The Earth as its continents would have been seen from space, starting 500 million years ago just before the Cambrian explosion (courtesy MSNBC Cosmiclog): As he built the visualizations, Mendez said he was struck by the fact that the distribution of land mass among the continents has changed dramatically over the past 750 million years, but the total land area has stayed consistent – between about 10 and 30 percent of total surface area. “I was expecting to see more,” he said.

Here, commenter bornagain77 notes, in response to a discussion of a one- or two-dimensional universe (the latter recently proposed by a  physicist  for our own early universe),

Though I have severe reservations about this ‘theory’, I think the ‘flatlander’ example you alluded to is excellent for illustrating the ‘higher dimensional’ nature of the spiritual realm …

Indeed. Consider Giberson and Collins’ comment on Dembski’s work:

It is abundantly clear that death and suffering had been present for literally billions of years before the appearance of humans. So how could  human sin be responsible for this? This claim collapses and can only be rescued by desperate moves, like the claim that later events can  cause earlier ones. Surprisingly, there are those so eager to make human sin the explanation for all the evils of natural history that they make  this paradoxical claim. William Dembski, for example, make this argument, in The End of Christianity. – Karl W. Giberson and Francis S. Collins, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2011), pp. 131-32.

A lot comes down to how one thinks about God. Read More ›

In Scientific American, we learn “ThNeuroscience of the Gut: Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract” (Robert Martone, April 19, 2011): We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial Read More ›

Here. Dedicated to philosopher of science Ernan McMullin (1924–2011).

Latest news from Loughborough University in Leistershire, UK (18 April 2011): “Sweat research sparks evolution speculation”: Research at Loughborough University to find out where athletes sweat the most has revealed surprising results (the cntral and lower back, near the spine).  [ … ] Discussions with colleagues with expertise in evolutionary biology raised a speculative explanation. Prof Havenith said: “Our research records scientific data but asking ‘why’ raises an interesting question. “If this pattern that we observe is a remnant from when we moved on all fours, before we walked upright, then sweating on the back would make sense. One biologit commented, “Does this imply that human ancestors lost body hair (and started sweating) before we became bipedal? This would go Read More ›

(Contest now closed for judging. Results here. ) Yes, a prominent Canadian cosmologist has written to a number of science notables to ask this simple question: Does Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins convert more people to Darwinism? For a free copy of The Nature of Nature , which do you pick and why? The cosmologist wants a pollster to do a study to find out which method works best. What questions would you recommend asking? (Note:This contest would normally run Saturday, but it’s a busy time of year for a lot of people, so you are getting a head start. Judging is Saturday, April 30.)

At AITSE (Caroline Crocker’s outfit), we are reminded of an Atlantic article (November 2010) on how little peer review actually contributes to the growth of a stable knowledge base:

Dr. John Ioannidis, formerly of Harvard University, Johns Hopkins and National Institutes of Health, is currently leading a team investigating whether medical research studies can be trusted and is making waves. He says that 90% of published results cannot. Moreover, he claims that peer-review by the scientific community is ineffective in addressing the problem. His research shows that, of the top 49 articles published in the last 13 years, only 25% of the claims to have found an effective intervention (e.g. daily aspirin or Vitamin E to reduce risk of heart attacks) were retested. This is understandable because 1) there is little funding for repeating someone else’s work, and 2) for an article to be accepted for publication it needs to contribute new understanding; repeated experiments do not. Of those claims that were re-tested, 41% were found to have been significantly exaggerated or simply wrong.

The problem isn’t that peer review does no good but that it isn’t doing the good needed now.

Suzan Mazur (non-Darwinian evolution news desk 1, new media) offers a number of articles on the defects of the current system in assessing the validity of research: Read More ›

In “A golden orb-weaver spider from the Middle Jurassic” (4/21/11), David Tyler at manchester U comments on a recent find:

The golden orb-weaver spider features in newly reported research and provides an exciting insight into past ecosystems. Today, these animals adorn tropical rainforests, with giant females of Nephila maculate (legs spanning up to 20 cm), and small males (just a few centimetres across). However, the fossil record of the Nephilidae family is meagre. The earliest example of the genus Nephila comes from the Eocene (considered to be about 34 Ma) and the earliest example of the family Nephilidae is a male from the Cretaceous (considered to be 130 Ma). The newly reported fossil golden orb-weaver spider is a giant female with a leg span of about 15 cm.

and observes

So this particular living fossil exhibits stasis at the genus level and raises again the issue of what can be learned from the phenomenon of stasis. A previous blog expressed some frustration at Neodarwinian evolutionists who file stasis in a box that says: no environmental change, no selection pressures, no evolution. The problem with Read More ›

