Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Coffee!! Thicker foreheads: Meet thickets of Darwinism

In “Men developed thicker foreheads and jaws due to fighting, over women” Richard Alleyne, science correspondent for Britain’s Telegraph, who presumably knows better, advises us (14 May 2010):

Winning a mate used to depend only on physical prowess and men with the strongest jawline and thickest skulls were better able to survive onslaughts from love rivals.

That meant that over time all men developed thicker bones in the jaws, around the eyes and on the forehead than women.

You can read the further Darwiniana for yourself here.


Men evolved manly jawlines and thick brows because they used to fight for women in the past, claim anthropologists

To dispose of the evidence-based issues first, it is more likely that characteristic male appearance is part of a kit of traits governed by the need for rapid building of muscle mass. Maybe a fuzzy navel was part of that too? Whether governed by design or chance, the kit is the kit, and if you have outdoor plumbing to begin with, you probably got whatever else came with the kit. (If you didn’t, you can always complain to the Manufacturer, though how much good that does is under debate. You might get the usual “I am the Potter, you are the clay,” boilerplate in response.)

The part I want to focus on is the observation of biological anthropologist David Puts of Pennsylvania State University and author of these theories, that “On average men are not all that much bigger than women, only about 15 percent larger. But the average guy is stronger than 99.9 percent of women.” From this he derives his theories.

As I wrote to a friend recently, Read More ›

Cricket Songs and Evolution in the Details

Male crickets attract females with their chirping, but some males are incapable of chirping. Now, new research shows that those silent males are affected by their singing comrades. Specifically, silent males that develop in the presence of abundant male song tend to be larger, with more reproductive potential, than male crickets growing up in a silent environment. Insects are more complicated than thought. As one researcher explained:  Read more

Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories listed by Martin Cadra

Pagels and others (like Nei) have argued that the majority of biological features could not have emerged from Darwinian means. If they are right, it stands to reason that if evolution is true, it has to be mostly non-Darwinian. At UD we have explored various non-Darwinian theories of evolution by scientists like Jukes, King, Kimura, Nei, Morgan, Bateson, Davison, and others. There are more names such as : Portmann, Troll, Heikertinger, Goldshmidt, Bertalanffy. Martin also lists Friedrich Nietzsche and Marx as non-Darwinians. Here is the website: http://cadra.wordpress.com/

Francis Beckwith Replies to UD Critics

FBOver on Biologos, Francis Beckwith has posted a third and a fourth instalment of his “Intelligent Design and Me” series.  He has dedicated these instalments to some of his critics, naming some UD people specifically, and also discussing the views of Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute.

I’m grateful that Dr. Beckwith has seen fit to reply.  I must confess that I had almost written him off as a “drive-by shooter”, but now I must say “better late than never”, and thank him for his effort to get back to us.

First, as one of the UD people mentioned by Dr. Beckwith, I should apologize for misreporting, in my earlier column, some of the chronological details of Dr. Beckwith’s religious and intellectual life.  Dr. Beckwith has corrected me on these in his new article.  I can assure him that there was no conscious attempt to misrepresent anything, and I am glad he has reminded us that his adoption of Thomism preceded his return to Rome by many years.  This makes the important point that Thomism is a theological approach rather than a religious confession, and is open to Christians other than Roman Catholics.

I won’t comment on Dr. Beckwith’s new articles point by point, but will focus only on two main ideas which I think need discussion.

A.  Dr. Beckwith tells us that Thomas Aquinas did not have an argument from design in the style of William Paley, but an argument from the existence of final causes.  Read More ›

Nuclear Power: A New Movement You Won’t Believe

I am going to tell you something unbelievable. It will sound like hyperbole or a parable contrived to make a point. It isn’t—it is true. You have heard of the many crazy things people believe but, believe it or not, there is a group that is certain that there is a way for the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) to rearrange fundamental particles to form spaceships, nuclear power plants and computers. I am indebted to Granville Sewell for this information, and why it is important.  Read more

If This Were Science

The twentieth century’s revolution in molecular biology has produced volumes of sequence data which evolutionists have marshaled in defense of their theory. One high-profile example is the molecular similarity between humans and chimpanzees. First proteins and later the genomes of these two species were found to be practically identical. These findings have often been touted as compelling confirmations of evolution. But there are also differences—significant differences. One example is the differences in the Y chromosome, which recent research has elucidated. These differences are explained by evolutionists, of course, as arising from various evolutionary processes. But the differences are significant and the evolutionary scenarios are speculative. In fact a recent paper appealed to several different mechanisms in order to explain the Read More ›

Granville Sewell on the 2nd Law

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has never been a friend of materialistic evolution. Granville Sewell’s arguments concerning it at the following two links are worth pondering: Link 1: from the book IN THE BEGINNING Link 2: video presentation “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution”

Biology´s ‘Skeleton In The Closet’: The Broken Bones Of Origins Science

Review Of Chapter 13 Of Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer, HarperOne Publishers, ISBN: 9780061894206

I never would have suspected that the literary sensation Dr Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat Comes Back would be used to make a point about the devastating shortcomings of origin of life theories (1). But when I read one of the later chapters of Meyer’s Signature In The Cell which in one foul swoop discredited Hermann Muller’s fortuitous origins of DNA, Henry Quastler’s DNA self replication hypothesis and Manfred Eigen’s ideas on hypercycles I could not help but be fascinated by his use of this children’s classic in his exposition. Of course in their own unique ways each of these scientists became steadfastly convinced that they were onto something of great significance that would lead to fruitful avenues on the all important question of how life had begun.

