… chimes in with them as they were portrayed in the recent article in Christianity Today (June 2011).
Maybe they aren’t really like that, to judge from Falk’s recent sponge over.
But Ruse is. At Huffpo, he says: Read More ›
In an effort to discredit a group hosting climate change skeptics, along with the skeptics themselves, the The Guardian‘s Leo Haig, an environment blogger charges,
That these characters are meeting up once again to thrash out these issues is no great revelation or surprise. After all, they wear their agenda with pride and promulgate it in the media and on the internet week in week out.What is more surprising, perhaps, is that some of them are happy to accept the invitation of an organisation that has promoted intelligent design and seems to tread a very fine line indeed between fighting “Islamic fascism” and outright Islamophobia. Are these speakers happy – or even aware – of the company they will be keeping this weekend? Is it fair to assume they did their homework on this group before accepting their invitation to be flown to LA to participate in the event? (10 June 2011)
Promoted intelligent design? Maybe so, if you consider that one of the current topics is Read More ›
In Life’s solution, Simon Conway Morris devotes an entire five-page, double-column index to convergence: Two or more species evolving the same complex, multi-part trait without being related.
Seemingly, it works that way in politics too, if we heed journalist Rich Galen’s advice:
There is a reason that just about every airliner looks like every other airliner. Some are larger, some smaller; some have two engines, some four, but they generally look alike.There is a reason for that. There is a design solution that fits commercial airliners. They take off, they go where the pilot aims them, they land, and they can carry enough passengers to make money.
Same with political campaigns. Every cycle candidates say, “We’re going to run a different type of campaign.” They all look pretty much alike because there is an engineering design solution for political campaigns.
Things change. On-line fundraising instead of using the USPS was new. So were digital avionics instead of analog instruments. But those things are updates, not fundamental changes. – “Design solution,” (Townhall, 06/10/2011)
Sounds like evolution (as it really happens) . .. Well, it seems one American politician ignored this pattern, and Read More ›
Just when it was noted that Amazon has been going all negative on “I haven’t read the book but … ” “noviews”, Wikipedia carries a notice on the Haeckel’s embryos page (June 11, 2011): This article’s use of external links may not follow Wikipedia’s policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links.(August 2010) The links may well have been cleaned up since then; at one time, much material on the Internet defended the fakes and attacked those who exposed them. Thoughts? Follow UD News for breaking news on the design controversy.
As in here. Also: What make you of this, from Wikipedia?
Sources note: Choosing only those embryos of species that fit the Darwin/Haeckel frame for teaching purposes – as opposed to a range of accurate depictions – isn’t the biggest problem, nor is exaggerating the similarities midway through development. Haeckel’s most serious misrepresentation is that he left out the earliest stages in embryo development – when various classes differ markedly.
Why would he do that? In order to demonstrate common ancestry through embryos, what you need is for them to all start out very similar and gradually diverge as they develop. And that does not happen. Of course, common ancestry can be true even if embryos do not demonstrate it. But if we believe there is sufficient evidence for common ancestry, why choose fake evidence to demonstrate it?
See Jonathan Wells, “Haeckel’s embryos: Setting the record straight,” The American Biology Teacher (May 1, 1999): Read More ›
Does ” Oxbridge-on-Thames” provide a test of the social power of new atheism?
Here, we noted that AC Graying was beginning to take heat, alongside Richard Dawkins, for refusing to debate American Christian apologist William Lane Craig, as other new atheists have done. He’s in the news again, as the organizer of a private, very expensive private New College of the Humanities (18,000 quid a year), where Richard Dawkins will have a key role: Read More ›
PZ has done an interview. I have compiled some statements that interest us here at UD. Here is the first installment.
ON ID
Host Stephen Smith: “You spend a lot of digital ink, if you will, attacking intelligent design and the people who are behind that movement. They argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process, such as natural selection.” Why do you have such scorn for these beliefs?”
Myers: “Well, for one thing, they’re dishonest. They’re grossly dishonest about this stuff. That’s not really where they’re coming from. When they say this stuff, they say, “Oh, we’re taking an objective view. We’re taking a secular view of the universe in saying that there’s a designer behind it.” They’re misleading you. That’s not where they come from. Where they come from is typically a very religious background. What intelligent design is, is taking their religious beliefs, sanitizing them of any mention of God, and presenting them in this cleaned up format. The sole premise, the sole impetus for doing this stuff is their belief in God.
