evolution decline
David Klinghoffer quotes from a post by paleontologist Gunter Bechly on everyone's favorite cuddly pet, prehistoric scorpions:
In today's science world it is no longer sufficient to objectively describe some nicely preserved ancient fossils. You must overinterpret the evidence and oversell their importance with a fancy evolutionary narrative. And you do not have to hesitate to be really bold with your claims, because neither the scientific reviewers nor the popular science media will care if your claims are actually supported by the evidence. This system is broken. It was broken by the pressure to publish or perish, by the pressure of public relation departments to generate lurid headlines, and by the pressure of the idiotic paradigm that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.

David Klinghoffer, "Scientific Decadence and the Myth of Objectivity" at Evolution News and Science Today
Speaking on behalf of popular media, I (O'Leary for News, a fifty-year veteran) would say, we'd far rather media releases were supported by sound evidence. But if the paleontologists are the only source of evidence and they all think as one — and we are unable to evaluate their work independently — it's not clear what we can be expected to do about it if they inflate or misrepresent the evidence. Some reforms must come from within. We can promote reform but we can't create it.

Klinghoffer goes on to note something neurosurgeon Michael Egnor wrote yesterday:
Perhaps the most disturbing damage that the abortion lobby has done to our society — aside from the systematic killing of tens of millions of innocent human beings — is the corruption of science in the name of ideology. Nowhere is this corruption more obvious than in the misrepresentation of the neuroscience of fetal pain perception.

A new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled Reconsidering Fetal Pain (open access) is a welcome correction to the abortion lobby's systematic misrepresentation. The authors, one of whom is an abortion advocate, reviewed the literature on the perception of fetal pain and came to the conclusion that there is clear scientific evidence to support the view that unborn children feel pain as early as 13 weeks of gestation. Michael Egnor, "Abortion advocate admits in a medical journal that unborn children feel pain" at Mind Matters News
Egnor adds, "I have cared for hundreds of premature infants and it is very clear that these very young children experience pain intensely. An innocuous needlestick in the heel to draw small amount of blood would ordinarily not be particularly painful for an adult. But a tiny infant will scream at such discomfort." But, all too often, it's a silent scream among killers.

Klinghoffer also introduces Discovery Institute's new "Long Story Short" video on homology: