An unbylined news feature in Raw Story (January 30th, 2011) tells us “Oklahoma bill would mandate educators question evolution in classes”

Educators in Oklahoma would be forced to openly question in their classes the legitimacy of the scientific theory of evolution should a new bill become state law.

“It’s a simple fact that the presentation of some issues in science classes can lead to controversy, which can discourage teachers from engaging students in an open discussion of the issues,” state Rep. Sally Kern, a Republican, said in defense of the bill she filed recently.

That used to be called teaching. Or a part of it anyway. Put another way: Any fact-based proposition that can be true can, alternatively, be false. Learning to hold intelligent opinions means considering reasonable arguments for adn against a proposition.

But, to get some idea how Darwinism is probably taught today, among Raw Story’s readers, note this: Read More ›

In “Science Cannot Fully Describe Reality, Says Templeton Prize Winner” (Science 16 March 2009), David Lindley profiles French physicist and Templeton winner Bernard d’Espagnat, 87: Quantum mechanics allows what d’Espagnat calls “weak objectivity,” in that it predicts probabilities of observable phenomena in an indisputable way. But the inherent uncertainty of quantum measurements means that it is impossible to infer an unambiguous description of “reality as it really is,” he says. He has proposed that behind measured phenomena exists what he calls a “veiled reality” that genuinely exists, independently of us, even though we lack the ability to fully describe it. Asked whether that entails a kind of mysticism, d’Espagnat responds that “science isn’t everything” and that we are already accustomed Read More ›

A friend offers “The 6 Crappiest Interview Questions”, groaning “Indeed! (And I’ve been asked many of them). Yes, we all have. Apparently, if you are really good, you will also get to hear from the same source, The Oatmeal, about crappy interviewees. It’s only fair, after all, that some of us should get our own back.

No, this isn’t about what you think. For once, we are talking about frogs and newts.

A friend notes that an evolutionary biologist puzzles as follows:

“One of the most puzzling paradoxes in the evolution of toxins is why organisms evolve to be deadly – contrary to venoms, for which deadly effects have a clear benefit. Extreme toxicity occurs repeatedly, from saturniid caterpillars to dart poison frogs. Selection favors the most-fit individuals, and those should be the ones that avoid predation. Killing an individual predator does not give an advantage over simply deterring one, especially if the prey has to be handled or eaten by a predator to deliver the poison. How, then, can we explain the evolution of deadly toxicity?” (Brodie, E. D., III. 2009. Toxins and venoms. Current Biology 19: R931-R935.)

Brodie, I’m told, is a leading researcher on evolutionary arms races at the University of Virginia. He goes on to suggest a solution: “arms races between predators and prey … drive the exaggerated evolution of toxicity in general, without resulting in deadly consequences to the primary selective agent.” (R933) He suggests as an example is the predator-prey relationship between garter snakes and a newt that produces tetrodotoxin powerful enough to kill 10-20 humans or thousands of mice. But the interesting thing is that the snakes, which seem to be the “primary selective agent” for newts, in the sense of selecting them for dinner, are resistant to the toxin. Brodie attributes the newts’ heightened toxicity to coevolution with the garter snakes.

My friend asks, “But how does that solve the paradox? Newts with a higher level of toxicity would only accrue selective advantage if those higher levels of toxicity protected them against the predators.”

Well, I suspect the answer lies in another question: Read More ›

“I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us – everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.” – Thomas A. Edison

Or what? Science 4 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6017 pp. 555-561 DOI: 10.1126/science.1197761 RESEARCH ARTICLE The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex John K. Colbourne et al To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jcolbour@indiana.edu We describe the draft genome of the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex, which is only 200 megabases and contains at least 30,907 genes. The high gene count is a consequence of an elevated rate of gene duplication resulting in tandem gene clusters. More than a third of Daphnia’s genes have no detectable homologs in any other available proteome, and the most amplified gene families are specific to the Daphnia lineage. The coexpansion of gene families interacting within metabolic pathways suggests that the maintenance of duplicated genes is Read More ›

