DISCOVERY - Key Persons
On this episode of ID the Future, historian Michael Flannery discusses his just-released book Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. It's the intellectual history of Wallace, who is credited with independently propounding the the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin insisted on a purely materialistic version of the theory, but as Wallace studied the evidence, he grew convinced that intelligent design also played a role in the history of life, particularly in the origin of humans. Though not a religious person, he broke with the rising scientism of his day to argue that there must be some "overruling intelligence" behind nature. Read More ...
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer of natural selection, was second only to Charles Darwin as the 19th century's most noted English naturalist. Yet his belief in spiritualism caused him to be ridiculed and dismissed by many, leaving him a comparatively obscure and misunderstood figure. In this volume Wallace is finally allowed to speak in his own defense through his grand Read More ›
Job Titles:
- Associate Director, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- Community Schools' ‘Woke' Indoctrination Agenda
- Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Arina O. Grossu, M.A., M.S., is a Fellow with Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism. She focuses on the protection of human dignity, human rights, and the sanctity of human life from fertilization to natural death. Her areas of expertise include abortion, women's health, bioethics, conscience, pornography, sex trafficking, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. She is the founder and principal at Areté Global Consulting where she works on policy, bioethics, communications, and strategic partnerships. She is a guest contributor at Charlotte Lozier Institute, contributor to Liberty University's Standing for Freedom Center, and an author at the National Catholic Register. She is part of a bioethics working group at the Heritage Foundation. Ms. Grossu is a member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
Ms. Grossu is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in Philosophy. She earned her M.S. in Bioethics from the University of Mary and an M.A. in Theology, magna cum laude, from the Dominican House of Studies. She is also certified in Health Care Ethics through the National Catholic Bioethics Center. She is an alumna of the Vita Institute at the University of Notre Dame, an intensive intellectual formation program for leaders in the national and international pro-life movement.
During the Trump Administration, Ms. Grossu worked as a Senior Communications Advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the Office for Civil Rights, protecting conscience, religious freedom rights, and civil rights in healthcare. She is the former Director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council where she was a spokeswoman and policymaker on life and human dignity issues.
Ms. Grossu has done television interviews on CNN, ABC, BBC, Fox News, EWTN, and CBN. Her articles and commentary have appeared in USA Today, LA Times, National Review, Bloomberg, Townhall, The Federalist, Washington Times, Daily Signal, Washington Examiner, National Catholic Register, Daily Caller, Christian Post, and others.
Ms. Grossu has presented lectures at the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women; Trinity International University's Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity; University of Notre Dame; Regent University Law School's Center for Global Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law; and Indiana Wesleyan University's Bastian Center for the Study of Human Trafficking. She has testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.
Ms. Grossu is a Dame of Malta, a member of the Board of Directors of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, and a National Board Member of the Salesian Sisters Partners Circle. She is also a Claremont Speechwriters' Fellow and a Leonine Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Software Architect
- Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
Brendan Dixon is a Software Architect with experience designing, creating, and managing projects of all sizes. His first foray into Artificial Intelligence was in the 1980s when he built an Expert System to assist in the diagnosis of software problems at IBM. Since then, he's worked both as a Principal Engineer and Development Manager for industry leaders, such as Microsoft and Amazon, and numerous start-ups. While he spent most of that time other types of software, he's remained engaged and interested in Artificial Intelligence.
Job Titles:
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Justin B. A. Frederick is an Eastern Orthodox Priest. He holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and also studied at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he focused on Patristics. During his time at Princeton, he was an editor of the Princeton Theological Review. He is a fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture as well as a priest at St. Maximus the Confessor Orthodox Church (OCA) in Denton, Texas. He has traveled extensively in Russia, speaks Russian fluently, and ministers to the Russian community in Dallas
Job Titles:
- Research Coordinator, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- Director, Cascadia Center
Since 1993, Bruce Agnew has been leading the Northwest Cascadia initiative serving as director of the Cascadia Center in Seattle. The Center is a private, non-profit, public policy center engaged in regional and international transportation and technology. Bruce also co-chairs of the Transportation Group for the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) - a public private partnership of ten Northwest states and Western Canadian provinces/territories.
Since 2017, he has served as director of the ACES NW Network dedicated to the acceleration of ACES (Autonomous-Connected-Electric-Shared) technology in transportation. The Network is a 40 member technology driven alliance co-chaired by Tom Alberg, Co-founder and managing partner of Madrona Venture Group in Seattle and Bryan Mistele, CEO/Co-founder of INRIX global technology in Kirkland.
In 2009, Seattle Magazine named him "Road Warrior" in their "Power List" of community leaders for his transportation initiatives from advocacy of a Deep Bore Tunnel for the Alaska Way Viaduct Replacement to innovative infrastructure financing, passenger rail and ferries. He was also awarded the "Smashed Brick" by the Canadian Consul General in 2008 for reducing barriers to cross-border trade and tourism.
On the North American front, Mr. Agnew chaired an advisory committee to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) chartered by NAFTA publishing a report,"Destination Sustainability" exploring carbon taxes on trade corridors and serves on the Can Am Border Trade Alliance.
From 1987-93, Mr. Agnew was Chief of Staff for U.S. Representative John Miller from Washington state's First District. Before his congressional service, Bruce Agnew was elected to two terms on the Snohomish County Council and served as President of the Puget Sound Regional Council in 1985. Mr. Agnew is a 1974 graduate of Stanford University and a 1977 graduate of U.C. Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) and resides with his family in Beaux Arts Village, WA.
Bruce Chapman - Chairman, Founder, President
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board
- Cofounder
- President
Bruce Chapman has had a long career in American politics and public policy at the city, state, national, and international levels. Elected to the Seattle City Council and as Washington State's Secretary of State, he also served in several leadership posts in the Reagan administration, including ambassador. In 1991, he founded the public policy think tank Discovery Institute, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board and director of the Chapman Center on Citizen Leadership.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer of INRIX
Bryan Mistele is the co-founder, President & Chief Executive Officer of INRIX, a leading provider of connected car services and transportation analytics. INRIX is at the forefront of connecting cars to smarter cities in more than 88 countries around the world. Bryan started INRIX in 2004, having had more than 15 years experience building high-technology businesses and transforming industries through the power of information technology As a leader on technology and transportation issues, Bryan is a popular speaker on the future of transportation. Bryan has served as a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Transportation Policy Project, as a member of the United States Department of Transportation's ITS Advisory Committee, and as a board member of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. Bryan is co-founder of ACES Northwest - a group committed to the adoption of Autonomous, Connected, Electric and Shared vehicles. Prior to INRIX, Mistele was an executive at Microsoft. Bryan holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Job Titles:
- President of Cogitare LLC
Byron Nutley is President of Cogitare LLC, a boutique financial and management consulting services firm. He is an active entrepreneur who has founded and led as CEO multiple tech companies that grew to over 100 employees, including nSET and iSolute. Byron has also served in senior leadership roles at a variety of other startups, from running operations at nanotech Zyvex Technologies and consulting firm Garrison Finish to CFO at blockchain technology company New Alchemy and software businesses ClipCard and FreeRein. He previously served as director of business operations at Microsoft for the Asia-Pacific region based out of Singapore, as well as on the initial Excel for Windows dev team during his 11-year career at the company. Byron received B.S. degrees in computer science and in engineering from Seattle Pacific University and an MSIA/MBA in finance and information systems from Carnegie Mellon University.
Job Titles:
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- Professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St Louis, Missouri
Jack Collins is Professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St Louis, Missouri. With degrees from MIT (SB, SM) and the University of Liverpool (PhD), he has been a research engineer, a church-planter, and, since 1993, a teacher. In addition to his early focus on Hebrew and Greek grammar, he also studies science and faith, how the New Testament uses the Old, and Biblical theology. He was Old Testament Chairman for the English Standard Version of the Bible, and is author of Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care, and Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1-11 (2018). He is currently writing commentaries on Numbers, Psalms, and Isaiah. During the 2016-17 academic year, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Carl Henry Center for Theological Understanding of Trinity International University. He and his wife have been married since 1979, and have two grown children.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Professor
- Fellow
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Cornelius G. Hunter is a graduate of the University of Illinois where he earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology. He is Adjunct Professor at Biola University and author of the award-winning Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Hunter's other books include Darwin's Proof, and his newest book Science's Blind Spot (Baker/Brazos Press). Dr. Hunter's interest in the theory of evolution involves the historical and theological, as well as scientific, aspects of the theory. His blog is Darwin's God.
