2006

What is the survival and reproductive value of a perfect memory? Let me guess: the woman “AJ” described in the article below also has an uncanny ability to attract mates and has given birth to numerous offspring — all on account of her prodigious memory!

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

Updated 11:50 PM ET March 24, 2006

ABC News.com http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pub&dt=060324&cat=scitech&st=scitechdyehard_woman_memory_060320&src=abc

James McGaugh is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he’s stumped.

McGaugh’s journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

“This is real,” he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren’t a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started. Read More ›

My name is Barry Arrington. I am an attorney in Denver, Colorado specializing in complex litigation and constitutional law. My passion is defending constitutional liberties, especially those guaranteed by the First Amendment. I am also very interested in Darwinism’s connection to the law. How, you might ask, is a theory of biological origins connected to the law? Good question. I will answer it by recounting an email I sent not long ago to Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things. I am a great fan of FT and think Mr. Bottum does a great job as editor, but recently he went seriously astray in a post on FT’s blog when he suggested we should deemphasize the debate over Darwinism because Read More ›

Do viruses exploit cells or do cells also exploit viruses? Viruses may have varying roles that we have hardly begun to discover. This conviction is likely to grow stronger as the evidence for the ubiquity and density of viruses in nature accumulates. ‘Coinage’ of plankton — viruses BOSTON, March 24 (UPI) — Sea experiments show there’s a constant shuffling of genetic endowments among tiny plankton, say Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers. The “coinage” the plankton use seems to be a flood of viruses, says researcher Sally W. Chisholm. The MIT team is uncovering a new facet of evolution that may help scientists see how photosynthesizing microbes manage to exploit changing conditions such as altered light, temperature and nutrients. “We are Read More ›

there still remain unanswered many fundamental questions about nature….nothing should be prohibited as a legitimate subject of science, and excluding the supernatural out of hand serves no useful purpose.

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Thanks to MatS for bringing this to my attention in a comment here. I thought it deserved more exposure so here it is.

For your convenience here’s a sample letter from one of the newest heretics: Read More ›

Lynn Barton, college educated home-schooling ex-stock broker mother of two tells it like it is: Like a fierce game of whack-a-mole, wherever I.D.’s politically incorrect head pops up, its opponents rush to smack it back down. I am enjoying all this tremendously. What makes it so much fun to watch is that so far not one of the critics understands it. more here Note: be forwarned that the article isn’t entirely accurate technically. But it should be good fodder for discussion here.

LEGAL EXPERTS ANALYZE THE IMPACT OF THE DOVER INTELLIGENT DESIGN TRIAL DECISION IN THE NEW BOOK, “TRAIPSING INTO EVOLUTION”

Traipsing Into Evolution is the first published critique of federal Judge John E. Jones’s decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, the foremeost trial to attempt to address the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. In this concise yet comprehensive response, Discovery Institute scholars and attorneys expose how Judge Jones’s Kitzmiller decision was based upon faulty reasoning, non-existent evidence, and an elementary misunderstanding of intelligent design theory.

For more information visit www.discovery.org/csc/traipsing.

Despite Jones’s protestations to the contrary, his attempts to use the federal bench to declare evolution a sacred cow–unquestionable in schools and fundamentally compatible with all “true” religion–are exposed by these critical authors as a textbook case of good-old-American judicial activism.

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Look at this. I suggest in no uncertain terms that threatening anyone or anything because of their political, religious, scientific, or any other belief is NOT acceptable behavior and should not be tolerated by anyone, especially on this blog. Origins, Darwinism, ID, etc. are all complex, highly scientific topics with implications beyond science that are contentious, at a minimum. But being contentious does not mean they should justify violence or threats of violence. So anyone out there reading this blog: if you’re thinking of resorting to violence or even threatening violence against ID detractors, DON”T DO IT. Your actions will only result in hurting inocent people and taking the focus off of our intended target (the science of and theory Read More ›

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0600591103v1

“We analyzed a very large set of molecular interactions that had been derived automatically from biological texts. We found that published statements, regardless of their verity, tend to interfere with interpretation of the subsequent experiments and, therefore, can act as scientific “microparadigms,” similar to dominant scientific theories. Read More ›

Interesting Reading

As the result of a somewhat insensitive and politically incorrect comment I made about evolutionary anthropology here, I have been immortalized for a few minutes at scienceblogs.com. My comment was as follows: “The methods and concepts of evolutionary anthropology often consist of making up stories, presenting them as facts, and arriving at silly conclusions.” Apparently this comment struck a nerve, because the author of the article (linked below) launches into a brilliant explanation about how studying tooth enamel reveals so much about human evolution. He makes my point much more effectively than I. I’ll leave it to UD readers to be the judge. http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/03/14/what_teeth_can_tell_us_about_h/#more

Was reading the new novel “Sunstorm” by Author C. Clarke and I noticed something “interesting”.

“Okay,” Toby said. “So a rogue planet fell into the sun. It’s an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? And–with respect–what does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?”
Eugene snapped, “Are you such a fool that you can’t see it?”
Toby bit back, “Now look here–“
Siobhan grabbed his arm. “Just take us through it, Eugene. Step by step.”
Eugene visibly fought for patience. “Have you really no idea how unlikely this scenario is? Yes, there are rogue planets, formed independently of stars, or flung out of stellar systems. Yes, it may happen that such a planet could cross from one system to another. But it’s highly unlikely. The Galaxy is empty. To scale, the stars are like grains of sand, separated by kilometers. I estimate the change of a planet like this coming anywhere near our solar system as being one in a hundred thousand.
“And this Jovian didn’t just approach us–it didn’t just fall near the sun–it fell directly into the sun, on a trajectory that would take it directly toward the sun’s center of mass.” He laughed, disbelieving at their incomprehension. “The odds against such a thing are absurd. No naturalistic explanation is plausible.”
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Judge Darrell White on Cobb and Dover: http://www.americanvision.org/articlearchive/03-01-06.asp.

I know quite a few medical doctors. Some are researchers, some limit themselves to private practice, and some do both. These are men and women of all ages and specializations. Not thousands or even hundreds of them – but maybe 30 or 40. Mind you, this is only one data point from a small sampling of physicians, but it is a good one: not one of these fine people believes in Darwinian Evolution. One told me that “Any physician who doesn’t see intelligent design in even his most troubled patient is either blind or stupid or just not paying attention.” Here is an example of one doctor who is neither blind or stupid – he is paying close attention and Read More ›

Steve Rueland writes More of What We’re Up Against. Unfortunately Steve fails to assign the proper blame here. What he’s up against is a high school science teacher that failed to teach the letter writer the basic laws of physics. These are your schools, Steve. We’re trying to wrest control of the science curriculum from your ilk for failures of exactly this kind. You cannot call fairy stories of time and chance being able to create life and all living things “science” and then expect the same students to believe real physical science. Once they know science teachers tell fairy stories and pretend they’re as factual as gravity they lose all trust in science teachers. We can spoonfeed this stuff to you, Stevey, if you’d stop making faces and spitting it out.

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