My friend, Five Feet of Fury and aptly so named, comments on a recent turn of events in Christopher Hitchens’ struggle with cancer (March 26th, 2011):

It never frickin’ fails: ‘Atheist Christopher Hitchens turns to evangelical Christian doctor in his fight against cancer’Oh yeah, we’re all so stupid and backward. Yep. Retards. Totally.

Atheists all come crying to us, one way or the other, eventually.  Read More ›

MathGrrl’s friends have been discussing her recent post( here), on measuring complex specified information, which garnered 324 comments and counting.*

Not being a mathie, I couldn’t follow most of the discussion here, but certain turns in the discussion reminded me of something I’d heard before: Read More ›

My latest MercatorNet column A choice argument Did you choose to cheat on your taxes? Or snub a friend? Free will makes an unexpected comeback. Possibly no issue between traditionalists and new atheists rankles more than this one: Are we simply the products of our genes and neurons, or can we make authentic choices? Traditional religions encourage repentance for sin, which just means, “I knew what I was doing and it was wrong.” No one repents of slipping on the ice, and ending up in traction. But a new doctrine has been highly seductive. You never choose. In a blog entry, “No soul? I can live with that. No free will? AHHHH!!!,” on the Psychology Today website, Tamler Sommers, professor Read More ›

The debate is over. Thus we are told by the Darwinian establishment. Of course, the debate is not over by definition, because debate continues. What this really means is that “evolution” is a fact, and the “fact” of evolution does not mean that living things have changed over time, but that the Darwinian mechanism of random errors (of any kind imagined or unimagined) filtered by natural selection can explain everything in the history of life, including the most sophisticated computer program ever devised, which is engendered in every cell of every living creature. I am one of those rare people who has actually read the attempts of Darwinists to refute Behe’s irreducible-complexity argument, and the so-called refutations are always the Read More ›

Here.

In all, Rodriguez found that separately removing seven different “gears” from a distant part of the molecule each caused the amino acid to bind more tightly to the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. Perona explained that this provides the first systematic analysis demonstrating long-range communication in an enzyme that depends on RNA for its function.”So what we think is going on is that these enzyme-RNA interactions far from the amino acid binding site evolved together with the needs of the cell to respond to subtle cues from its environment — especially in terms of how much amino acid is available,” said Perona. “It makes sense in terms of evolution.

– Glimpse of How the ‘Code’ of Life May Have Emerged, ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2011)

Well, anything can make sense in terms of evolution, because it is a directionless story, festooned with “may haves”.

Friend Jonathan kindly writes, Read More ›

Here: A fresh look at forgotten vials from Stanley Miller’s primordial-soup-in-a-bottle experiments implies that volcanoes seeping hydrogen sulfide helped form some of life’s earliest ingredients.  Earth’s early atmospheric conditions aren’t known, and the reactions in this experiment could only have happened near a source of sulfur. On a primordial Earth, that would have meant volcanoes. Whereas Miller originally focused on chemical reactions in the atmosphere, the primordial soup may have gathered in a volcanic bowl. Danielle Venton , “Primordial Soup’s Missing Ingredient May Be Sulfur”, Wired Science (March 21, 2011) File this under Mayhaveology: Origin of life

Heaven knows, it’s hard to get attention even for a gut hit like amoebic dysentery , never mind for Blob World in general, but here, with graphic details: Amoeba sex might have been missed because when grown in the lab, many of them don’t show any signs of engaging in sex — they have the ability to reproduce themselves by cloning, or copying themselves, indefinitely. And when they did show signs of sex, researchers may have mistaken it for a rare exception to the no-sex rule.- “Amoebas: Sexier than anyone knew: Once considered the epitome of chastity, researchers say it’s not so” (Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience, 3/22/2011) Like, they’re amoebas. It would rarely occur to them to do anything, anything at Read More ›

The fossil bore holes into victims’ shell, and subsequent repair attempts, tell a curious story. So says physicist David Tyler here: Darwinian concepts of the struggle for survival have featured strongly in attempts to explain the Cambrian Explosion. However, although predator-prey roles are to be found, the evidence linking these with adaptive change is lacking. Last December, an alternative ecological framework for interpreting this part of the fossil record was discussed (go here for the 4th in the series). The authors introduce their paper by pointing out the importance of this issue in the minds of evolutionary biologists, but then they go on to show evidence that for shell-crushing predation, this selection force was non-existent before Stage 4 of the Read More ›