On this ID the Future Cornelius Hunter discusses the controversy over determinism and free will. Joined by host Michael Keas, Dr. Hunter, a specialist in biophysics and computational biology, takes listeners all the way back to Aristotle, then to Newton, then to Pierre-Simon Laplace, who theorized that a sufficient computation could determine the future based on just the universe's initial conditions and the laws of nature. Laplace was a physical determinist, in other words, one who holds that the laws of nature determine everything. That includes human choices, which determinists today, such as German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, take to be merely an illusory experience. But it's "an irrational rejection of evidence" on their part, Hunter argues; evidenced by how Read More › Read More ... When Scientists Make Truth Claims Outside Science Cornelius Hunter October 27, 2020 Here is a small, representative sampling of such claims over the past three centuries. These claims are not from science, but they drive science. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, biophysicist Cornelius Hunter explains how mitochondria, the powerhouse of eukaryotic cells, pose a powerful and newly acute problem for evolution. For years evolutionists thought that some early cells must somehow have brought other cells inside of them, and those other cells then mysteriously evolved into mitochondria. But recent research undermines that notion. Why do many evolutionists then still cling to the idea? Dr. Hunter's answer explains how a lot of evolutionary thinking persists in the face of mounting contrary evidence.Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast. Read More ... Why This Virus is No Threat to Intelligent Design Cornelius G. Hunter January 16, 2017 On this episode of ID the Future, Ray Bohlin interviews Cornelius Hunter about a recent article in Science on virus invasion of bacteria. Hunter explains protein-protein binding and how the immune system is not analogous to evolution. Listen in as these two biologists discuss criticisms of neo-Darwinism! Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Dr. Cornelius Hunter - a Discovery Institute Fellow, adjunct professor, and author - about his website Darwin's Predictions, which critically examines 22 fundamental predictions of evolutionary theory. In this fourth and final podcast of the series, Dr. Hunter discusses evolution's failed prediction that competition should be greatest between neighbors. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- Director, Education & Outreach
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow
- Darwinism, Design, and Public Education
- Gonzaga Law School Professor
- Law Professor at Gonzaga University School of Law
- Professor Emeritus of Law at Gonzaga School of Law
- Professor of Law Gonzaga Law School to Darby School
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- Teaching about Evolution in the Public Schools
David K. DeWolf is a Professor Emeritus of Law at Gonzaga School of Law in Spokane, Washington and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, Professor DeWolf has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Bistline of the Idaho Supreme Court. He has written a briefing book for public school administrators, Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Curriculum.
This week Discovery President Bruce Chapman interviews Gonzaga law school professor, and Discovery senior fellow, David DeWolf about last year's federal intelligent design trial, Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District. DeWolf is the co-author of the new book "Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision" a critique of federal Judge John E. Jones's decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, the first trial to attempt to address the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design in public schools. In this concise yet comprehensive response, Discovery Institute scholars and attorneys show how Judge Jones's Kitzmiller decision was based upon faulty reasoning, non-existent evidence, and a serious misrepresentation of the scientific theory of intelligent design. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- ENV Editor
- Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News & Science Today, Center for Science & Culture
ENV editor David Klinghoffer has just posted a new op-ed at Redstate.com about the academic bullying of Dr. Ben Carson for his doubts about Darwinism.
Job Titles:
- President of Axion Systems, Inc
Dick Greiling is President of Axion Systems, Inc., an application software development firm located in Seattle, which he co-founded in 1986. He is also the business manager of 222 Westlake LLC, Terry & Thomas LLC, and Benson Investments LLC, family corporations which develop and own real estate in the Puget Sound region. Dick serves as treasurer of University Presbyterian Church. Prior to his work at Axion, Dick spent 12 years as a management consultant, serving such clients as the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Postal Service, Air Force Systems Command, and the University of San Francisco. He received his B.S. degree from Columbia University and his M.B.A. from U.C. Berkeley. Dick and his wife Kristina live in Seattle.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Senior Fellow
- Senior Fellow and Chairman, American Center for Transforming Education
Donald P. Nielsen is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute and Chair of the Institute's program on public education reform. For nearly 30 years, he has devoted his life work to transforming public education. For two years, he traveled the country studying America's public education system and authored, Every School: One Citizen's Guide to Transforming Education. Mr. Nielsen was awarded the Harvard Business School's 2004 Alumni Achievement Award. In 2009, he received the Leadership Award from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.
Job Titles:
- Development Assistant, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- CSC Director of Science Communications
- Gauger: Is It Easy to Get a New Protein
- Is Director of Science Communication
- March and July Offer Two Great Chances to Learn More about Intelligent Design
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Dr. Ann Gauger is Director of Science Communication and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, and Senior Research Scientist at the Biologic Institute in Seattle, Washington. She received her Bachelor's degree from MIT and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Zoology. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where her work was on the molecular motor kinesin.
Her research at Biologic Institute has focused on two areas: the limits of neo-Darwinism as a mechanism for change at the protein level, and evidence for the uniqueness of human origins. As Director of Science Communication, she is responsible for communicating the evidence for intelligent design to the wider public.
She serves as an editor of the journal BIO-Complexity, and her scientific work has been published in Nature, Development, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Genetic Regulation of Development, In Vitro, In Vitro Cell and Developmental Biology, BIO-Complexity, and Biological Information: New Perspectives. She has coauthored the book Science and Human Origins and appeared in the documentaries, Metamorphosis, Flight, and The War on Humans. Her web posts appear regularly on Evolution News and Views, and she writes for other on-line and print publications as well.
She and her husband of twenty-six years are proud parents of three young adults.
On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid shares biologist Ann Gauger's recent article on emerging clues to life's design, and how the "Darwinian Regime" tends to ignore them. One stubborn bit of biological evidence Gauger highlights is the fact that cells can't make life-essential ATP, NAD, and other metabolic co-factors without having ATP, NAD, and the other co-factors there first. It's a "daisy chain of causal circularity woven by what must be an intelligent designer," Gauger comments. Or as she also puts it, "It's chickens and eggs, all the way down." Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, biologist Ann Gauger responds to a negative review of the new Crossway anthology Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, arguing that parts of the review are confused and contradictory. For instance, Denis Lamoureux uses classic design language while denying design. He says design is all front-loaded so that random evolutionary processes can produce designed outcomes, thus changing the meaning of both "random" and "evolution." He accuses ID of being theologically driven, apparently unaware that it's theistic evolution that is theological. And he seeks to support faith through appreciation of the wonders of nature while insisting that appeals to evidence of design in nature somehow undermine faith. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- CSC Research Director
- How Does the Intelligibility of Nature Point to Design
- in the Beginning: How the Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design Got Their Start
- Senior Fellow at the Seattle
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Dr. Bruce Gordon is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and Associate Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Houston Baptist University. He is an historian and philosopher of physics who earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University, as well as degrees in applied mathematics and analytic philosophy from the University of Calgary, piano performance from the Royal Conservatory at the University of Toronto, and systematic theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
Dr. Gordon has taught at the University of Calgary, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, Baylor University (where he served as a research professor and director of the program in science and religion) and The King's College in New York City (where he taught science and mathematics).
Dr. Gordon's scholarly work focuses on interpretive questions at the intersection of quantum theory, cosmology, analytic metaphysics and philosophical theology, along with fine-tuning issues in physics and biology, and the socio-historical and cultural dimensions of scientific and philosophical ideas. The recipient of National Science Foundation and Templeton Foundation conference grants, he has published technical articles in philosophy of science journals and contributed to edited collections. Recent publications include an appendix on inflationary string cosmology in a book authored by Fr. Dr. Robert Spitzer of Gonzaga University and the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, three essays in a book co-edited with William Dembski titled The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, essays on the deleterious effects of Darwinian naturalism in Western culture in Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension and on ID as a species of uniformitarian analysis that can and should replace methodological naturalism as a constraint on science (in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith). He also served as co-editor of the volume Biological Information: New Perspectives. Some of these essays are part of ongoing project leading to a book examining the metaphysical implications of quantum physics and their integral connection to theistic metaphysics.
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow
- the Activity of a Cell Is Like That of a Factory
- Writer, Thinker, Raconteur, and Senior Fellow
David Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Berlinski has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels. He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. In addition, he has held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France.
