Well, either the people behind the trade journal Genome Research are creationists or the term is used by everyone else too. Genomics and Darwinism Genome Research is now accepting submissions for a special issue, entitled Genomics and Darwinism, devoted to comparative and evolutionary genomics, including primary research reporting novel insights in large-scale quantitative and population genetics, genome evolution, and natural and sexual selection. Methinks the Darwinists doth protest too much. 😆

h/t to fBast: “Ooooh, stop the presses! New thread, somebody? See: Origin of Nerves traced to Sponges, it seems that sponges don’t have nerve cells, but they know how to grow ‘em. This smacks very loudly of front-loading.”
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Abstract:

“We are pretty confident it was after the sponges split from trunk of the tree of life and sponges went one way and animals developed from the other, that nerves started to form,” said Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. “What we found in sponges though were the building blocks for nerves, something we never expected to find.” Read More ›

“New Evidence Debunks ‘Stupid’ Neanderthal Myth” chirps the ScienceDaily release:

Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens). The research team has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.

Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years. (August 26, 2008)

Now, the obvious question is, who decided that the ‘thals were dummies? They were around long enough (conventionally, from about 250 000 to about 28 000 years ago) so they must have fed themselves using their tools.

The textbook belief was in fact based on the now-rotting Tree of Life popularized by Darwin and his modern-day followers. They assumed that modern humans (homo sapiens) were “superior” to the Neanderdumbsters, and interpreted all facts about the latter to fit that view.

However, enterprising researchers from the University of Exeter, Southern Methodist University, Texas State University, and the Think Computer Corporation decided to do some investigation, so they themselves spent three years making both Neanderthal tools and Homo sapiens tools.

And guess what:

… when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes favoured by Neanderthals were more efficient than the blades adopted by Homo sapiens.

 One researcher offers various speculations about why Homo sapiens preferred tools that didn’t work as well, but the inferior intelligence of homo sapiens (hereafter saps) is not one of the options offered.

The researchers already done enough damage to the official materialist narrative for one decade.

I suggest that the next step should be this: Read More ›

Michael Dickinson reports on “a marvelous machine”: ——————-

Flies In Danger Escape With Safety Dance

” . . .Dickinson used superslow-motion video cameras to study how a fly avoids getting swatted.. . .Dickinson says a fly will typically jump off the surface and then begin to fly away from the swatter. But the high-speed cameras revealed something amazing about what happened before the fly jumped.

“They perform an elegant little ballet with their legs,” says Dickinson. “They move their legs around to reposition their bodies so that when they do jump, they will push themselves away from the looming threat.” Read More ›

A tough choice for teh environmentalist whackos if I ever saw one. Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News August 25, 2008 Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades. The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour. But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine Read More ›

Last week I posted about issues with the production of variation that Darwinists often overlook. So then, the question becomes, what is the mechanism for variation production? In a recent book, called Eight-Legged Marvels: Beauty and Design in the World of Spiders, Chad Arment invites us to examine that very question. In the introduction, Arment says:
Read More ›

“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Burt, n.d.), pp. 38-39.

Hiram Caton,  the retired Aussie political science prof who enjoys sending up the currently raging Darwin cult, writes to say that he has now drunk deep from the “clear-thinking oasis” available at Richard Dawkins’s site.

And he sends back this message to the peoples who still sit in darkness and have not yet seen the great light:

I just completed my pilgrimage to the ‘clear-thinking oasis’, as the shrine is called, the RichardDawkins.net. An inspiring, edifying experience that filled my cup with a rosary of blessings.

Marvellous portraits of Mr. Dawkins etched him indelibly on my mind. And the fulsome library of DVDs: The Enemies of Reason, the Root of All Evil, the Four Horsemen, and the most recent, The Genius of Charles Darwin, which takes novitiates into the inner sanctum–Richard Dawkins’ splendid library.

He shows us his first edition copy of The Origin of Species and whispers that it’s ‘not just the most precious book in my library, but the most precious book in the library of our species’.

I suddenly realized that it’s the TRUE holy book and that my Darwin doubts exploit the shadows between Reason and the Root of Evil, Superstition. I cleansed my mind by accepting that it’s Either/Or: Dawkins and Reason or THEM. The reward was immediate sense of exalted freedom!!

In addition to DVDs, the site offers novitiates a variety of charms and amulets that express the conversion to clear-thinking: T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs which convey the message of Dawkins’ outreach, the ‘Out campaign’ (copied from the gay/lesbian outing).

The message is simple: Look at me, I am a proud ATHEIST. Lots of potential here, like ‘I’m a SELFISH GENE’, or, ‘ABOLISH the Archbishop’. And the Four Horsemen? What or who could they be? Why none other than the Four Evangels–Dawkins, Dennett, Chris Hutchins, and Sam Harris, chatting about the evils of religion and the blessings of clear-thinking.

