Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, the nation lost not only its 39th president but also a prominent born-again Christian who accepted evolution. In chapter 5 of his 2005 book Our Endangered Values , entitled “No Conflict Between Science and Religion,” Carter insisted, “The existence of millions of distant galaxies, the evolution of species, and the big bang theory cannot be rejected because they are not described in the Bible, and neither does confidence in them cast doubt on the Creator of it all.” Yet in the late 1980s, he proposed a creationist argument to no less a figure than the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould — whose rebuttal, surprisingly, was inadequate.

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Back in 2020, the Kentucky State Police (KSP) were embroiled in a controversy after it was discovered that a training PowerPoint presentation quoted Adolf Hitler and advocated ruthless violence. In spite of this horrendous exception, the Kentucky State Police is well-respected and noted for their professionalism and devotion to duty. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the KSP paid Answers in Genesis (AIG) to send an officer on a K9 training class on February 1 to 4, 2025, at the Ark Encounter. Besides K9 training, the class included Fundamentalist Christian and Christian Nationalist propaganda. With the government agencies and politicians increasingly becoming entangled Christian Nationalism, this incident is particularly disturbing.

On February 7, 2025, Ken Ham bragged in his daily blog that the AIG Department of Public Safety had hosted numerous law enforcement organizations in K9 training at the Ark. Photos indicated a Kentucky State Police officer was there with his vehicle, as were several other regional law enforcement agencies. Moreover, an organization known as TACTICA Ministries (Teaching Authorities Christian Truth in Central America) was also present. My curiosity was immediately piqued by the presence of the KSP trooper. The questions I immediately had were, “Why is a major law enforcement organization being trained by AIG?” and “Why isn’t AIG going to a major organization like the KSP for training instead?”

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The eminent physicist R.W. Wood is well remembered for his work Physical Optics, published in 1911. I always had a paperback handy and used it well into the 1990’s. In 1907, Wood published How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers, A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners, illustrated by the author. His discussion of the puffin follows:

Upon this cake of ice is perched,

The paddle-footed Puffin

To find his double we have searched,

But have discovered—Nuffin!

The puffin is the only creature in the book that has no double.

William Dembski has recently made two posts (on January 10 and on January 20) at Evolution News, the advocacy site of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He describes them as sections of a paper he submitted to the DI’s house journal BIO-Complexity. The paper was not immediately accepted, he said, and in the meantime he wanted to post the sections at EN.

As Dembski declares in the preface to the first of these posts, their argument in these posts is, in effect, that

Conservation of information is a big result of the intelligent design literature, even if to date it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It quantifies the amount of information needed to increase the probability of finding a needle in a haystack so that the needle can actually be found. The upshot of conservation of information is that the information needed to find a needle in a haystack in turn requires finding another needle in a haystack, implying there is no free lunch in search.

In Dembski’s account, when evolutionary biologists argue that processes such as natural selection can put adaptive information into the genome, they are failing to explain where the information comes from. They are building it into their evolutionary algorithms as a detailed goal, and not informing the reader that they have done that. The biologists’ argument has thus simply displaced the question, not answered it. Dembski’s first post is illustrated by an illustration of the Shell Game, to label the argument of evolutionary biologists as a dishonest trick.

Actually, the two posts leave Dembski’s argument no further than it was some years ago. We can deal with it without going into great detail, because we have seen these arguments before. Let’s ask, and answer, some brief questions as to what was accomplished:

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