Recent articles by Dr. Berlinski have been featured in Commentary, Forbes ASAP, and the Boston Review. Two of his articles, "On the Origins of the Mind" (November 2004) and "What Brings a World into Being" (March 2001) have been anthologized in The Best American Science Writing 2005 , edited by Alan Lightman (Harper Perennial), and The Best American Science Writing 2002, edited by Jesse Cohen, respectively.
He is author of numerous books, including A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon 1996), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000, Harcourt Brace), Newton's Gift (The Free Press 2000), The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (Harcourt, October 2003), A Short History of Mathematics for the Modern Library series at Random House (2004), The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Crown Forum, 2008), and The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements (Basic Books, 2013).
On today's ID the Future, Human Nature author David Berlinski continues his conversation with host Wesley J. Smith. Here Berlinski reflects on the Jewish Holocaust, the destructive nihilism of the Nazis and the SS, and the shortcomings of Neo-Darwinism as an explanation for the diversity of life. Berlinski and Smith also discuss the increasingly widespread attacks on human exceptionalism, the growth of emotivism and why it's a problem, and the bizarre nature rights movement. This is the second and concluding part of a conversation borrowed, with permission, from Wesley J. Smith's Humanize podcast.
On this ID the Future, host Wesley J. Smith talks with polymath and Human Nature author David Berlinski about the philosophy of mathematics, the corruption of science, the burning of Notre Dame, modern Europe's curious incapacity to build graceful, beautiful structures, and what's driving the devolution of Western society. But before any of that, Berlinski relates the dramatic story of how his parents, European Jews, escaped the Nazis only by the skin of their teeth. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation borrowed with permission from Wesley J. Smith's Humanize podcast.
This episode of ID the Future features the second part of a conversation between Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson and polymath David Berlinski, author of the newly released book Human Nature. In this segment of the interview, Robinson asks Berlinski about a book by Nicholas Christakis, Blueprint, which argues that evolution has endowed us with a genetic makeup that drives human culture toward virtue and progress. Berlinski demurs, pointing to the horrors of the twentieth century and by noting that the virtues Christakis underscores, such as cooperativeness, can also be put to nefarious purposes. The Nazi Party, for instance, "was a marvelous engine of cooperation. All those Nazis cooperated with one another running death camps." Robinson also asks Berlinski about Read More › Read More ...
This episode of ID the Future features Part 1 of an interview between Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson and Discovery Institute senior fellow David Berlinski, author of The Deniable Darwin and the newly released Human Nature. Berlinski begins by noting that living systems possess "a degree of complexity that is almost unfathomable" and explains how this poses an acute problem for Darwinism. The two also discuss discontinuities in the fossil record as well as Berlinski's insistence that "any theory of natural selection must plainly meet what I have called a rule against deferred success." Berlinski also rebuts Razib Khan's claim that in rejecting modern evolutionary theory, conservatives sacrifice "the most powerful rejoinder" to the claim "that male and female are Read More › Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, mathematician, polymath, and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Berlinski concludes a two-part conversation with Jonathan Witt about Berlinski's new book Human Nature. Today he talks about what we've sadly lost from the West, disputing secularists' optimistic claims that we're less violent than the medievals were. From his home next door to Notre Dame Cathedral, he also muses on the cathedral fire and contemporary France's inability to build anything like the great cathedral. Re-construct, yes - though even that may lie beyond the collective will of France. Create, no. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher, mathematician, and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Berlinski answers questions from Jonathan Witt about Berlinski's celebrated new book Human Nature. Is evolution carrying us upward to new heights of human goodness, as some have claimed? If not that, then will a computer-connected singularity take us on that upward trajectory, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus? With his famous quick wit, Berlinski says no, and warns of a new "explosion of religion," but a new religion, one without rational grounding and with a great willingness to punish dissenters. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. David Berlinski continues to discuss the origin and nature of mathematics with CSC Research Coordinator Casey Luskin. Is math something waiting to be discovered, or is it a construct of the human mind? Listen in as Dr. Berlinski examines the mystery of mathematics, and reflects on the blurry distinction between math that is "discovered" and math that is "created." Read More ...
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute 's Center for Science
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Guillermo Gonzalez is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1993 from the University of Washington. He has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and at the University of Washington and has received fellowships, grants and awards from such institutions as NASA, the University of Washington, the Templeton Foundation, Sigma Xi (scientific research society), and the National Science Foundation.
Gonzalez has extensive experience in observing and analyzing data from ground-based observatories, including work at McDonald Observatory, Apache Point Observatory and Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. He is a world-class expert on the astrophysical requirements for habitability and on habitable zones and a co-founder of the "Galactic Habitable Zone" concept, which captured the October 2001 cover story of Scientific American. Astronomers and astrobiologists around the world are pursuing research based on his work on exoplanet host stars, the Galactic Habitable Zone and red giants.
Gonzalez has also published nearly 70 articles in refereed astronomy and astrophysical journals including The Astrophysical Journal, The Astronomical Journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Icarus and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He also is the co-author of the second edition of Observational Astronomy, an advanced college astronomy textbook.
In 2004 he co-authored The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery with Jay W. Richards. He's also an affiliate of Biologic Institute.
On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, co-authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, discuss reports on another extra-solar planet recently in the news. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez discuss several discoveries made in the past 15 years supporting their conclusions in The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. Gonzalez shows how the book's thesis - that conditions for life and scientific discovery meet on earth to a fine-tuned degree that strongly points toward design - has been confirmed multiple times. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, host Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, authors of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery, discuss what's changed in the 15 years since the book first appeared. One big change, the number of exo-planets discovered has exploded from 200 or so to several thousand. Gonzalez walks through this and other exciting recent advances in astronomy, and the two discuss how these new discoveries bear on the predictions and arguments they advanced in their book. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards interviews astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez on the first images ever taken of a black hole, released to the public early in April 2019. Not that it's exactly an "image," for as Gonzalez explains, no light can escape a black hole. But this massive object - equaling billions of suns in mass - in the M87 galaxy still provides important information, adding to the list of confirmations for Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which also provides further support for Big Bang cosmology. And that, in turn, tells us our universe isn't infinitely old - so where did it come from, if not an intelligent designer? Read More ...
Have scientists discovered a planet with possible life on it? On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. As the co-originator of the Galactic Habitable Zone, Dr. Gonzalez knows better than anyone what it takes for a planet to sustain life. Listen in as he tells us whether the newly discovered exoplanet Gliese 581d is habitable. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez joins Casey Luskin for an interview, delightfully holding forth on the Copernican Principle and his latest research regarding extrasolar planets. Listen in as Dr. Gonzalez also shares about his experience being interviewed for the upcoming film, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."
Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Jay Richards interviews George Gilder, Discovery Institute co-founder, author, and technology futurist, regarding his ground-breaking best-seller, Wealth and Poverty, and how the principles of capitalism articulated in the book are as applicable today as they have ever been.
Jay Richards interviews mathematician, entrepreneur, and philosopher, Dr. Bill Dembski, about his unique thought experiment regarding how one could create a decentralized, DIY, information-based currency. Richards also explores with Dembski the concepts of natural and artificial intelligence. Trained as a mathematician and philosopher, Dr. Bill Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, Read More ›
Job Titles:
- Director and Fellow, American Center for Transforming Education
- Director of the Institute 's American Center for Transforming Education
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow of Discovery Institute and Director of the Institute's American Center for Transforming Education. Her articles have been published by the New York Post, The Federalist, Real Clear Education, The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, Washington Examiner, The Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, and a host of other media outlets. Prior to joining Discovery Institute, she spent nearly two decades leading within the field of education as a national consultant, requested conference speaker, head of school, virtual and hybrid academy director, administrator, classroom teacher, and athletic coach. In 2019, she was invited as a contributing author for the book, MindShift: Catalyzing Change in Christian Education and co-authored "From Gutenberg to 5G." Dr. Ingraham was awarded the George W. Selig Doctoral Fellowship in 2013. The following year she received the "World Changer in the Field of Education" award from Regent University.
Job Titles:
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California
William Lane Craig is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, England, before taking a doctorate in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, at which latter institution he was for two years a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Prior to his appointmant at Talbot he spent seven years at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Katholike Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time, and Eternity, as well as nearly a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science. He currently lives in Atlanta with his wife Jan; they have two children, Charity and John.
