Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture

Can the Mind Be Explained by the Brain?

Fostering Relationships Despite the Prevalence of Technology

MIT psychologist Dr. Sherry Turkle has been observing the effects of chatbot use on dozens of people, young and old.

Doctor’s Diary: The Platypus as an Icon of Intelligent Design

Maybe the platypus was deliberately designed to show doubters that that designer can do “whatever I want, whenever I want, and however I want.”

Assisted Suicide, Here We Come: Because There Can Never Be Enough

The primary hope of preventing legalization in these states rests with the disability rights community.

High-Speed Insect Brain Provides Evidence of Engineering Design

Two recently published studies of fly behavior provide evidence for sophisticated sensory information processing in insect brains. A study of fruit flies (Drosophila) led by scientists from the…

SETI and Fermi Paradox Are Nextdoor Neighbors of ID

What do SETI researchers, usually atheists or agnostics (cf. Jill Tarter as an example of the former, Carl Sagan of the latter), want to find? Evidence of MIND.

Knowledge Isn’t Opposed to Mystery; It’s a Path to Wonder

Learning about how a seahorse works might be one of the most spiritual things I can do.

What Makes a Mind? An Old Philosophical Question Becomes Urgent

Gaurav Suri and James McClelland state their case plainly. “Interactions between neurons are the engine of the mind,” they write.

ID-Based Engineering Dethrones Darwinism

For a layman’s report, see this overview by Dr. Casey Luskin and Dr. Brian Miller.

Back to the Future with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Lamarck believed that “all living beings are constantly transforming themselves” and thus life forms shape their own evolution.

AI Empowers Creativity and Creates Work

Work is not in limited supply. There is always and forever more to do. The Sabbath is a gift to rest from one’s work, because we are finite and the work is not.

But WHY Does Intelligent Design Predicts Ultimate Engineering?

A possible objection to Dr. Burgess’s case for ID might be that the apparent superb design of the human body is what you’d expect from evolution.

Constraints on Cell Size that Evolutions Can’t Explain

Cells reach a Goldilocks size for their needs. Evolutionists are at a loss to say how cells hit the sweet spot for smooth functioning.

“The Jungle of Fanciful Assumption”: Wilberforce Critiques Darwin

Wilberforce notes, among other things, Darwin’s error in arguing that natural selection operates the same way as artificial selection.

Little Green Men? A Test for the Design Inference

On August 6, 1967, a student named Jocelyn Bell (later Jocelyn Bell Burnell) discovered a strange radio signal coming from space.

How Small Became Beautiful: A History of Information Storage

For readers whose eyes may be glazing over with all these large exponentials for measuring DNA storage, let me offer an observation from Michael Denton.

Decline and Fall of Dawkins’s Meme Concept

The term eventually became a general handle for the manipulation and transmission of images on the internet.

Legal Liability for the AI Geniuses?

AI can become a serious social pest without rogue superagents or cyberDoomsday. Human stupidity could do all the heavy lifting.

Immanent Agency: It’s Evolution by Design, After All

Agency theory as proposed certainly is not “magic,” but it specifically invokes teleology within its operating framework.

Materialists Grapple with the Reality of Purpose in Organisms

Twentieth-century materialism treated living organisms as reducible machines governed strictly by Newtonian physics and simple genetic mechanics.

Biological Novelties “Arrive” as if Ordered from DoorDash

The question of how bodies are actually built remains as unclear at the end of these 54 minutes as it was at the beginning.