From G. K. Chesterton, an early twentieth century Catholic writer, both anti-materialist and anti-Dawinist, in his Orthodoxy: (Courtesy Super flumina ) As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the […]
Month: May 2011
Reflections on Time
My motorcycle gang (think “Wild Hogs”) planned to ride up to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Memorial Day weekend, but the forecast was for cold and rain, so we called an audible and headed south through the deserts and mountains of northern New Mexico. On the way down we made a detour […]
Another windy day in the junkyard …
From Jason Palmer at BBC News (19 May 2011), we learn, “Protein flaws responsible for complex life, study says.” This time mistakes produce more functional proteins: Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, researchers say.A comparison of proteins across 36 modern species suggests that protein flaws called […]
Has cosmic inflation collapsed?
In Scientific American (April 2011), Paul J. Steinhardt asks “The Inflation Debate: Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed? (April 6, 2011) : Summary Cosmic inflation is so widely accepted that it is often taken as established fact. The idea is that the geometry and uniformity of the cosmos were established […]
Why is the debate over design theory so often so poisonous and polarised?
To answer this one, we need to go as far back as Aristotle’s The Rhetoric some 2300 years ago. In this verbal self-defense classic — as in: “you gotta know what can be done, how, if you are to effectively defend yourself . . . ” — on what has aptly been called the devilish […]
PZ Myers lets the facts and logic fend for themselves
“Seriously, aren’t atheists ashamed of P.Z. Myers, asks Reb Moshe Averick (the “maverick”rabbi and author of The Confused, Illusory World of the Atheist), for The Allgemeiner (May 29, 2011): One of my mentors, Rabbi Yaakov Weinberg, (of blessed memory), made the following, rather sobering, observation about human nature: “Nobody ever allowed something as trivial as […]
Evolutionist: Our Best Defense Against Anti-Science Obscurantism
Evolutionists say undirected, random events, such as mutations, accumulated to create the entire biological world. An analogy once used for this claim is that of a room full of monkeys pounding away at typewriters and producing Hamlet. Today the analogy needs to be updated from typewriters to computer keyboards, but otherwise remains apropos. When the […]
Who are the Real Freethinkers, Darwinists or ID Folks?
Arguing with Darwinists is like trying to teach calculus to people who have not yet mastered arithmetic. kairosfocus has an excellent presentation here. This is the kind of stuff Darwinists dismiss with a shrug of the shoulder while proclaiming that the Darwinian mechanism could have done it, and furthermore must have done it, because there […]
Louisiana: Goodbye, Darwin in the schools lobby. Now back to teaching. Or what?
In “Scientists Issue Letter Supporting Louisiana Science Education Act” (Evolution News & Views, May 27, 2011), John West tells us that 15 PhD scientists signed a letter saying that it’s okay for Louisiana teachers to discuss problems with Darwinism. The Louisiana Senate agrees: yesterday the Louisiana Senate Education Committee voted down a bill that would […]
Remember those primitive people who had no words for numbers?
Which shows how number sense evolved? Forget them. In “Geometry skills are innate, Amazon tribe study suggests,” (BBC News , 24 May 2011), Jason Palmer reports , Tests given to an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate.Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing […]
The Giraffe: A Model of Intelligent Design
Image courtesy of Hans Hillewaert and Wikipedia. The recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe is one of Professor Jerry Coyne’s favorite pieces of evidence for evolution. It is also the topic of a recent post of his on Why Evolution is True. Professor Coyne is certainly right about one thing: the recurrent laryngeal nerve of […]
Arsenic-driven origin of life takes hit
In “Critics take aim at NASA ‘arsenic life’ study” (May 27, 2011), CBC News tells us Eight articles questioning a controversial study claiming that some bacteria can use the normally toxic substance arsenic to build DNA have been published in the journal Science.The study, published last December in Science, was led by NASA scientist Felisa […]
Humans evolved to get revenge?
No, as a matter of fact. In “Winners, losers – and revenge” (Britain’s The Sunday Times, May 25, 2011), David Hawkes, reviewing a book, tells us, “The echoes of revenge drama, from Iago to Charlie Sheen, can still be heard today”and manages to discuss the subject meaningfully, precisely because he isn’t pretending to tell us […]
10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers
When Michael Behe visited the UK, back in November, the Humanist Society of Scotland and the British Center for Science Education wrote up a list of “10 + 1 Questions For Professor Behe” which they subsequently distributed to their ranks of faithful followers. I responded, at the time, fairly thoroughly to the arguments made therein […]
But, what if the Cambrian robot is self-replicating?
Dr Liddle, commenting on the Cambrian Robot thread (itself a takeoff on the Pre- Cambrian Rabbit thread), observes at comment no 5: the ribosome is part of a completely self-replicating entity. The others aren’t. The ribosome didn’t “make itself” alone but the organism that it is a component of was “made” by another almost identical […]