Job Titles:
- Associate Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural
- Senior Fellow With the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
- Senior Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
Eric Holloway is a Senior Fellow with the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, and holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Baylor University. A Captain in the United States Air Force, he served in the US and Afghanistan. He is the co-editor of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies.
Job Titles:
- Stewardship Officer, Major Gifts, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Senior Fellow
- Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC
- Contributing Editor of Forbes
- Gaming AI / Why AI Can'T Think but Can Transform Jobs
- Life After Capitalism / the Information Theory of Economics
George Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A co-founder of Discovery Institute, Mr. Gilder is a Senior Fellow of the Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality, and also directs Discovery's Technology and Democracy Project. His latest book, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (2018), Gilder waves goodbye to today's Internet. In a rocketing journey into the very near-future, he argues that Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a "great unbundling," which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.
George Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A co-founder of Discovery Institute, Mr. Gilder is a Senior Fellow of the Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality, and also directs Discovery's Technology and Democracy Project.
Born in 1939 in New York City, Mr. Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Henry Kissinger and helped found Advance, a journal of political thought, which he edited and helped to re-establish in Washington, DC, after his graduation in 1962. During this period he co-authored (with Bruce Chapman) The Party That Lost Its Head. He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and editor of the Ripon Forum. In the 1960s Mr. Gilder also served as a speechwriter for several prominent official and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon. In the 1970s, as an independent researcher and writer, Mr. Gilder began an excursion into the causes of poverty and wealth, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (1972) and Visible Man (1978) - which led to his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981).
Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and as a frequent contributor to Arthur Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a study of presidential speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence.
In 1986 Gilder was made a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium. His deeper examination of the lives of present-day entrepreneurs culminated in many articles and a book, The Spirit of Enterprise(1986), which was revised and republished in 1992. That many of the most interesting current entrepreneurs were to be found in high technology fields also led Mr. Gilder, over several years, to study this subject in depth. In his best-selling work, Microcosm (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. A subsequent book, Life After Television, was a prophecy of the future of computers and telecommunications and a prelude to his book on the future of telecommunications, Telecosm (2000). The Silicon Eye (2005) travels the rocky road of the entrepreneur on the promising path of disruption, and celebrates some of smartest and most colorful technology minds of our time. His groundbreaking book, The Israel Test (2009), relates his work on capitalism to the safety and prosperity of Israel, what Gilder calls "the central issue in international politics" in our time. What critics have hailed as a "unique contribution" to the debate, Gilder argues that hostility toward Israel arises primarily from hostility toward capitalist creativity. How we react to that creativity-by resenting it or admiring and emulating it-will impact the future of Israel, the United States, and the world.
Mr. Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a frequent writer for The Economist, The American Spectator, the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is an active churchman, sometime runner, and with his wife Nini, parent of four children.
Discovery co-founder George Gilder sat down with Steve Forbes on Forbes's podcast What's Ahead. There are not many minds that have been able to predict what's ahead quite like Gilder who has proven to be a true visionary in economics and tech. In this conversation with Forbes, Gilder discusses his new book Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data Read More ›
Job Titles:
- Founder and President of Fieldstead
Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. is founder and president of Fieldstead and Company, Inc., a private philanthropy working in national and international relief and development, education, the arts, family and children's concerns, and religious freedom issues worldwide. Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Ahmanson, is a graduate of Occidental College in that city and holds a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington.
Job Titles:
- Event Coordinator
- Program Assistant
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- President of Seattle
Jim Spady is the President of Seattle's iconic Dick's Drive-in Restaurant chain. A 1976 graduate of Bellevue's Interlake High School, Jim earned an economics degree (summa cum laude) from Arizona State University in 1980 and a Juris Doctor degree (magna cum laude) from the University of Washington School of Law in 1983.
Job Titles:
- Chief Economist of Vident Financial
- Fellow, Discovery Institute 's Center on Wealth & Poverty
Jerry Bowyer is the Chief Economist of Vident Financial, which has more than $1 billion directly under management. He is also author of The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics and host of the podcast "Meeting of Minds with Jerry Bowyer." He is Editor of Town Hall Finance, Editor of Christian Post Business, serves on the Editorial Board of Salem Communications, is Resident Economist with Kingdom Advisors, is Senior Fellow in Financial Economics at the Center for Cultural Leadership, and is President of Bowyer Research. He has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson and with the Beechwood Company, which is the family office associated with Federated Investors. He consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, including airport privatization with Wilbur Ross, the current US Commerce Secretary. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups. He has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh's largest financial services firm.
Jerry holds a Sacred Theology Licentiate from the Collegium Augustinianum and a Bachelor's degree from Robert Morris University. He has lectured at Oxford University's Wycliffe Hall, has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent College, and has guest-lectured at Carnegie Mellon University's graduate Heinz School of Public Policy, at Grove City College, at Northwest University, at Lancaster Bible College, and at Indiana Wesleyan University. In 1997 Jerry delivered the commencement address at Robert Morris University and was the youngest commencement speaker in its history. The school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry's speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.
Jerry has been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News and has been a Forbes.com columnist. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted "The Kudlow Report", and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, The Wall Street Journal as well as many other publications. He is also the author of The Free Market Capitalist's Survival Guide, published by Harper Collins and of The Bush Boom.
Jerry was consulted by the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the economic crisis of 2008. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED's On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.
Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet the Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary John Snow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.
Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.
Job Titles:
- Fellow of Discovery Institute 's Center for Science
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
John Bloom is a Fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and a Professor of Physics at Biola University in La Mirada, California. He serves as the Academic Director for Biola's M.A. in Science and Religion program (MASR), which he founded in 2004, and previously served as Chair of the Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering Department. Dr. Bloom teaches a variety of undergraduate courses in Physics and graduate courses in the MASR. His research interests include the integration of Christianity with the sciences, and apologetics.
John C. Wohlstetter is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (beg. 2001) and the Gold Institute for International Strategy (beg. 2021). His primary areas of expertise are national security and foreign policy, and the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He is author of Sleepwalking With The Bomb (2nd ed. 2014), and The Long War Ahead and The Short War Upon Us (2008). He was founder and editor of the issues blog Letter From The Capitol (2005-2015). His articles have been published by The American Spectator, National Review Online, Wall Street Journal, Human Events, Daily Caller, PJ Media, Washington Times and others. He is an amateur concert pianist, residing in Charleston, South Carolina.
Job Titles:
- Education & Outreach Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Activists Disrupt Seattle Mayor 's Homelessness Strategy
- Business Owners Facing Drug Epidemic on Their Own
- Journalist and Senior Fellow With Discovery Institute 's Center
- Journalist and Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth and Poverty
- Neighbors of Licton Springs Create ‘Community Garden' to Deter Tents
- Union Gospel Mission Helps Homeless Community Stay Cool During Seattle 's Heat Wave
Jonathan Choe is a journalist and Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute's Center on Wealth and Poverty, covering homelessness issues for its Fix Homelessness initiative. Prior to joining Discovery, Choe spent several years as one of the lead reporters at KOMO-TV, consistently the top rated television station in Seattle. His in depth stories on crime and deep dive investigations into the homeless crisis led to measurable results in the community, including changes in public policy.
Choe has more than two decades of experience in tv news behind the scenes and in front of the camera for ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and Tribune. He has also been been nominated and honored with multiple industry awards including an Emmy. Choe spent several years teaching classes on emerging media and entreprenuership to under privileged youth in inner city Chicago.
Choe is a New England native and Boston University journalism school graduate.
For months now, Jonathan Choe has been tracking and looking into multiple homeless encampments across Seattle and King County. Another segment of the homeless community are creating a crisis in the woods, preferring to stay hidden in these lush havens.
Job Titles:
- Executive Editor, Discovery Institute Press, Senior Fellow and Senior Project Manager, Center for Science & Culture
Justin B. A. Frederick is an Eastern Orthodox Priest. He holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and also studied at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he focused on Patristics. During his time at Princeton, he was an editor of the Princeton Theological Review. He is a fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture as well as a priest at St. Maximus the Confessor Orthodox Church (OCA) in Denton, Texas. He has traveled extensively in Russia, speaks Russian fluently, and ministers to the Russian community in Dallas
Job Titles:
- Vice President, Discovery Institute, and Managing Director, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- Director, Discovery Society, Center for Science & Culture
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Brazilian Scientist
- Distinguished Scientist
- Foresight in Chemistry and Life
- Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences
- Message from the Molecules - They Say "Intelligent Design
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- the Radio at the Edge of the Universe
A member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Marcos Eberlin received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and served as a postdoc at Purdue University. Back at UNICAMP, he founded and coordinated for 25 years the ThoMSon Mass Spectrometry (MS) Laboratory, making it an internationally recognized research center, one of the best-equipped and innovative MS laboratories worldwide.