Muller drew inferences from his own work on viruses, in particular bacteriophages (‘bacteria eaters’), equating these simple organisms to “a gene that copies itself within the cell” (2). He envisioned these as being somehow analogous to primitive DNA floating around in the chemical-rich soup of the early earth (2). Quastler on the other hand suggested that polynucleotides could act as templates for replication through complementary base pairing (3). And Eigen chose to assume that ‘self-reproducing molecular systems’ involving RNA molecules and basic enzymes could somehow supply an early form of transcription and translation, later forming hypercycles that would have preceded the arrival of the earliest cells (4).

So how is the Cat in the Hat relevant? Crucial aspects of the above mechanistic propositions, writes Meyer, parallel the antics of our feline friend as he unwillingly redistributes the mess he has created in the house of his none-too-happy hosts. Origin of life scientists have similarly been trying for decades to “clean up the problem of explaining the origin of [biological] information” only to find that they have “simply transferred the problem elsewhere- either by presupposing some other unexplained sources of information or by overlooking the indispensable role of an intelligence” (1). And their modern day brethren, with the apparent sophistication of computer-housed evolutionary algorithms, have fared little better. Meyer’s unpacking of the reality behind Ev, for example, described by its author Thomas Schneider as “a simple computer program” that attempts to evolve the information content of DNA binding sites in a hypothetical genome, is a case in point (5). In Ev Schneider specifies the sequence of these DNA binding sites and incorporates the code for the binding site ‘recognizer’ (protein) into the genome (5). The relative penalties for mis-binding or non-binding of the recognizer to sequences are pre-set into the program (5). Read More ›

Does ID Contribute to Knowledge?

A friend of mine sent me a link to a recent article by Giberson. In it Giberson claims that the problem with ID is that “first they need a fertile idea—one that generates new scientific knowledge”. I think it has already done this.

Many eminent scientists have noted that the reductionist way of looking at biology in the 20th century cannot remain forever the way biology operates. Carl Woese’s “A New Biology for a New Century” is a good example of this. The question, though, is what to replace the reductionist view with.
Read More ›

Homochirality and Darwin: Part 2

Judging from the comments to the homochirality post, Darwin (aka evolution) still gets support and Pasteur still endures ridicule. Some suggested that I had misread the meteorite data, others suggested that homochirality is easily obtained in the laboratory, while still others proposed circularly polarized light. So it is with a certain sense of vindication that I read the New Scientist article, Did exploding stars shatter life’s mirror? The article begins by saying all life is L-amino, and then admits that all amino acids found on meteorites has an excess of L-amino. “For every type of amino acid found in meteorites there is an excess of the left-handed form over the right-handed of between 2 and 18 per cent,” says Uwe Read More ›

A Deep-Sea Snail and Evolution’s Superior Material Designs

Once again evolution has come up with an ingenious design, this time a multilayered protective material with a range of potential applications. The material was discovered in the shell of a deep-sea snail, Crysomallon squamiferum, which is able to withstand powerful crab attacks. Here is the summary of the new findings:  Read more

Heartland Institute on NAS Climate Report

Your tax dollars being used against you: ————————————— NAS Climate Report: ‘Partisan, Closed Minded’ The National Academy of Sciences Thursday reasserted its opinion that the Earth’s climate has warmed to crisis levels and that human activity – the burning of fossil fuels – is the primary cause. In its 869-page report, the NAS, a group of American researchers that advises the U.S. government, urged Congress to adopt specific policy measures to halt the undesirable effects of global warming. James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute, finds the NAS membership is fatally comprised of global warming activists who are pursuing a political agenda and ignoring competing scientific data. Taylor was project manager for the Fourth International Read More ›

Human-Chimp Genomic Differences

One of the most popular evidences proclaimed for evolution in recent years is the high similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. The cousin genomes are about 99% similar and this has repeatedly been expounded as an obvious proof text of evolution. But these comparisons did not include the finicky Y chromosome which only recently has been decoded from the chimp genome. These new results show an entirely different picture.  Read more

“First cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome”

Big news at Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics: Summary: Link 1 Press Release: Link 2 The rhetoric is interesting. What they’ve done is stuck a synthetic genome inside a nonsynthetic cell. Nonetheless, they’ve slipped into talking of a “synthetic bacterial cell.” Indeed, one headline reads “The First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell.” This is hype. If something is going to be called “synthetic,” shouldn’t the whole of it be synthesized and not merely a minuscule portion of it? Also, does such a cell knowably signal design and, if so, why wouldn’t cells untouched by Synthetic Genomics do the same, i.e., implicate design?

Neo-Lamarckian Thoughts

Greetings to all. I have been interested for some time in the question-begging character of the logic of natural selection. This is old hat, of course, but just in a nutshell: a new well-adapted trait must first exist in an individual before it can be selected, so while natural selection could potentially explain the proliferation of such a trait throughout a population, it could never explain its origin. Of course, the Darwinist will say, No problem, new traits are thrown up by chance due to random genetic mutation. There are two things wrong with this reply, however. The first is a conceptual point. Even if it were the case that every mutation at the level of the genome were indeed Read More ›