In “Black, White and Stinky: Explaining Bold Coloration in Skunks” (ScienceDaily June 8, 2011), we learn about warning colors in mammals (who can’t usually do fashion runway colours): Read More ›
Too many false alarms in the nervous system when heat is mistaken for light? Here: “For a long time, people assumed that light and heat had to trigger via different mechanisms, but now we think that both types of energy, in fact, trigger identical changes in the pigment molecules,” says Yau. Moreover, since longer wavelength pigments have higher rates of false alarms, Yau says this may explain why animals never evolved to have infrared-sensing pigments.”Apart from putting to rest a long-standing debate, it’s a wake-up call for researchers to realize that biomolecules in general have more potential thermal energy than previously thought,” says Luo. – “Why Animals Don’t Have Infrared Vision: Source of the Visual System’s ‘False Alarms’ Discovered”, (ScienceDaily Read More ›
Here. Note: Re Expelled, this was rumoured. The site has not been serviced for some time. Hang on to your DVDs.) Here is the auction page. Here are some excerpts from the screenplay. Expelled quotes
After this recent claim that autism was somehow adaptive in the prehistoric era, many are reading with interest this: Two other studies published in the June 9 issue of Neuron report on the same families studied by State, Sanders and their co-authors. One of these, by a group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, paints a very similar picture — that autism is a highly genetically diverse disorder and that sporadic changes in the structure of the genome present only in the affected individuals and not in other families often play a key role.The other study, by researchers at Columbia University, suggests that although hundreds of genes may be involved in autism, they appear to disrupt a common Read More ›
So contend Salverda and de Visser in Current Biology,
Given that there is genetic variation in evolvability, how can it evolve? This is not straightforward, as natural selection benefits organisms with high fitness and not those with increased evolutionary potential. In order to evolve by natural selection, variants with increased evolvability must be associated with direct or indirect fitness benefits. Direct positive effects on offspring fitness are unlikely, at least for short-term evolvability, because genotypes that produce relatively many beneficial mutations tend to be those with relatively low fitness [7]. Variants with increased evolvability thus rely on longer-term benefits arising from the association with rare beneficial mutations, which they produce at an increased rate. Such second-order selection due to hitchhiking with beneficial mutations (Figure 1) is also the mechanism by which mutators, i.e. mutants with an increased mutation rate, reach high frequency in microbial populations [8].In the new study, Woods et al.[2] report a detailed demonstration of second-order selection of evolvability in a large population of the bacterium Escherichia coli. Read More ›
Having been invited to debate Craig, Professor Grayling replied:
I am not interested in debating Professor Craig, though if he would like to co-opt me for the publicity for his tour – I would be happy to debate him on the question of the existence of fairies and water-nymphs. But as for the very uninteresting matter of whether there is just one god or goddess and that it can be debated despite the claim that it is transcendently ineffable and unknowable – that is an empty prospect, hence my declining the invitation. –
Which prompted this response from a popular British TV presenter: Read More ›
The second award offer in the recent contest, a copy of Don Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, asks “What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?”
It goes to homerj1 at 3 for
The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.
This won because it can be used effortlessly in a sentence, as in:
Prof. Retro Darwin’s noview of biochemist Michael Behe’s latest …
Rev. Darwin Santa, noviewer of Steve Meyer’s …
Recently, Dimbo Darwin, science writer, noviewed Bill Dembski’s latest …
Ease of use is important. And dropping the pretense of reading makes for more honest communication: Read More ›
Three recent papers in Science:
In Evolution, the Sum Is Less than Its Parts
Sergey Kryazhimskiy1,2,
Jeremy A. Draghi1, and
Joshua B. Plotkin1
Propagating bacteria in a lab for thousands of generations may seem tedious, or even irrelevant, to most evolutionary biologists. Nonetheless, such experiments provide an opportunity to deduce quantitative principles of evolution and directly test them in controlled environments. Combined with modern sequencing technologies, as well as theory, recent microbial experiments have suggested a critical role for genetic interactions among mutations, called epistasis, in determining the pace of evolution. Two papers in this issue, by Khan et al. on page 1193 (1) and Chou et al. (2) on page 1190, present precise experimental measurements of these epistatic interactions.