Eberlin has published nearly 1,000 scientific articles and is a recipient of many awards and honors, including the title of Commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit (2005) from Brazil's President, the Zeferino Vaz Award (2002) for excellence in teaching and research. He is the founder and current president of the Brazilian Society for Mass Spectrometry (BrMASS) - one of the largest MS societies. Eberlin is also President of the Brazilian Society for Intelligent Design (TDI Brasil) and the Director of the Discovery-Mackenzie Research Center for Science, Faith and Society at Mackenzie University in São Paulo, Brazil. Previous to writing Foresight, he published the bestselling book Fomos Planejados, the first book in Portuguese presenting the scientific evidence for intelligent design in nature.
Distinguished Brazilian organic chemist Marcos Eberlin talks about chemical evolution and the origin of life, pivoting off of comments by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour in Science Uprising Episode 5, and off of Eberlin's own Nobel laureate-endorsed book. Read More ... The Lovable Venus Flytrap: A Design Analysis Marcos Eberlin July 12, 2019 A correspondent sends along this remarkable nature video from the BBC and asks a good question. Read More ...
Mariana Parks is retired from a career in public policy, having worked as Deputy State Director and speechwriter for US Senator Slade Gorton, and as president of the Slade Gorton International Policy Center. She also served as Senior Advisor for US Representative Dave Reichert, and worked for the Washington Policy Center and Microsoft Government Affairs. Parks ran her own company providing consultancy to a broad range of corporate, political and non-profit organizations. She now serves as president of CTNNB1 Syndrome Awareness Worldwide, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing awareness of the ultra-rare genetic disorder, which affects her grandson, connecting other families and the medical community dealing with the Syndrome, and providing resources and research into finding effective treatments and eventually a cure.
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow, the Center for Science & Culture and the Center on Human Exceptionalism
Michael Denton holds an M.D. from Bristol University, as well as a Ph.D. in biochemistry from King's College in London. A Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, Denton has had a critical impact on the debate over Darwinian evolution.
Denton's most prominent book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, coined the phrase that evolution is a "theory in crisis," and is credited with having inspired both Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe to investigate scientific problems with Darwinian evolution. His book showed that severe cracks exist in the foundation of Darwinism in areas related to homology, paleontology, and molecular biology. Although originally drafted more than 30 years ago the core argument that much of the complexity of the biological world cannot be accounted for in terms of cumulative selection has stood the test of time as witnessed by the growing skepticism by many in the scientific community that micro evolution can be extrapolated to macroevolution. Following the work of historian of science Thomas Kuhn, Denton recounted that scientific revolutions occur when the dominant paradigm accumulates so many deficiencies that it reaches a "crisis" stage. According to Denton, Darwinism has reached that final stage. His 1998 sequel, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, elaborates on the evidence for design in nature, showing that the laws of the universe are finely-tuned not only for the existence of carbon-based life and even complex beings of biology close to modern humans.
Dr. Denton's research topic as a PhD student and post doctoral fellow at Kings College in the 1970s was the differentiation of the red blood cell, and his main research focus since the early 1980s has been on identifying genes responsible for inherited retinal disease in humans. Because certain categories of disease genes (e.g. recessive genes) can be more easily identified by studying large consanguineous pedigrees, he has spent several months each year for nearly two decades working and living in India and Pakistan where large inbred populations, ideal for gene mapping, are relatively common. His retinal research led to the identification of several new retinal disease genes including the gene used in the first successful gene therapy trial at Moorfields eye hospital in London in 2009.
He has long adhered to a structuralist view of organic form, seeing much of the underlying order of life to be immanent in nature, the result of higher organizational principles or ‘laws of form' which constrain the behaviour of complex higher order assemblages of biomatter. As he argues, because these organizational principles or laws are emergent, and only manifest by their influence on ‘higher order assemblages,' they cannot be inferred from analysis of the individual molecular components or parts of living systems analyzed in isolation and consequently pose a severe challenge to the reductionist agenda. Darwinism is also challenged because they represent emergent causal agencies which are immanent in nature and have nothing to do with natural selection. Moreover as Denton stresses: "Emergent features of any composite or whole (like the properties of water) are only manifest when the components of the composite (hydrogen and oxygen) are ‘combined together.' Because of this, they cannot be the result of cumulative Darwinian selection which is by definition a gradualistic process which can only build order bit by bit. Selection may choose and conserve the emergent properties of a whole but it cannot create them in the first place."
Dr. Denton has published his work in journals such as Nature, Biochemical Journal, Nature Genetics, BioSystems, Human Genetics, Clinical Genetics, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, and Biology and Philosophy. He has presented his work at major universities throughout the world. His current research focuses on exploring the role and limitation of genes in the generation of cell form, particularly retinal cells and red blood cells and examining the challenge posed to Darwinian functionalism by the apparently non adaptive ground plans or types which underlie much of the adaptive complexity of life. He rejects the metaphysical basis of the Darwinian framework, specifically the assumptions that living organisms are nothing more than machines and that all properties of organisms have adaptive significance.
On today's ID the Future, host Eric Anderson sits down with Australian biologist and MD Michael Denton to discuss his new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. As Denton notes, throughout the Middle Ages, humans were viewed as central to the cosmic scheme of things, but this anthropocentric view began to fall out of favor in the sixteenth century, and few if any scientific discoveries in the subsequent two centuries offered any apparent aid or comfort to the view. That, however, isn't the end of the story. According to Denton, even as Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection seemed to be draining from the idea what little life remained Read More › Read More ...
Today's ID the Future spotlights the groundbreaking new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence, with author and biologist Michael Denton reading excerpts from the work. Here Denton, who is also an MD, marvels at the engineering sophistication of the human heart and hands. Then he dives into the heart of his new book, teasing just a small sampling of the many ways nature appears fine tuned for bipedal, intelligent, technology-developing creatures such as ourselves. One or two such examples are interesting. But where the argument gains dramatic force is in the accumulation of many examples, stretching from physics and the characteristics of our sun to chemistry and the ensemble of unique characteristics of Read More › Read More ...
On this ID the Future, biochemist Michael Denton draws from his groundbreaking new book, The Miracle of the Cell, to explore a fine-tuning design argument centered on the periodic elements essential for life. Twenty elements-and water, too-appear to have been precisely fine-tuned in advance for highly specific biochemical roles. Without their precise properties, cellular and animal life would be impossible. "Words fail," says Denton, to describe the "almost eerie sense" that someone very powerful knew in advance the roles and capacities required of various elements to carry out the astonishingly sophisticated activities that make cellular life possible. Denton says that this fine tuning provides an independent line of evidence that life is the result of intelligent design. Read More ...
On this ID the Future, biochemist Michael Denton delves further into his revelatory new book The Miracle of the Cell. Here he discusses finely tuned chemical bonds. Cellular life would be impossible if strong bonds weren't just so for some cellular functions, and if weak bonds weren't just so for others. Each type of bond exists in a Goldilocks zone, neither too strong nor too weak for its purposes. They're tailored to fit. Denton also explores the miracle enzyme known as ATP synthase and some of the fine-tuning particulars of this life-essential molecular complex. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, biochemist and author Michael Denton tells host Eric Anderson more about his new book The Miracle of the Cell, and about his epiphany when he recognized the many remarkable ways that nature's chemistry is fine-tuned for life. The focus in this conversation is on carbon chemistry and its "goldilocks zone" ability to form stable bonds but let loose of them when needed. Whereas biologists once wondered about a vitalist "life force" in the cell, Denton sees intelligence and foresight in the very design of carbon, its unique properties, and its "coincidental" relation to water. According to Denton, all of this, taken together, constitutes "one of nature's most remarkable examples of nature's fitness for Read More › Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, Eric Anderson speaks with biochemist Michael Denton about Denton's new book The Miracle of the Cell, part of his continuing Privileged Species series exploring nature's fine tuning for life. New research keeps unveiling ever more ways in which this fine tuning exists, from the cosmos to the atoms of the periodic table, even to the subatomic level of quantum tunneling. As for the cell itself, It is as if scientists are discovering a "third infinity," says Denton. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, we listen in on a few minutes from a lecture given by Australian biochemist Michael Denton, author of the brand new book The Miracle of the Cell. In this segment, Denton explains the "remarkable set of coincidences" that makes the creation of oxygen through photosynthesis possible. From the specific energy of visible light to the unique properties of water, this degree of fine tuning for life shouts intelligent design. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- Devil 's Chaplain: Evolution As a "Theological Research Program
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- Professor Emeritus of UAB Libraries
Michael A. Flannery is professor emeritus of UAB Libraries, University of Alabama at Birmingham. He holds degrees in library science from the University of Kentucky and history from California State University, Dominguez Hills. He has written and taught extensively on the history of medicine and science. His most recent research interest has been on the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). He has edited Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press, 2008) and authored Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (Discovery Institute Press, 2011). His research and work on Wallace continues.
