… nice kids at Baylor begin to sound like Lady Gaga and look like the broom closet before Tidy Up day: “The video contradicts the idea that science is straightforward,” Shim said. “For a lot of jobs, I think, time in equals output, but in science you have to sit there and struggle. Endless troubleshooting and repetition are just part of the job.” Though stripped of the original music video’s glossy sterility and the mechanized precision of Gaga’s cultish knot of backup dancers, Bad Project remains, in fact, really bad —- but endearingly so. Clad in safety gear with an ill-fitting blonde wig mounted atop her head, Wiese is the video’s centerpiece, her cheerless expression channeling the disillusionment of aggrieved Read More ›

For example, “That’s when the doctor called and didn’t know what to say to us,” Britton said in a telephone interview. “No one had ever seen it before. And then we’d go to the neurologists and they’d say, ‘That’s impossible.’ ‘He has the MRI of a vegetable,’ one of the doctors said to us.” Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain. “There are some very bright, specialized people across the country and in Europe that have put their minds to this dilemma and are continuing to do so, and we haven’t come up with an answer,” Dr. Adre du Plessis, chief of Fetal and Transitional Medicine at Read More ›

Did this whiz past me last month? From Science (Science 28 January 2011): Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the ClassroomMichael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer Just over 5 years ago, the scientific community turned its attention to a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued their Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to overturn a policy explicitly legitimizing intelligent design creationism. The case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, followed a familiar script: Local citizens wanted their religious values validated by the science curriculum; prominent academics testified to the scientific consensus on evolution; and creationists lost decisively. Intelligent design was not science, held the court, but rather an effort to advance a religious view via public schools, a violation of the U.S. Read More ›

In the person of Rabbi Moshe Averick, whose book, Nonsense of the Highest Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, has merited the attention of someone or other at Richard Dawkins’s Foundation’s Web site, who is looking for help in refuting the Reb. Moshe offers, “Turns out Richard Dawkins’ watchmaker has 20/20 vision after all.” In his turn, the Reb also identifies a Dawkins schoolboy howler, in the opinion of colleagues: An “all ya gotta do is … ” origin of life. On the same page, we also learn from Robert Shapiro: SHAPIRO: Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful book, but the place where he absolutely blew it was in a section on the origin of life. He took all Read More ›

I have responded, here, to occasional UD commenter Larry Tanner (a nom de plume, so I can safely use it); who has objected to my background post for the ID Foundations series, on signs, symbols and their significance.

Possibly, Richard Dawkins’s worst offense against the world of reason is the coining of the word “meme” – a “unit” of “thought” that replicates in the minds of others by neo-Darwinian natural selection. The idea itself is, of course, hardly a useful description of how people influence each other, but it serves very well as a lazy substitute for precise language.

For example, we might hear about the “hate Hilary Clinton meme”, the “Islam is the religion of peace meme”, or, even more inexcusably, the “religion meme”. These short cuts are short circuits.

How about, in order, Read More ›

My attention was recently drawn to this critique of physicist Stephen Barr’s comments on church father Augustine (354-430 CE). Barr, a frequent critic of intelligent design, argues that Augustine did not take the Genesis account literally. This site argues, more plausibly in my view, that Augustine aged, he became more drawn to literal accounts of events in Scripture.

None of which would matter except that Augustine is often misused as a poster boy for bashing literalism, as Thomas Aquinas is misused by Catholic Darwinists as opposed to the idea that design can be detected in nature.

The point everyone seems to miss is this: We don’t know what Augustine or Aquinas (or Aristotle) “would have” thought, if they had been given the information available today. It’s the nature of history that they were not given it, and were reasoning from what they knew. Read More ›

A good laugh will help you sleep: Brain area for empty news stories discovered Satirical website Newsbiscuit has a cutting article making fun of the regular ‘brain scans show…’ news items that are a staple of the popular science pages. Scientists are heralding a breakthrough in brain scan technology after a team at Oxford University produced full colour images of a human brain that shows nothing of any significance. ‘This is an amazing discovery’, said leading neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, ‘the pictures tell us nothing about how the brain works, provide us with no insights into the nature of human consciousness, and all with such lovely colours.’… A couple stories like this have whizzed past recently. It sounds like I’m Read More ›

Why you should swear off all popular science media (except for Uncommon Descent and other sensible blogs) for your own mental health: Where does all this leave us?Let me return to the beginning, to Cordelia Fine and how we can think better about science, neural function, and human difference. The essentialist view of the brain is rapidly falling by the wayside. It is not just the recognition of neuroplasticity, and how experience and use can shape how the brain fires and wires together. Today, how we think about what parts of the brain do has changed – the essentialist view of innate modules, as well as our projection of human categories onto the brain, has come largely undone in the Read More ›

According to this paper, ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — New research shows that all not mammals are created equal. In fact, this work shows that the animals most commonly used by scientists to study mammalian genetics — mice — develop unusually quickly and may not always be representative of embryonic development in other mammals. Hmm. Lab rats might not work out either. For medical purposes, the only solution, I guess, is to use lab technicians and postgrad students instead. Some regulations appended to the legislation may need to be changed, of course, but it shouldn’t take too long …

NOVA scienceNOW: Where Did We Come From? Airing Wednesday, February 16 at 8pm on PBS In this episode of NOVA scienceNOW, journey back in time to the birth of our solar system to examine whether the key to our planet’s existence might have been the explosive shockwave of an ancient supernova. Meet a chemist who has yielded a new kind of “recipe” for natural processes to assemble and create the building blocks of life. And see how the head louse, a creepy critter that’s been sucking our blood for millions of years, is offering clues about our evolution. Finally, meet neuroscientist André Fenton, who is looking into erasing painful memories with an injection. Thoughts?

Read the last quoted line of a Nature editor’s recent story: The design Debate But external peer review hasn’t always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those Read More ›

In “Mind vs. Machine”, in The Atlantic (March 2011), Brian Christian reflects When the world-champion chess player Garry Kasparov defeated Deep Blue, rather convincingly, in their first encounter in 1996, he and IBM readily agreed to return the next year for a rematch. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov (rather less convincingly) in ’97, Kasparov proposed another rematch for ’98, but IBM would have none of it. The company dismantled Deep Blue, which never played chess again. The apparent implication is that—because technological evolution seems to occur so much faster than biological evolution (measured in years rather than millennia)—once the Homo sapiens species is overtaken, it won’t be able to catch up. Simply put: the Turing Test, once passed, is passed Read More ›

… about genetics, here, in honour of Darwin Day. Meet A False Fact: What Would Darwin Do (WWDD)?Now, in the spirit of challenging false facts and views, as Darwin encourages us to do, we have a particular “false fact” in mind, used to support a false view. Both are widely promoted by Richard Dawkins, who should know better. (More about that, below.) We’ll call this false fact Dawkins’ Whopper. You can listen to the Whopper here, as Dawkins answers this question: Out of all the evidence used to support the theory of evolution, what would you say is the stongest [sic], most irrefutable single piece of evidence in support of the theory? Or you can read a transcript of what Read More ›