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, explain, Such cases of elaborate innate behavioural programs (spider webs, bee foraging as we saw above, and many more) cannot be ccounted for by means of optimizing physico-chemical or geometric factors. But they csan hardly be accounted for by gradualistic adaptation either. It’s fair to acknowledge that, although we bet that some naturalistic explanations will one day found, we have no such explanation at present. And if we insist that natural selection is the only way to try, we will never have one. – What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 91

I would like to commend Thomas Cudworth for his latest attempt to engage ID critic Professor Edward Feser in dialogue. Over the past few weeks, I have been greatly heartened by Professor Feser’s clarifications of his position vis-a-vis Intelligent Design. For instance, in a recent post on his blog site, he wrote:

The dispute between Thomism on the one hand and Paley (and ID theory) on the other is not over whether God is in some sense the “designer” of the universe and of living things – both sides agree that He is – but rather over what exactly it means to say that He is, and in particular over the metaphysics of life and of creation.

Moreover, in an email sent to me last month, Professor Feser wrote:

I have never accused any ID defender of heresy, and would never do so. To say to a theological opponent “Your views have implications you may not like, including ones that I believe are hard to reconcile with what we both agree to be definitive of orthodoxy” is simply not the same thing as saying “You are a heretic!” Rather, it’s what theologians do all the time in debate with their fellow orthodox believers.

I welcome Professor Feser’s statements that he regards the Intelligent Design movement as theologically orthodox, and that he believes God is the designer of living things.

In his latest post, Thomas Cudworth put a question to Professor Feser. He asked Professor Feser whether, in his view, God could have possibly planned to create a universe in which intelligent beings could infer His existence from studying nature – in particular, from observing clues such as cosmic fine-tuning and irreducible complexity, which would show that the evolutionary process must have been intelligently planned. I know that Professor Feser is a very busy man with a lot of work on his hands, so I’d like to attempt a reply on his behalf. Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), has this to say about design theory as a legitimate approach to science:

I’ll start with Ken Miller’s 2008 book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. In additon to giving straightforward biology-based criticisms of Behe’s irreducible complexity argument … Miller also has a more fundamental critique of intelligent design (the “Battle for America’s Soul” part).

Miller makes the claim that the intelligent design movement doesn’t just want to “win the battle against Darwin”; the intelligent design movement wants to “win the greater war against science itself.”
This claim that the intelligent design movement is anti-science is quite a strong claim. The way intelligent design proponents typically portray their activity is that they are looking for scientific evidence for the existence of a designer. This may be confused science, but it’s not anti-science. Moreover, some Read More ›

Recently, the physicist Sean Carroll, Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology, composed an article entitled Does the Universe need God? for The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (eds. James B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett, Wiley-Blackwell, due for publication in 2012). There are lots of things I’d like to say in response to Professor Carroll’s article, but instead, I’ve decided to condense my remarks into a set of seven questions, which I hope Professor Carroll will be kind enough to answer.

1. In your article, you’ve argued that the ultimate explanation of why events happen is that things are simply obeying the laws of nature – in particular, the laws of physics. What do you mean by the term “law of nature”? Specifically, are the laws of nature (a) rules which prescribe the behavior of objects, or (b) mere regularities which describe the behavior of objects?
Read More ›

It’s often said that many European non-Darwinian evolutionists are fans of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Here’s something to know, however: The Catholic thinker most identified with evolution, the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin … des not loom as large on the Catholic intellectual landscape as he did a generation ago. Teilhard concocted from evolutionary theory a kind of process theology that, among other things, implicitly denies the doctrine of original sin. Pope Pius XII once asked the great French thelogican Etienne Gilson to write a critique of Teilhard’s work. Gilson replied that such a task was impossible because Teilhard’s books were poetry and not philosophy You cannot “refute” a poem. Even Teilhard’s serious defenders, Read More ›

(

Apologies, Reb.)

In “The Language of Science and Faith,” Giberson (soon to be in an online dialogue with Bill Dembski) and Collins argue that God has given nature “freedom”: This is their proposed solution to the problem of evil in nature:

When God, as a loving Creator, withdraws from complete sovereign control over his creatures and grants them freedom, this means – in ways often difficult to understand – that those creatures can now act independently of God. They are free to not be robotic automatons, puppets or trained attack dogs. In the case of the Holocaust – the classic example of human evil – we always do exactly what Dembski says we never do: we shift the responsibility for that evil from God to the Nazis. Such reflections have long characterized Christian thinking about the problem of evi. All we need to do now is enlarge this general concept to include the sorts of things that nature is doing on its own.Not all Christians are comfortable with the idea that nature has freedom, of course. …

Actually, not all Christians can even make rational sense of the these assertions. Read More ›

In “Primordial Weirdness: Did the Early Universe Have One Dimension? Scientists Outline Test for Theory”, at ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011), we re asked to consider whether the universe started out with only one dimension: That’s the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.They suggested that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today). The theory, if valid, would address important problems in particle physics. Now, in a new paper in Physical Read More ›