The (remade) video below contains the whole shameful story of the treatment my Applied Mathematics Letters paper has received from AML, Springer and The Mathematical Intelligencer. In this paper, and in my reply to Bob Lloyd’s Mathematical Intelligencer piece, whose primary target was this unpublished AML paper, I did not conclude that the second law has been violated by what has happened on Earth, only that you cannot use the widely used but absurd “compensation” argument to claim that it has not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRLSwVRdNes The fundamental natural principle behind the second law is that natural (unintelligent) forces do not do macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view, so you can’t say, as Styer and many Read More ›

An interesting article in SciTechDaily reports on a new study describing “a biological transistor that is made from genetic material (DNA and RNA) in place of gears or electrons.” From the article, When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations. And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper published March 28 in Science, the team details a biological transistor made from genetic Read More ›

Here’s what we read in this PhysOrg blurb: It may seem logical, but the surprising part of this finding is how universal it is. “It is almost expected that the frequency of usage of any component is correlated with how many other components depend on it,” said Maslov. “But we found that we can determine the number of crucial components – those without which other components couldn’t function – by a simple calculation that holds true both in biological systems and computer systems.” For both the bacteria and the computing systems, take the square root of the interdependent components and you can find the number of key components that are so important that not a single other piece can get Read More ›

The following reply by Optimus to KN in the TSZ thread, is far too good not to headline as an excellent summary of the case for design as a scientifically legitimate view, not mere  “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo”  ideology motivated and driven by anti-materialism and/or a right-wing, theocratic, culture war mentality commonly ascribed to “Creationism” by its objectors: ______________ >> KN It’s central to the ideological glue that holds together “the ID movement” that the following are all conflated:Darwin’s theories; neo-Darwinism; modern evolutionary theory; Epicurean materialistic metaphysics; Enlightenment-inspired secularism. (Maybe I’m missing one or two pieces of the puzzle.) In my judgment, a mind incapable of making the requisite distinctions hardly deserves to be taken seriously. I think your Read More ›

An interesting new study has just been published in PLoS Biology on the subject of the remarkable signal transduction circuity responsible for the process of bacterial chemotaxis (a subject that has long fascinated me) and the switching of flagellar rotation direction. The paper is entitled “HAMP Domain Conformers That Propagate Opposite Signals in Bacterial Chemoreceptors,” and the authors provide the following summary: A central question in biological signal transduction is how cell-surface receptors transmit signals from the outside world across cell membranes and into the cells themselves. In bacteria and lower eukaryotes such receptors are composed of individual modules responsible for specific functions (e.g., sensing, relay, or output). HAMP domains act as the signal relay modules in many receptors, physically bridging input Read More ›

Over at Evolution News & Views, Stephen Meyer’s forthcoming game-changing new book on the Cambrian explosion and the origins of evolutionary novelty is announced. From the article, We’ve been keeping something from you, dear readers, but now it can be told. The evolution debate is about to undergo a paradigm shift. Darwin’s Origin of Species launched a revolution whose scientific, cultural and spiritual effects are still with us. Now a new revolution is on the horizon. On June 18, the HarperOne imprint of HarperCollins will publish Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, by Stephen C. Meyer. The book’s official website is now live. Go there to pre-order your copy now — do so by April 30th, Read More ›

Phinehas asks Neil Rickert a fascinating question about the supposed direction of evolution.  Neil says he will address it in a separate thread, and I started this one for that purpose.  The rest of the post is Phenehas’ question to Neil: @Neil I also appreciate the professional tone. I am a skeptic regarding what evolution can actually accomplish. In keeping with your demonstrated patience, I’d be grateful if you would give serious consideration to something that keeps tripping me up. I’ve often thought of natural selection as the heuristic to random mutations’ exhaustive search. A path-finding algorithm can be aided in finding a path from point A to point B by using distance to B as a heuristic to narrow Read More ›

For those of you who do not know, some months ago Elizabeth Liddle started the website known as The Skeptical Zone (TSZ). The site has a sort of symbiotic relationship with UD, because many, if not most, of the posts there key off our posts here. Not only does TSZ have a name that invokes a skeptical turn of mind, it also has a motto apparently intended to bolster that attitude: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” The motto is taken from Oliver Cromwell’s August 5, 1650 letter to the synod of the Church of Scotland urging them to break their alliance with royalist forces. Now with a name and a motto like that, one might Read More ›

Soft-bodied worms from the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada have been known for over 100 years. They are known by the name Spartobranchus tenuis and are considered one of the most abundant species in the Walcott Quarry community. However, only recently has a detailed examination of their characteristics been made, leading to the conclusion that they are ancient examples of acorn worms. One member of the research team was Christopher Cameron from the University of Montreal, who studies modern-day acorn worms. Identifying the fossils was not problematic: “Spartobranchus is clearly an acorn worm,” he said in an interview. “It’s almost like someone took a picture of a modern-day animal – it’s absolutely astonishing.” These Read More ›

For the Darwinists “evolution” by natural selection is what created all the species. Since they are used to say that evolution is well scientifically established as gravity, and given that Newton’s mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theory, which deal with gravitation, are plenty of mathematical equations whose calculations pretty well match with the data, one could wonder how many equations there are in evolutionary theory, and how well they compute the biological data related to the Darwinian creation.   As known, Darwin introduced no math whatsoever in his theory of origin of species. Darwin hated math (not by chance). Therefore one had to wait for few XX century mathematicians before seeing some math in evolutionary theory. It is specifically in population Read More ›

I need a picture of a small, hot-blooded mammal taunting an irritable dinosaur. An animation would be even better: the dinosaur would have a tic which makes him roar ‘IDiot’ constantly. Maybe make that several small mammals, becoming dozens and then hundreds. Singing something witty to the hamster dance. Or maybe not that last bit. Larry Moran has sort-of replied to my previous blogpost but disappoints with only one substantive point. And even that one point is wrong: ID is not committed to the idea that individual genomes be well-designed; that is just an expectation some of us derive based on belief in a designer which is established on other evidence. ID would still be true if only globular proteins Read More ›

You probably remember that an organism’s DNA is collectively referred to as the genome and that it contains genes that code for proteins. What you may not know is that the genome is tagged here and there with small molecules helping to determine which genes to express. These small molecules are collectively referred to as the epigenome and one recent study found a tremendous variation between the epigenomes in the same species of plant collected from different locations around the world. As one researcher explained:  read more

Here at UD, comment exchanges can be very enlightening. In this case, in the recent Quote of the Day thread, two of the best commenters at UD — and yes, I count KN as one of the best, never mind that we often differ — have gone at it (and, Box, your own thoughts — e.g. here — were quite good too ). Let’s lead with Box: Box, 49: [KN,] your deep and important question *how do parts become integrated wholes?* need to be answered. And when the parts are excluded from the answer, we are forced to except the reality of a ‘form’ that is not a part and that does account for the integration of the parts. Read More ›