So they say:

Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval. Read More ›

Astrobiology Magazine, (not the source you’d expect), offers MSNBC a word of caution re fossils of early life: However, the interpretation of the structures has always been controversial, and it is still hotly debated among scientists searching for Earth’s earliest evidence for life. Specimens from the site apparently displayed branching structures that some researchers said were inconsistent with life, while others dismissed such branching as artifacts from photo software.Analysis of the structures themselves suggested they were carbon-based, and therefore associated with the organic chemistry of life, but some contended they were a type of carbon known as graphite, while others said they were kerogen, a mixture of organic compounds. Now University of Kansas geospectroscopist Craig Marshall and his colleagues have Read More ›

I have asked University of Toronto’s best known evolutionary biology standard bearer, Larry Moran to explain. He says he is a “pluralist,” not a Darwinist, and partial to genetic drift as a mechanism of evolution. Sounds sensible in principle. I hope he’ll expand on the theme here. If he agrees, in principle, we’ll print it.

Over on his blog, Why Evolution is True, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne writes critically of a Nature paper published in May of last year, which he describes as “a misguided attack on kin selection.” Coyne asks, If the Nowak et al. paper is so bad, why was it published? That’s obvious, and is an object lesson in the sociology of science.  If Joe Schmo et al. from Buggerall State University had submitted such a misguided paper to Nature, it would have been rejected within an hour (yes, Nature sometimes does that with online submissions!).  The only reason this paper was published is because it has two big-name authors, Nowak and Wilson, hailing from Mother Harvard.  That, and the Read More ›

Note: This post’s date stamp has been advanced, to continue a vital discussion. Newer posts follow MathGrrl’s below.

Bornagain77 writes (in jest I believe):  “MathGrrl posting a thread??? [here.] Is this Uncommon Descent???”

BA’s comment reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad when I was about 13.  I was blessed with a dad who from an early age engaged with me on theological issues.  One of the issues we debated was the “once saved always saved issue” (Calvin’s “perseverance of the saints”).  My dad believes in the doctrine, and one day I decided to be a little provocative and told him I had become an Armenian (the camp that believes a Christian can “fall from grace”).  I expected him to get upset and power down on me and try to push me into recanting that statement.

I will never forget his response.  He said, “OK.”  Read More ›

My thanks to Jonathan M. for passing my suggestion for a CSI thread on and a very special thanks to Denyse O’Leary for inviting me to offer a guest post.

[This post has been advanced to enable a continued discussion on a vital issue. Other newer stories are posted below. – O’Leary ]

In the abstract of Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, William Demski asks “Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?” Many ID proponents answer this question emphatically in the affirmative, claiming that Complex Specified Information is a metric that clearly indicates intelligent agency.

As someone with a strong interest in computational biology, evolutionary algorithms, and genetic programming, this strikes me as the most readily testable claim made by ID proponents. For some time I’ve been trying to learn enough about CSI to be able to measure it objectively and to determine whether or not known evolutionary mechanisms are capable of generating it. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is quite a bit of confusion about the details of CSI, even among its strongest advocates.

My first detailed discussion was with UD regular gpuccio, in a series of four threads hosted by Mark Frank. While we didn’t come to any resolution, we did cover a number of details that might be of interest to others following the topic.

CSI came up again in a recent thread here on UD. I asked the participants there to assist me in better understanding CSI by providing a rigorous mathematical definition and showing how to calculate it for four scenarios: Read More ›

Earlier this year, sociobiologist E. O. “Dear Pastor” Wilson disowned his “inclusive fitness” (kin selection) theory, developed from his study of ants and bees. According to his theory, among life forms that live in groups, many members may give up the chance of reproducing their selfish genes so that the group as a whole is more fit. The problem is that it’s notclear how this situation could arise.

He hadn’t long to wait for a reaction from his colleagues: Read More ›