Because Darwinism requires “fantastic leaps of faith” The Darwinist troll bawling up a storm in his cave about this recent defection may not have heard about the one below: The author worked for ten years as a Senior Research Scientist in the medical and scientific instrument field. The complexity of life came to the forefront Read More…
Month: April 2011
Coffee!!: Non-materialist neuroscientist offers Skeptiko his theological views
From PR Underground, neurotheology researcher, physician and author, Andy Newburg explains, how fundamentalists Christians and Atheists share a minority view of God. (PRUnderground, April 27th, 2011) Join Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk for an interview with Dr. Andy Newburg. A distinguished researcher at Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, and professor in Religious Studies at the Read More…
Intelligent design is antievolution … or maybe not …
Here is a current debate on the subject from Cassandra’s Tears and here at Intelligent Reasoning is a comment, if you’d like to weigh in. Many sources think that intelligent design is concerned principally with the plausibility of proposed mechanisms for evolution, not with denying that it occurs. Most ID theorists are skeptical – based Read More…
Darwinism’s Eroding Monopoly In Academia
Evolution News & Views is reporting on a rather revealing study of Scottish first year students at Glasgow University who doubt Darwinian evolution. In fact, the Times Education Supplement (TES) article reports that “One in 20 first-year biology students at Glasgow University don’t believe in the theory of evolution, according to new research.” The article further Read More…
Saturday afternoon science show: Pigs love mud because we all evolved from fish
“Pigs have ‘evolved to love mud’”, Victoria Gill explains (BBC News, 29 April 2011). Dutch researcher Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre theorizes that … the behaviour could have evolved in pigs’ most ancient relatives.”We all evolved from fish, so it could be that this motivation to be in water could be something Read More…
Coffee!!: Thoughts on SETI’s past and future: Merge with ID?
Interesting discussion at “Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads.” Could SETI just merge with ID and study evidence of intelligence in signals along those lines? Otherwise, it could merge with astrobiology units at various universities and restrict itself to looking for evidence of bacterial life in outer space. SETI has always been handicapped by the Read More…
Brown bag: Darwinists trade broomsticks for calendars in effort to vindicate “no homework” prof
Yes, really. Recently, in a guest edited issue of philosophy journal Synthese, anti-ID Louisiana U prof Barbara Forrest broomsticked – of all people – Baylor prof Frank Beckwith, framed as an ID supporter. And anyone who keeps up with the issues knows he isn’t. The scandal here is that Forrest is supposed to be a Read More…
Time out: He invented it, he disowned it, but we’re supposed to go on believing it?
A friend of Uncommon Descent writes to say that E. O. Wilson abandoning his kin selection theory (group Darwinism vs. the selfish gene) due to lack of evidence has caused quite the little uproar in Britain. He adds, The gist of the responses in Nature seemed to be that Nowak and Wilson did not understand Read More…
Directions for perpetrating a science hoax
Here, Adam Ruben, – “Experimental Error: Forging a Head” Science (April 22, 2011), reflects on how to construct a science hoax and have free publicity coming out of your ears: Attach the bones of something to the bones of something else. You have just created the missing link between those two species. “It’s amazing!” you Read More…
Remember the telephone game?
Yes, we all do, but that’s not the whole story … Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work Read More…
Coffee!! For the lone reader in Downadashack, New Brunswick, who isn’t …
… plenty sick of the Royal Wedding, here’s New Scientist’s evolutionary psychology take on Kate’s “ruthless mating intelligence”: AH, THE eugenic thrill of it! Status weds beauty: a promising start. Royalty weds a good-genes commoner: excellent progress. A 6-foot, 3-inch prince who flies rescue helicopters and shows self-deprecating humour weds a 5-foot, 10-inch Amazon with Read More…
More Signs of Design: Bacteria on the Radio
Wired Science is reporting on a forthcoming paper which has been posted on the pre-print website, ArXiv. The authors propose that chromosomes might act in a manner synonymous with a radio antennae, involving electrons travelling around DNA loops to produce species-specific wavelengths. Read More>>>
Awesome powers of common shrew or weakening powers of current classification?
This New Scientist article (Michael Marshall, 28 April 2011) on the interbreeding of shrews despite the fact that their chromosomes have been rearranged does not use the “biological species concept” (it’s hard to know how to do so under the circumstances). Stuck for a term, Marshall calls the differently arranged groups “races” instead. Anyway, Searle Read More…
Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads
Bob McDonald, the science guy at Canada’s government broadcaster, CBC, critiques (April 28, 2011) the spending on the Royal Wedding, contrasting it with the small amount required to keep the recently defunded, 50-year-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program going: … Until recently, their efforts had been hampered by the fact that they had to Read More…
Something to get up for tomorrow morning …
Hey hey, ho ho Six planets in a row here, April 30 (and maybe eight planets if you have binoculars).