On this episode of ID the Future, science historian and host Michael Keas talks with fellow science historian Michael Flannery about the newly updated book Intelligent Evolution: How Alfred Russell Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwin. Flannery tells of Darwin's involvement in the Plinian Society, a "freethinkers" group at Edinburgh University where he studied medicine as a teenager. It was there that he first encountered radical philosophical materialism, the worldview that laid the philosophical foundation for his work in evolution. Flannery also speaks of Alfred Russel Wallace's "intelligent evolution" and how it differs from Darwinism and from today's theistic evolution - what Flannery prefers to call "Darwinian theism." Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, host Mike Keas speaks with science historian Michael Flannery about Darwinism, Past, Present, and Future, in which Flannery wonders about an L.A. Times op-ed by Ann Reid, director of the pro-Darwinism lobby group The National Center for Science Education. Read More ... Humanity and Teleology: Darwin, Wallace and Lyell Debate Natural Selection Michael Flannery August 22, 2018 On this episode of ID the Future, Michael Flannery, historian of science and emeritus professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, discusses how Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, broke with Darwin by arguing that the rise of humans required something more than blind evolutionary mechanisms. As Flannery also notes, the great geologist Charles Lyell sided with Wallace in the debate, to Darwin's dismay. Listen in to learn more about Lyell's idea of uniformity, the pro-Darwinian origins of the journal Nature, and how professional dissent from Darwinism has existed and persisted ever since Darwin's Origin of the Species. And to dive deeper still, check out Flannery's new book on Wallace, Nature's Prophet. Read More ... Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Darwin's Pattern for Scientific Dialogue that Darwinists Could Stand to Follow Michael Flannery August 20, 2018 On this episode of ID the Future host Mike Keas talks a third time with Michael Flannery about Flannery's new book Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. The surprising word come out of this conversation is how open Darwin was to Wallace's opposing viewpoint - unlike many Darwinists today. Some of Flannery's recent experience with historians of science, though, shows there is at least hope in some quarters for increasing academic openness today. Read More ... Nature's Prophet, Pt. 2: Alfred Russel Wallace's Case for an "Overruling Intelligence" Michael Flannery August 13, 2018 On this episode of ID the Future historian Michael Flannery continues discussion of his new book Nature's Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. Flannery tells how Wallace became convinced of some "overruling intelligence" in nature - not because of "gaps" in what he knew, but because so many human attributes demand a better explanation than Darwin's own "utility principle." They called for a cause adequate to the effects. Please consider donating to support the IDTF Podcast. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- 4 Story of 2020: Evolution, Design, and COVID - 19
- COVID - 19 and Biochemical Design
- Darwin Devolves Author
- Excerpt: Darwinism and Design
- Excerpt: Letter to the Journal of Chemical Education
- Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University
- Recognizing Design by a "Purposeful Arrangement of Parts
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Behe's current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures.
In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and two books, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution and The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which argue that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design. Most recently, in Darwin Devolves, Behe advances his argument, presenting new research that offers a startling reconsideration of how Darwin's mechanism works, weakening the theory's validity even more.
On today's ID the Future, Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe argues that Darwinism was built on a foundation of ignorance. Through no fault of Darwin's, neither he nor anyone else in his day had a clue about the nature of cellular life and biological information, says Behe. Even the biologists of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis in the first half of the twentieth century were fairly clueless about the foundation of life, Behe says. When researchers did finally begin to unravel the sophisticated foundations of life, earlier notions of how evolutionary processes might have invented the great diversity of life forms on earth were exposed as causally inadequate. Behe says that in fact all the attempts to rescue the idea of mindless Read More ›
On this ID the Future, ID biologist Michael Behe continues fielding tough questions from philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 3 of 3, Behe responds to the claim that some designs in biology are bad designs and to criticisms leveled at ID from some Thomists. Also in the mix, the issue of academic pressure to distance oneself from ID, even before those involved understand what the theory of intelligent design actually is. Madden also asks Behe what reforms he'd pursue if he suddenly found himself in charge of the National Academy of Sciences. Tune in to hear Behe's response, and much more. This three-part series is borrowed, with permission, from Flynn's podcast, which can be found on his Read More › Read More ...
In today's ID the Future, intelligent design pioneer Michael Behe continues his conversation with philosophers Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. Here in Part 2 of a three-part series, Behe offers an illustration from language and Madden presses him, noting that meaning detection in language is not parts to whole. A lively exchange ensues and then Behe turns the discussion back to his primary focus, detecting design in molecular biological machines by recognizing the purposeful arrangement of parts. From there the conversation turns to everything from epigenetics, systems biology, and autopoiesis to co-option, mousetraps, tie clips, biologist Kenneth Miller, and the philosophers Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. For Behe's newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This discussion is presented here with permission of philosopher Read More › Read More ...
Today's ID the Future features Darwin Devolves author and Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe speaking about the logic and evidence of intelligent design with two philosophers, Pat Flynn and Jim Madden. In a friendly, stimulating exchange, Flynn and Madden press Behe with objections - some philosophic, others scientific - to see how well his position stands up to scrutiny from experts who have engaged the subject. Here in Part 1 of a three-part series, Behe counters the charge that ID is an argument from ignorance, and then the three men compare the contemporary design argument to philosopher Thomas Aquinas's fifth way. For Behe's newest book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, go here. This discussion is presented here with permission of philosopher Read More › Read More ...
On today's ID the Future, author and biologist Michael Behe discusses with host Andrew McDiarmid how the once seemingly humble cilium is actually even more irreducibly complex than Behe suggested in his ID classic Darwin's Black Box-and indeed, even more complex than his review of cilia in his update in 2007. At the time Behe described cilia as "irreducible complexity squared." But as noted in a recent article at Evolution News, even more layers of sophistication in cilia and their Intraflagellar Transport (IFT) system have now been discovered. So, does that mean we are now looking at irreducible complexity cubed? Listen in as Behe and McDiarmid revel in the engineering sophistication of this fascinating molecular machine, and discuss why, more Read More › Read More ...
Today's ID the Future features an excerpt from the Michael Medved Show spotlighting intelligent design proponent Michael Behe. The two Michaels do a quick flyover of Behe's hard-hitting new book, A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael Behe Answers His Critics. Along the way they discuss some random mutations often touted as proof of evolution's power, including some found in dogs. On closer inspection, this dog of an argument for evolution won't hunt. Tune in to hear Behe's lucid explanation. Read More ...
Michael Medved Spotlights Michael Behe and His New Book
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow, Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence
- Woke" Comes Back to Bite the Darwinists - and They Deserve It
Michael R. Egnor, MD, is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has served as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery, and award-winning brain surgeon. He was named one of New York's best doctors by the New York Magazine in 2005. He received his medical education at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his residency at Jackson Memorial Hospital. His research on hydrocephalus has been published in journals including Journal of Neurosurgery, Pediatrics, and Cerebrospinal Fluid Research. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Hydrocephalus Association in the United States and has lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe.
Job Titles:
- Generation President of Dunn Lumber
Mike Dunn is the fourth generation president of Dunn Lumber. Mike started working after school in 1969 and has done practically every job in the company. His favorite job was buying the lumber, plywood, and other commodities, which he did for 25 years. He is the father of three married children, two of which work for the company and has year-old identical twin granddaughters. He loves boating and golf when he has time, but mostly he's found interacting with family, team members, vendors, and customers. As he's very fond of saying, "trust is hard to build and easy to lose!"