But wait: which one is Pestilence? which is Famine? Death? The acolyte’s acquired clear thinking is left to figure it out. Read More ›

Professor Antony Flew writes:

The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).

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http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v9/n9/pdf/nrm2472.pdf “MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are known to regulate gene expression at the level of translation, but how does this affect what proteins are produced? Two recent papers have shown that individual miRNAs can affect the expression of hundreds of proteins. One known as miR-223 seems to function as a rheostat to finely adjust protein output. Another miRNA let-7b is can fine-tune protein production from thousands of genes. Individual miRNAs can have an effect on global protein expression, and protein repression is likely to be mediated by a specific complementary sequence target region in the corresponding messenger RNA. The emerging picture is that miRNAs do not have just a small number of mRNA targets — they function at the transcriptional and translational level Read More ›

I made the following response in the commentary on another thread. Because some people thought it deserved to become an article in its own right… here it is.

Also with an apology to Jonathan Wells for calling him a “Moonie”. I had no idea it was considered by many to be derogatory. I thought it was merely a neutral descriptive like “Jehovah” or “Mormon” or “Amish”.

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Ever wonder what Science Bloggers do when they’re not science blogging? Wonder no longer. http://trends.google.com/websites?q=scienceblogs.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 Top Five Things Science Blog Readers Search For: 1. scotch tape mosquito bites 2. kate beckinsale 3. sponge bob 4. bruce lee 5. britney spears Interesting (if you’re a 12 year old). Top Five Blogs Science Blog Readers Also Visit 1. richarddawkins.net 2. catholicleague.org 3. rememberthycreator.com 4. dirtgetswet.com 5. politicalirony.com Yup. All science.

In the post below, where U Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller replies to the attempted hatchet job by third-rate Darwin hack Sahotra Sarkar, I think this point made by Fuller is especially critical:

The overarching sense of scientific progress and its concomitant faith in greater explanatory unity and increased predictive control of nature over time: All of these trade on an ID-based view of the world, in which human beings enjoy a special relationship to reality that enables us to acquire a deep knowledge, most of which affords no particular reproductive advantage and more likely puts our continued survival at risk. Armed only with a Darwinian view of the world – and without the implicit ID backstory – it becomes difficult to justify the continuation of the scientific enterprise in this full-bodied sense.

The idea that we can understand nature is daily retailed to science students in publicly funded schools. We want them to know that we can somehow acquire the ability to understand reality – but that requires explanation.

And the explanation cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian view is, as I have noted before, that our minds are illusions created by our neurons – which are in turn under the control of our selfish genes. These systems did not originate in order to discover truth but to enable us to leave offspring.

So Sarkar’s theories cannot be true to nature. They can only be meaningless (but for those who take them seriously, they may possibly result in a need for infant shoes).

That is okay with me, to be sure. But producing the infants to wear the shoes is not Read More ›

In the Face of an Aspiring Baboon: A Response to Sahotra Sarkar’s Review of Science vs. Religion?

Introduction

Some will wonder why I expend such great effort in responding to Sahotra Sarkar’s negative review of my Science vs. Religion? I offer four reasons: (1) The review was published in the leading on-line philosophy reviews journal (which offers no right of response). (2) Word of the review has spread very fast across the internet, especially amongst those inclined to believe it. Indeed, part of the black humour of this episode is the ease with which soi disant critical minds are willing to pronounce the review ‘excellent’ without having compared the book and the review for themselves. (3) The review quotes the book sufficiently to leave the false impression that it has come to grips with its content. (4) Most importantly, there is a vast world-view difference that may hold its own lessons. Sarkar and I were both trained in ‘history and philosophy of science’ (HPS), yet our orientations to this common subject could not be more opposed. Sarkar’s homepage sports this quote from Charles Darwin: ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke’. I take this to be wishful thinking on Sarkar’s part.

My response is divided into 4 parts:
1. The Terms of Reference: Start with the Title
2. What to Make of the Philosophical Critique of ID?
3. Sarkar’s Particular Criticisms I: The More Editorial Ones
4. Sarkar’s Particular Criticisms II: The More Substantive Ones

Read More ›

I see all these scientists and science teachers in this video proclaiming they see “God’s Hand” in the universe all day long then in the same breath they say design detection is bogus. So what exactly do they “see” that convinces them that God’s hand is all over the place? Obviously it isn’t rational evidence that can weighed, measured, or otherwise rationally evaulated because that would be science and furthermore it would be the science behind intelligent design. Personally I think these people are either liars who are not convinced they see God all over the place or they are being truthful in becoming convinced of things with no rational evidence which technically means they are hallucinating and probably shouldn’t Read More ›