14 April 2025
In Wellington, we're hoping to take a trip to the Abundant Life church early next month. The church's pastor, Hamish Thomson, recently took over the running of the quarterly Prayers at Parliament meetings that myself and other skeptics have attended in the past, but this isn't why we'll be visiting. On May the 4th, in the evening, the church will be hosting guest speaker Mike Collins (no, not the astronaut who didn't land on the moon, this one's a speaker for Creation Ministries International (CMI)) giving a talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”. With a title like that, I think we'll be in for a real treat - a fairly major bending of the truth to fit a conservative religious narrative.
23 January 2024
I recently watched a debate on YouTube between Dr. Zachery Ardern and Stephen Woodford.
13 February 2023
It's 12th February as I write this. Happy Darwin Day! (And, a day before my birthday)
19 July 2021
Yes, the pandemic is still with us, and alarmingly new strains are emerging. Evolution does what evolution does.
5 June 2016
Rush Limbaugh, US radio talk show host, has used a conversation about Harambe the gorilla to argue that evolution does not work.
21 February 2016
Antonin Scalia, a conservative Supreme Court judge in the US, died this week at age 79. Scalia took some strange legal views in his time, such as this one on evolution:
7 February 2016
I went to see Creation Ministries International speaker Jonathan Sarfati give a couple of talks in Wellington last week. Jonathan was brought up in New Zealand, and was once the national chess champion.
1 August 2014
Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.
1 May 2012
On a recent visit to New Plymouth I was rather taken aback to see a billboard outside a central city church posing the question: "Evolution? How come we still have apes?" It wasn't so much surprise that someone could know so little about evolutionary theory that they would think this was a persuasive argument - versions of this are often to be seen in the less sophisticated creationist publications - it was more that they should feel the urge to display their ignorance on a busy street corner.
1 May 2009
Evolution - What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Donald R Prothero, Columbia University Press. Reviewed by Louette McInnes.
1 August 2008
Mike Palin queries the judging criteria in a recent high school science video competition.
1 August 2008
Ian Wishart is one of New Zealand's more prominent creationists. In a recent book he takes on evolutionary biology, a task for which he seems ill-equipped.
1 February 2008
In NZ Skeptic 85 Alison Campbell discusses teaching evolution in the school curriculum with particular reference to the influence of local creationist pressures opposing this as a sole 'theory'. If New Zealand Skeptics are to be true to their cause they must also take a hard look at their own basic assumptions. My concern from an informed amateur perspective is that in teaching evolution it is important to be intellectually honest to students. The fact of the development of life forms over billions of years and their gradual divergence from earlier morphological templates is beyond question to any rational inquirer even if it cannot demonstrated in the traditional hypothesis/experimental test paradigm. Furthermore, Darwin's concept of natural selection is most obviously applicable to those life forms we are most familiar with and on which he based his inductive studies. At this level of macro development for instance, some morphological changes are clearly adaptive for predation or escape, and auditory or visual cues evolve to serve the attraction of mates or camouflage. However there is still substantial debate whether this paradigm can cover all stages in the evolution of life on Earth. It is when we get to the question of the origins of life or the complex operations within a single cell that questions arise. Such intricate developments are crucial to the central concept of Neo-Darwinism.
1 November 2007
The teaching of evolution in New Zealand schools may seem secure, but it has faced many challenges, and these appear to be on the increase. This article is based on a presentation at the Evolution 2007 Conference, Christchurch.
1 November 2007
The Plausibility of Life-resolving Darwin's dilemma, by Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart. Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10865-6. Reviewed by Louette McInnes.
1 February 2007
Attacks on Darwinian evolutionary theory have come from within the scientific community as well as from creationists. Much of this is the normal process of scientific scrutiny, but some bear all the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
1 November 2006
Jim Ring finds some material to pass the time on a recent flight.
1 August 2005
Since I wrote my piece (NZ Skeptic 75) based on Bruce Flamm's article in Skeptical Inquirer concerning a research paper on the efficacy of prayer, Dr Flamm has reported 'significant development'. Lest you jump to the conclusion that the authors, journal and university have acknowledged their serious error and have retracted the paper, be at once disabused. The significance of these developments, to my mind, is their minuscule and peripheral nature; nothing has really changed. One could reasonably grant a significant development to Wirth; he pleaded guilty to a 46-page indictment and is in jail for five years. Concerning the 'lead' author, Lobo, the journal later printed, at the bottom of the back page, an Erratum, that this name had been included 'in error'. Young researchers often complain that senior colleagues insist on their names appearing on papers unjustifiably. In the topsy-turvy world of this journal, people find their names put unknowingly on papers they have had nothing to do with!
1 May 2005
<>
1 May 2004
A Waikato University website on evolution has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers, says biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell.
1 August 2002
A critique of "Walking with Beasts", by Ian Wishart, Investigate Magazine, June 2002
1 May 2002
Netsurfer Science is a website every skeptic should bookmark. It provides a good lead-in to many science and skeptic-related sites and issues on the web. Here are a couple of recent items.
1 February 1997
NZCSIOP does not take a stand against religious belief, per se, and many Christians are committed Skeptics. While Mr van der Lingen's essay may appear to contradict this stance, he is not arguing that religious belief is incompatible with being a Skeptic; he is only challenging some claims and methodologies adopted by those who take a particular set of positions regarding the relationship between evolutionary science and contemporary Christian belief.
1 August 1996
**RIVER OUT OF EDEN: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF LIFE by Richard Dawkins.
1 May 1995
We need to immunise ourselves against this virus too.
1 February 1992
Fundamentalists suffer contortions in trying to make their assumptions fit Biblical accounts.
1 November 1991
by D R Selkirk & F J Burrows; NSW University Press, 1987; 158 pp
1 May 1989
"Do you believe in science or religion?" is a not uncommon question amongst layfolk caught in the crossfire between, for example, biological and cosmological evolution, and creationism. Creationism has made one largely unrecognised major inroad: it has managed to create a broad dichotomy in the public mind, which has on the whole responded according to the "two sides to every argument" sense of fair play and concomitantly cocked an ear to proponents of the "other view". It is my assertion, however, that the very issue of "'science vs religion" is as mythical as the charming creation-stories of many a mythology in that creationists are not at all representative of "religion" in its global sense.
1 May 1988
To secure a place in American schools creationists now claim their doctrines are scientific, while evolution, on the other hand, is a 'religion'.
1 May 1988
On Sunday, 24 May, there was broadcast on the Commercial programmes a debate on Evolution-Creationism. The host was George Balani and our member, Gordon Hewitt, spoke for evolution and Dr Arthur Wilder-Smith defended creationism. This debate provided the perfect example of creationist technique in action. How do creationists do it?
1 May 1988
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana's creationism law signals trouble for fundamentalist parents in Alabama who have challenged public school textbooks on religious grounds, attorneys and educators are saying.
1 November 1987
Stephen Jay Gould, the world's best known palaeontologist, was approached by a creationist in Auckland after a lecture.