Job Titles:
- Dallas Operations Manager, Discovery Institute Dallas
Paul Chien is Professor Emeritus, University of San Francisco (2015) and he was elected Chairman of the Department of Biology twice. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California at Irvine's Department of Developmental & Cell Biology. Dr. Chien is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and has held such positions as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (CIT); Instructor of Biology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong; and a consultant to both the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory of the CIT, and the Scanning Electron Microscopy & Micro X-ray Analyst in the Biology Department of Santa Clara University, California. His work has been published in over fifty technical journals and he has spoken internationally, and on numerous occasions, from Brazil to mainland China-where he has also been involved in cooperative research programs. Dr. Chien and coworkers translated 16 ID-related books and 6 DVDs into Chinese.
Inventor Ray Kurzweil proposed in 1999 that within the next thirty years we will upload ourselves into computers as virtual persons, programs on machines
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- CSC Fellow
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
- Our Irreducibly Complex Calcium Control System
Raymond Bohlin received his Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is currently Vice-President of Vision Outreach for Probe Ministries and a Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He has lectured on more than two dozen college and university campuses, addressing origins issues as well as other science-related topics such as the environment, genetic engineering, medical ethics, and sexually transmitted diseases. Dr. Bohlin's work has been published in the Journal of Thermal Biology, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation and the Journal of Mammalogy. He is the author of The Natural Limits to Biological Change (Probe Books 1984), which he is currently revising and updating, and edited the book Creation, Evolution and Modern Science (Kregel, 2000).
Dr. Howard Glicksman, author of an extended series at Evolution News on "The Designed Body," is interviewed today by Ray Bohlin on glucose, glycogen, glucogon, insulin - all part of an extended multi-step series essential for life - an irreducibly complex series. "If students only knew how life worked," says Dr. Glicksman," … they'd quickly come to realize that when it comes to figuring out where it all came from, common sense tells us it was intelligent design, and it's the Darwinists who are suffering from an illusion."
In this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Anika Smith interviews CSC Fellow Ray Bohlin. Ray Bohlin earned his Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas and is the current Presidents of Probe Ministries. During his academic studies Bohlin developed doubts about evolution that he then explored in his book, The Natural Limits to Biological Change written in 1984. Listen as he explains his skepticism of evolution and offers advice for emerging scientific doubters of Darwin. Read More ...
Richard Dawkins has got himself in a bit of a pickle and, in an effort to wash off the brine, now appears to be in a bit of a lather. In an op-ed this morning in the L.A. Times (see here), he is at pains to distance himself from remarks he made in the newly released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Toward the end of the film, in an interview with Ben Stein at the British Museum, Dawkins confesses he has no idea how life originated on earth - nor does anyone, he admits - but, as Nobel laureate Francis Crick once theorized, it could well be explained by having been seeded here by an alien intelligence. Of course, he Read More ›
Job Titles:
- Research Professor of Science, Technology and Health at Biola University
- Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Richard Gunasekera is Research Professor of Science, Technology and Health at Biola University, and holds professorships in Biological Sciences and Biochemistry. He has enjoyed a 20-year career in higher education as Professor and a scientist in the field of Biochemical Genetics and Forensic Science. He earned his bachelor's in biochemistry at Baylor University, a master's degree in bio-organic chemistry from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, a master's in molecular genetics and a doctorate in Biomedical Sciences at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. He has held faculty and research positions at Rice University in Houston, Texas A&M University Health Science Center, and the University of Houston-Victoria. His research now spans several interdisciplinary fields such as biochemical genetics, nanomedicine, forensic science, and cancer biology. Gunasekera's work is focused on using nanomedicine to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses which he conducts with collaborators such as Dr. James Tour and others at his home institution. He has recently published molecular findings regarding the SARS CoV-2 virus and potential prevention methodologies of COVID-19 that were cited by WHO-related investigators early in the pandemic. Richard and his wife Nisha have two children.
Job Titles:
- Back - to - School Special Offer: Order Discovering ID Curriculum and Get Two Free DVDs
- Director of Communications, Center for Science & Culture
- He Has Been Vindicated by the Leading Scientific Publications in the World
- New Infographic "the Science of ID: Biochemistry" Beautifully Showcases ID 's Use of Scientific Method
- Well I'Ll Be a Monkey 's Uncle Er, I Mean Nephew Science and Human Origins 2 Biology Book for Kindle
Robert Crowther holds a BA in Journalism with an emphasis in public affairs and 20 years experience as a journalist, publisher, and brand marketing and media relations specialist. From 1994-2000 he was the Director of Public and Media Relations for Discovery Institute overseeing most aspects of communications for each of the Institute's major programs. In addition to handling public and media relations he managed the Institute's first three books to press, Justice Matters by Roberta Katz, Speaking of George Gilder edited by Frank Gregorsky, and The End of Money by Richard Rahn.
In 2000 he took a position as a brand strategist at Parker LePla in Seattle and helped manage marketing and brand communications for a number of non-profit organizations and corporations including Seattle Children's Home, Wild Tangent, Group Health, Bastyr University, and IDX Technologies.
In 2003 Crowther returned to Discovery Institute to take over as Director of Communications for the Center for Science & Culture. He oversees public and social media relations for the Institute's work on the debate over evolution.
In addition to researching and writing on the debate over evolution, Crowther has written on generational studies and was co-founder, and senior fellow, of the Generational Inquiry Group, a virtual think-tank conducting and disseminating research on political and cultural issues from a generational perspective.
His writing on a number of issues has been published in The Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The New York Times, Wolrdnetdaily.com, San Angelo Standard Times, Tacoma News Tribune, Whistleblower Magazine, LTM Newsletter, City Magazine, Insight Out, Cityheat, Business Unusual, and Computer Wave. He also twice successfully published his own magazine the first focusing on the intersection of music and culture, and later one looking at technology and culture.
On this episode of ID the Future, Rob Crowther continues his conversation with J. Scott Turner, biologist at the State University of New York (SUNY), visiting scholar at Cambridge University, and author of the new book Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. Turner critiques evolutionary biology's bias toward mechanistic and gene-centric thinking, and contemporary biology's failure to come to grips with the evidence of purpose and intentionality at many levels of biology. Viewing the brain as a computer, for example, obscures many things about the brain and the mind that exceed computers, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Job Titles:
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Robert Lowry Clinton received his Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently professor emeritus in the department of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which he chaired from 2004 until 2012. Dr. Clinton has published two books and numerous articles in periodicals such as First Things, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the Journal of Supreme Court History. In 2001, he gave a nationally-televised address at the U. S. Supreme Court. In 2007-2008, he was William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.
In God and Man in the Law: The Foundations of Anglo-American Constitutionalism, which ranges widely over the fields of Anglo-American constitutional and legal history, natural law theory, political philosophy, and theology. Dr. Clinton contends that a theistic, God-centered Constitution is more compatible with the American constitutional tradition than the agnostic, human-centered Constitution that has been developed more recently by the American judiciary. Dr. Clinton is now working on a book challenging scientific naturalism and its implications for social and political science.
Job Titles:
- Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth & Poverty
Job Titles:
- Professor at State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences
Scott Turner is a biologist and physiologist, a professor at State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry and visiting professor at Cambridge. In this episode, Rob Crowther interviews him about his new book Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something Alive and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed To Explain It. Turner argues that modern Darwinism has reached a scientific dead end, unable to tell us what life is, treats many of its features - including purpose and desire - virtually as illusions. There's a better way to view life, says Turner.
Job Titles:
- Founder and President of the Skip & Susan Gilliland Foundation
Skip Gilliland, Founder and President of The Skip & Susan Gilliland Foundation, joined the Discovery Institute board in 2008. He is the co-founder of Geodax Technology, Inc., a nuclear medicine technology company based in Greensboro, North Carolina. Mr. Gilliland served as the company's Chief Technical Officer from its founding in 1985 until 2004. In 2001, the company was named by the Triad Business Journal (a local business and trade publication) as one of the fastest growing companies in the region. Prior to founding Geodax, Mr. Gilliland worked for the Carolina Power & Light Company in its nuclear power generation division.
CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher is blunt about the cause: Machine learning "doesn't live up to the hype"
Job Titles:
- Author of Darwin 's Doubt
- Director, Center for Science & Culture
Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design became a national bestseller, provoking a wide-ranging debate about the adequacy of Darwinian theory to explain life's history. In Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied, leading scholars in the intelligent design community respond to critiques of Meyer's book and show that the core challenge posed by Meyer remains unanswered.
Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Darwin's Doubt, talks about a significant discovery in China of tiny sponges in the pre-Cambrian layer of the fossil record. Having studied these fossils alongside Chinese paleontologist and Cambrian explosion scholar Jun-Yuan Chen, biologist Paul Chien describes the technique used to analyze the sponge embryos' complexity. Excerpted from Illustra Media's film, Darwin's Dilemma - http://www.darwinsdilemma.org/.
Job Titles:
- Academic Mentoring Centers Coordinator
- Senior Fellow and Academic Mentoring Centers Coordinator
Stephen Dilley (Ph.D., philosophy) is the Academic Mentoring Centers Coordinator and Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Prior to joining Discovery, Dr. Dilley was a professor for 14 years at St. Edward's University (Austin, TX). His teaching and research centered on the history and philosophy of biology, with special attention given to methodological naturalism and the role of theology in the justification of evolutionary theory. Publication-wise, Dr. Dilley is editor of Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism (Lexington Books) and co-editor of Human Dignity in Bioethics (Routledge). He has published essays in British Journal for the History of Science, The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and elsewhere. Dr. Dilley has also presented his work at a variety of conferences, including meetings of History of Science Society, American Philosophical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Political Science Association, and the like.
Job Titles:
- Director of Finance & Operations
Job Titles:
- President
- Celebrates Its 25 Year History
- DI President
- Institute: World Changers
- Member of the Business
Steven J. Buri was appointed President of Discovery Institute in December 2011. He joined the Institute in April 2000 as Executive Director and was named Vice President in 2005.
Mr. Buri has served in various capacities in government at the local, state and federal levels. From 1996-1998, Steve was a senior staff member to U.S. Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), representing him in international trade, foreign policy and immigration issues. He was also active in statewide political campaigns, working with Washington State gubernatorial candidate Dale Foreman in 1996 and as Political Director for Christopher Bayley's 1998 U.S. Senate campaign.
Following the 1998 campaign, Mr. Buri co-founded Stewardship Partners with Mr. Bayley. Stewardship Partners takes a free-market approach to environmental challenges and works to bridge the gap between private landowners and those responsible for enforcing environmental laws and regulations. He served as Executive Director of the organization from 1998-2000. In 2009 he founded the Roanoke Conference, a statewide political conference designed to connect activists and elected officials with students and young professionals. In just its second year, The Seattle Times, called the conference "the must-attend event for Republicans in Washington State." The conference is held each January in Ocean Shores, Washington and attracts more than 500 attendees.
Mr. Buri is an active member of the business community in Seattle, and in Newcastle, Washington, where he served as Deputy Mayor of the city from 2010-2011 and as Mayor from 2014-2015. In his council capacity, Steve served on several regional committees including the Eastside Transportation Partnership (ETP), a group of regional leaders charged with representing the transportation needs of Eastside residents.
Discovery Institute President Steve Buri reflects on the mission of the organization in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic
In his Seattle Times op-ed, DI President Steven J. Buri reminds us to thank our fellow citizens who choose to place their names on a ballot. At a time when many Americans are fed up with politics, we should take a moment to appreciate those that aspire to public service - often at great personal sacrifice and little personal gain. Read More ...
Job Titles:
- Regional Ambassador, Center for Science and Culture
Job Titles:
- Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell
Tony Whatley grew up in Atlanta and earned both his Bachelor and Masters Degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology. All of his career was spent in the institutional investment management field. His first stint was as one of the original founders of INDATA, which relocated to San Francisco in the early 1970's. In 1976, he was recruited by Frank Russell Company and moved to the Pacific Northwest. He spent 15 years in various positions with Frank Russell rising to the Director of Sales and Marketing. In 1992, he founded Accessor Capital Management and served as the CEO of Accessor Mutual Funds until the company was sold in 2008. Since that time, Tony has served on several boards of nonprofit organizations and devoted much of his time to researching and writing about fitness and its application in promoting health and longevity.
Job Titles:
- Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Walter L. Bradley received his B.S. degree in Engineering Science (Physics) in 1965 and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1968, both from the University of Texas (Austin). He subsequently taught at the Colorado School of Mines as an Assistant/Associate Professor of Metallurgical Engineering for 8 years, at Texas A&M University as Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering for 24 years, and for 10 years at Baylor University as a Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research area has been Materials Science and Engineering, with a focus on the mechanical properties of plastics and polymeric (plastic) composite materials, fracture and life prediction. He has received more than $7 million in research funding (NSF, AFOSR, DOD, NASA , 10 fortune 500 companies) and published more than 150 refereed technical papers and book chapters. He has been honored by the American Society for Materials as an elected FELLOW of ASM in 1993. The Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) honored him with a career-contributions award as the Educator of the Year for the US, Canada, and England in 2011. His most recent work has focused on converting agricultural waste into functional fillers for engineering plastics to provide new economic opportunities for poor farmers in developing countries.
Dr. Bradley has also explored polymeric issues related to the origin of life, co-authoring The Mystery of Life: Reassessing Current Theories (Philosophical Library, 1984) and articles in the journals The Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 18 (1988) and the American Biology Teacher, Vol. 55 (No.2), February 1993, pp. 78-83.
Job Titles:
- Artificial Intelligence Understands by Not Understanding
- Conservation of Information - the Idea
- Conservation of Information - the Theorems
- Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos
- How Does Worldview Differ from Cultural Environment
- How Is the Intelligent Design Movement Doing
- Information All the Way Down
- NFTs the Reinvention of Property
- the Design of Life / Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems
- Why Influence Matters More Than People Realize / How Do We Go from Defending Ourselves to Persuading Others
On today's ID the Future, philosopher William Dembski and host Casey Luskin explore the relationship between science and faith. What is science? What is faith? How does Christianity define faith? Dembski explains that faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition is not the opposite of reason; at the same time, faith possesses a relational component-trust in a just, gracious, and reasonable God-that goes beyond mere assent to propositions. As for science, Dembski describes it as a careful search for truths about the natural world, including truths about key elements such as the birth of our fine-tuned universe and the origin of living things. Dembski says that he is convinced that scientific discoveries, unshackled from atheistic blinders, point strongly to intelligent design as Read More › Read More ...
On today's ID the Future intelligent design pioneer William Dembski tells the story of his rocky journey into and out of higher education, the reasons for his sabbatical from the ID movement, his recent success as an entrepreneur, and his return to intelligent design work. Along the way Dembski bats down a mistaken rumor about his sabbatical. The occasion for his conversation with host Casey Luskin is the recent anthology Dembski and Luskin contributed to and helped edit, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions about Life and the Cosmos. Read More ...
Today's ID the Future features Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour and intelligent design pioneer William Dembski discussing information theory, information as a meaningful reduction of possibilities, Shannon information versus specified information, and how natural selection has come to function as a God substitute for many scientists, despite the lack of evidence. The conversation is borrowed, with permission, from Dr. Tour's Science & Faith podcast. Read More ...
On this episode of ID the Future, hear the second segment of William Dembski's recent appearance on the Gilmore and Glahn radio show. Dembski and Gilmore discuss whether or not intelligent design is science, and what the theory's current status is among scientists. Read More ...
A mathematician and philosopher, Bill Dembski is the author/editor of more than 20 books as well as the writer of peer-reviewed articles spanning mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and theology. A past philosophy professor, he retired in 2014 from active research and teaching in intelligent design (ID) to focus on the connections between freedom, technology, and education - specifically, how education helps to advance human freedom with the aid of technology. Bill Dembski is presently an entrepreneur who builds educational software and websites. He lives near Denton, Texas.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Senior Research Scientist
- Software Engineer
Winston Ewert is a software engineer and intelligent design researcher. He received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from Trinity Western University, a Master's Degree from Baylor University in Computer Science, and a PhD from Baylor University in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His specializes in computer simulations of evolution, specified complexity, information theory, and the common design of genomes. He is a Senior Research Scientist at Biologic Institute, a Senior Researcher at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, and a Fellow of the Bradley Center.