… it turns out that Jerry “whyevolutionistrue” Coyne doesn’t like Elaine Ecklund, a Templeton author on faith and science*: Elaine Ecklund is making more hay out of her Templeton-funded research than I would have thought possible. Author of the book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, she has spent her post-publication time distorting her findings as loudly and as often as possible, and spinning them to claim that they show the need for a consilience of science and faith. Templeton could not have gotten more bang for their bucks. Her latest piece, “Science on Faith“, is in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (It’s behind a paywall but I got it from the library.) Once again Ecklund emphasizes the many Read More ›

One group that isn’t going along with John “end of science” Horgan’s “immoral” rap about multiverse theorizing is the Templeton Foundation. A friend sends me this excerpt from a recent newsletter (which I can’t currently find online): Meanwhile, Cambridge University cosmologist and JTF Trustee John D. Barrow has just published the UK version of his new title, The Book of Universes. Barrow, a best-selling popular science author and the 2006 Templeton Prize winner, explores the underappreciated fact that Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts the existence of multiple and varied universes. What might these universes be like? And what do the latest scientific findings tell us about our own universe? Barrow’s Book gives readers a comprehensive overview of what we know, Read More ›

… and I presume that the elect are wending their way home from the “I do, I do, I do, I do, I DO believe in Darwin!” praise festival. Guitar chords, someone? I understand some Darwinists like to get folksy when fronting the message … Why, exactly, they do believe in Darwin will be long debated by social historians. I’d just shrug and say “Darwin feeds their inner ape,” and – more practically – their many genteel endowments. The ol’ Brit toff understood that sort of thing precisely, if nothing else. He got rich off Wedgwood pottery. Okay, well the (cue evil music!) Discovery Institute sent me this, about Wallace, Darwin’s co-theorist (remember, the theory could have been called Wallaceism, Read More ›

John Horgan, who took it on the ear some years ago for prophesying the end of science, now asks, provocatively I suppose, whether theorizing about alternative universes is immoral: These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don’t deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as “Popperazi” – which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren’t theories – they’re science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence. And they’re fun too. They’re everything except science, and good on Horgan for pointing it out. Read More ›

Ken Connor, commenting on Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece (December 13, 2010) on the loss of replicability of science findings over time, writes, But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. . . . For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated Read More ›

Canada’s National Post tears into the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ “investigations” of Christian universities: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it. [ … ] The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive Read More ›

As if evolution was not silly enough already evolutionists are now claiming that the fact that different plants all have leaves is a compelling evidence for their belief that all of nature just happened to spontaneously arise, all by itself. I occasionally enjoy a good spoof, but this is no joke. You can see this evolutionary logic for yourself right here. Some may find this unbelievable but this example, while stupefying, is actually representative of evolutionary thinking.  Read more

Here’s a good one: NCSE’s Eugenie Scott Serves as Chief of Darwinian Thought Police for University of Kentucky Faculty Casey Luskin February 11, 2011 9:29 AM As reported on ID the Future interview, Martin Gaskell’s attorney Frank Manion stated that during the course of Gaskell’s lawsuit, it became clear that Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), consulted University of Kentucky (UK) faculty about whether UK should hire Gaskell. She gave Gaskell a clean bill of health–not because she endorsed hiring Darwin-skeptics, but because at the time she believed Gaskell was a died-in-the-wool evolutionist–“accepting of evolution.” According to her e-mail, Eugenie Scott wrote: Gaskell hasn’t popped onto our radar as an antievolution activist. Checking his Read More ›

From the Australian (Paul Monk, February 7, 2011), on the dangers of consensus in science: … we are justified in being wary of foreclosing major debates based on scientific consensus, since it can be in error. Second, it shows that the way to challenge and correct scientific consensus is not through polemic or denial, but through specifying crucial variables and deductions and testing them scrupulously, in the manner of Hubble. Third, it shows that there is, nonetheless, such a thing as scientific consensus and that when handled in the manner just described, it tends to prove self-correcting. Fourth, it shows that ideally such correction will occur, as it did between Hubble and Shapley, on the basis of lucid examination of Read More ›