do not engage these methodologies out of sadistic purpose. Rather, their goals are to find new medical treatments, cure diseases, and generally reduce human (and animal) suffering. Indeed, without animal research, the many medical and veterinary advances achieved since World War II would have been impossible. That is why we must think about this important moral issue and not just “feel.”

It is encouraging that common sense can occasionally prevail.

And why does animal research work?

Wesley Smith does not go further into why animal research turns out to be useful. Why should we expect that advances in understanding of human hearts might come from studying mammals, rather than, say, carrots? Because we’re much more closely related to mammals than to carrots. There is where medical research makes use of evolutionary biology every day, no matter how rarely medical researchers talk about it.

We can hope that Wesley Smith will ponder whether his friends at S&C are helping our understanding of humans by rejecting evidence for evolution.

Conspiracies

And of course there are any more issues. Vaccines, anyone? There are rampant nonsensical conspiracy theories saying that messenger RNA in vaccines is intended to kill you, or at least change who you vote for. Wesley Smith’s colleagues at S&C have repeatedly described evolutionary biologists as deliberate liars whose basic motive is not to understand evolution, but to destroy religion. That too is a conspiracy theory.

The broader right-wing movement is saturated with conspiracy theories, from the delusion that there is a Great Replacement conspiracy to the fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen. JFKJr is a crackpot’s crackpot who is busy appointing his crackpot friends to HHS, to NIH, and to CDC.

Wesley Smith has shown that he can see clearly what is going on, at least in one important case. We look forward to more of his honest appraisals.