“It actually is a hybrid,” said Judy McLinton, a spokeswoman for the Northwest Territories’ environment and natural resources department in Yellowknife.

Jim Martell, 65, who paid 50,000 Canadian dollars (45,000 US dollars) to hunt Polar bears, shot the animal, described by local media as a “pizzly”, a “grolar bear”, or Martell’s favorite, a “polargrizz” on April 16.

The Idaho native told The National Post: “Everybody thought it was a Polar bear, and then they started looking more and more and they seen other features that resembled some of a Grizzly as well.”

The bear had thick, creamy white fur, typical of Polar bears, but its long claws, humped back and shallow face, as well as brown patches around its eyes, nose, back and on one foot are Grizzly traits.

Geneticists have linked the two species. They believe Grizzly bears ventured north some 250,000 years ago to hunt seals and that their fur turned white over time. Thus, the Polar bear was born.

Odd couples have produced mixed offspring in captivity.

But this is the first discovery of this mixed breed in the wild, officials said.

The two species mate at different times of the year and inhabit vastly different regions — one lives on Arctic ice floes, the other in forests.

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For those looking to see if ID returns false positives (ASSUMING that indeed there is additional CSI involved in this immunity, which is apparently unknown at this time).

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0602382103v1

Spontaneous regression/complete resistance (SR/CR) mice resist very high doses of cancer cells that are lethal to WT mice even at low doses. In this study, we show that this resistance is mediated by rapid infiltration of leukocytes, mostly of innate immunity, in both primary and repeated challenges. Formation of rosettes with infiltrating natural killer cells, neutrophils, and macrophages was required for the subsequent destruction of cancer cells through rapid cytolysis. Highly purified natural killer cells, macrophages, and neutrophils from the SR/CR mice independently killed cancer cells in vitro. The independent killing activity by each subset of effector cells is consistent with the observation that the resistance was abolished by depleting total infiltrating leukocytes but not by depleting only one or two subsets of leukocytes. The resistance was completely transferable to WT recipient mice through SR/CR splenocytes, bone marrow cells, or enriched peritoneal macrophages, either for prevention against subsequent cancer challenges or eradication of established malignancy at distant sites.

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Here is an email I just received. See my recommended list below: Dear Professor Dembski: My name is SNIP. I am a doctoral student in the philosophy program at SNIP. I am writing to you because I have recently become interested in some of the arguments being put forth under the intelligent design banner, but there is, what seems to me to be a vast amount of literature springing up, and I’m finding it difficult to navigate through it all. Since there’s so much hostility to the view, I’m not really comfortable discussing the topic with most of the folks in my department. The last thing I need right now is to be labeled as a “fanatic” of some sort. Read More ›

[This from a colleague at a major research institution addressed to Michael Behe and me:] I never cease to be amazed, but not surprised, at how blind scientists are to their own prejudices. I have followed your paths of dealing with these prejudices and, as have many others, I have had my share of encounters with intellectual bigots. Within a week of my joining the staff at the SNIP SNIP Research Institute (SSRI) in [jan-dec, 2003-4-5], my removal was called for by a sizable group of the research staff who had discovered (by doing a Google search) that in 2001-2-3 when I was at the SNIP Center, I had signed the Discovery Institute statement questioning Darwin’s theory of origins [go Read More ›

Question: What qualifications does one need to debunk ID? Here are Hunter Rawlings’s: “Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Rawlings was a 1966 graduate of Haverford College, with honors in classics, and received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1970. His scholarly publications include a book, The Structure of Thucydides’ History (Princeton University Press, 1981).” (ref)

Intelligent Design and the Place of Religiously-based Ideas in American Politics
By Hunter Rawlings III
Mr. Rawlings is the President of Cornell University. The following article was first delivered in the form of a lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

—————–
Evangelical Protestantism has in recent years become ever more potent in American public life, while the voices of secular humanists become ever more strident in their reaction to religious rhetoric. This is a badly polarized state of affairs, as we have recently seen in national debates over the case of Terry Schiavo, abortion, stem cell research, and the opposition of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. What is the right way out of this polarized situation?
—————–

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most moving and probably the most significant speech in American history, his Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln used his presidential platform to give an anguished rumination on the purposes of the Almighty and the consequences for Americans, in both North and South, of practicing slavery. The Second Inaugural is, as many have pointed out, essentially a sermon. Its biblical, indeed prophetic rhetoric has had a powerful effect upon all subsequent Presidential speechmaking, which struggles, never successfully, to emulate it. In spite of our constitutional separation of church and state, America’s chief executives rarely deliver a major address without a direct appeal to God.

In that same epochal year of 1865, Ezra Cornell and A.D. White founded Cornell University as a new kind of American institution of higher learning. Unlike its predecessors like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia, Cornell was to be a nonsectarian university, “an asylum for Science,” as President White wrote, “where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, where it shall not be the main purpose of the Faculty to stretch or cut science exactly to fit ‘Revealed Religion.. ..'” Read More ›

John Brockman, the literary agent par excellence for materialist scientists intent on making their materialism available to the wider public, has finally put together the anti-ID collection to best all anti-ID collections.

Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockman

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/it06/it06_index.html.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction —John Brockman
Publisher & Editor, Edge; Editor, What We Believe but Cannot Prove

In some ways, the media chatter provoked by the intelligent-design movement has made collective fools of large segments of the American public. Educated Americans are dumbstruck by the attempt of the state of Kansas to officially redefine science to include the supernatural. Europeans cannot believe that such an argument should be raging in the twenty-first century—and in the United States, of all places, the seat of our most advanced technology and a leader in so many areas of scientific research.

Intelligent Design: The Faith the Dare Not Speak Its Name —Jerry Coyne
Evolutionary Biologist; Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author (with H. Allen Orr), Speciation

Not only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory.

