Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Poor Charles Darwin. He was a kind, gentle soul--decent to a fault, some have said--yet he keeps getting cast as the Antichrist. The latest equation of Darwinism with godlessness comes in Ohio, where some members of the state school board want to downgrade the theory of natural selection in the biology curriculum guidelines. If their effort succeeds, Darwin's theory would have to share the blackboard with a school of thought called "intelligent design theory." Boosters of intelligent design--ID, for short--hope this triumph would be the first step toward restoring a spiritual dimension to our understanding...
...just creationism in disguise. If so, it's a good disguise. Creationists believe that God made current life-forms from scratch. The ID movement takes no position on how life got here, and many adherents believe in evolution. Some even grant a role to the evolutionary engine posited by Darwin: natural selection. They just deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum...
...Darwin anticipated such doubts, and admitted in The Origin of Species that the eye at first seems to imply an intelligent designer. But then he traced a scenario for the step-by-step evolution of a mere "nerve sensitive to light" into a "living optical instrument...
...doubts in new bottles. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, invented the label "irreducibly complex" for structures that could not have arisen incrementally. And rather than dwell on the eyeball, he applies the term to such microscopic entities as the human blood-clotting mechanism. In his book Darwin's Black Box, Behe says this mechanism, involving more than a dozen proteins, could hardly have emerged full-blown in a single mutation. Yet it couldn't have been built one protein at a time, he says, because without any one protein it would be useless...
...board member Florrie Darwin argued that the tunnel allows more of the structures’ space to be below ground, so neighbors can look at shorter buildings...