The Good Fight — Leonard Susskind
Physicist, Stanford University; Author, The Cosmic Landscape

I suspect there is more at stake than biology textbooks in Kansas. As a longtime observer of the science-government-politics triangle, it looks to me as if there is another hidden agenda: to discredit the legitimate scientific community. A well-respected scientific community can be a major inconvenience if one is trying to ignore global warming, or build unworkable missile-defense systems, or construct multibillion-dollar lasers in the unlikely hope of initiating practicable nuclear fusion.

The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How it Was Perpetrated — Daniel C. Dennett
Philosopher; University Professor, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Breaking the Spell

Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.

Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite — Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, Seeing Red

So, here’s the irony. Belief in special creation will very likely encourage believers to lead biologically fitter lives. Thus one of the particular ways in which consciousness could have won out in evolution by natural selection could have been precisely by encouraging us to believe that we have not evolved by natural selection….Anyone for “natural creationism”?

Human Evolution: The Evidence — Tim D. White
Paleontologist, and U.C. Berkeley Professor; Co-director, the Middle Awash project, the world’s largest and most successful scientific research effort into human origins and evolution.

A denial of evolution — however motivated — is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance.

The “Great” Transition — Neil H. Shubin
Evolutionary Biologist, University of Chicago; Specialist in the evolutionary synthesis of expeditionary paleontology, developmental genetics, and genomics

When we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn’t clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life — a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. (see excerpt below)

Intelligent Aliens — Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor’s Tale

Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity. Read More ›

Where does this “hole” come from?

Hint: Read More ›

Thanks to Uncommon Descent subscriber Mats for the heads up. Tell all the doctors you know! Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS WHO DISSENT FROM DARWINISM As medical doctors we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the origination and complexity of life and we therefore dissent from Darwinian macroevolution as a viable theory. This does not imply the endorsement of any alternative theory. Sadly, academic freedom is no longer assured in America and other countries. This is especially true when it involves espousing views contrary to the theory of Darwinian macroevolution. Numerous instances have been documented where scientists and teachers have been censored and even removed Read More ›

Here’s my latest contribution to The Mathematical Foundations of Intelligent Design: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2006.05.conservation_of_information.pdf. It’s still a bit rough. I’ll be revising it shortly. [Version 1.1 is now out, 6may06. –WmAD]

The magazine who made these men “Man of the Year”

1938 – Adolf Hitler
1939 – Joseph Stalin
1942 – Joseph Stalin
1957 – Nikita Krushchev
1979 – Ayatullah Khomeini

now brings you Judge John Jones as a 2006 Honorable (pun intended) Mention.

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Somebody, anybody, please put this theory out of its misery. Evolutionary biologists have traced the origins of laughter back 4m years to pre-humans slipping and stumbling in their first faltering attempts to walk on two legs. According to the theory, when they saw a member of their group lose his footing they would laugh as a sign to each other that something was amiss, but nothing too serious. The theory could explain why, to this day, the ungainly walk remains a staple element of slapstick humour from John Cleese’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” to Rowan Atkinson’s accident-prone Mr Bean. . . . http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2157946_1,00.html

Your tax dollars at work: . . . The constant, unanswered assault on evolution is harmful to science and science education. ID and its progeny rely on supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. Yet all of science education and practice rests on the principle that phenomena can be explained only by natural, reproducible, testable forces. Teaching our students otherwise disables the very critical thinking they must have in order to be scientists and is a fundamental distortion of the scientific process. ID is therefore not simply an assault on evolution: it is an assault on science itself. ID groups have threatened and isolated high school science teachers. Well-organized curricular challenges to local school boards place teachers in the difficult position of Read More ›

There is no conflict between institutionally objective science and religion.

Remarks of John H. Calvert, Esq.
Presented on April 29, 2006, at the Northern District of California Judicial Conference Litigating Morality

I wish to think the organizers for the invitation. But also I would like to applaud them for including this item on the agenda. In my view the decision tree about religion, ethics, morals and even government, starts with a very simple question: “Are we designs or occurrences?” The question we are addressing today is how should science and government respond to it? Should they deal with it objectively or should they prejudge the question and permit only one of the two competing possibilities? Along these lines this panel has been asked to address the current conflict between science and religion, particularly in the area of origins.

I don’t believe there is a conflict between institutionally objective origins science and religion. That kind of science objectively seeks an inference to the best current explanation using the scientific method. It is a quest for more reliable explanations, not pre-ordained ones. This kind of science should not conflict with any religion because it is the weight of the evidence, not bias, that drives explanation.

The conflict arises when science abandons this approach, particularly in an area of science that unavoidably impacts religion – science that seeks to investigate and explain the origin of life and its diversity. Where do we come from? As explained recently by Cardinal Christopher Schönborn, this question is key to the formation of our world views. This is because what we believe about where we come from is INSEPARABLE from what we believe about where we should be going.

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[From a colleague:] Any UD readers in the NYC area may want to attend this June 6 seminar on ID at St Bartholomew’s Church (Episcopal) in Manhattan: http://www.religionnews.com/press02/PR050206.html Scroll down to see the event details; information is also available here: http://www.stbarts.org/cri.htm#moral Two of the speakers are Marc Kirschner (Systems Biology, Harvard), whose book with John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, addresses ID critically, and Robert Pollack (Columbia Univ), whose book Signs of Life talked in detail about the parallels between DNA and language. Pollack, a geneticist, now runs a religion-and-science program at Columbia: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/faculty/pollack Don’t miss a really amazing paragraph on Kirschner’s Harvard webpage: “Organizing Space and Time: In the development of an organism, as in the theater, timing is Read More ›

Intelligent Design by Cesium-137 (thanks to Joe Manzari for alerting me to this development.)