In “Going ape: Ultraviolence and our primate cousins,” New Scientist’s News Editor, Rowan Hooper, reviewing a book on ape violence, riffs,

Josephine Head, also of the Max Planck Institute, describes how she tracked a trail of blood from where chimps had been vocalising loudly the night before, and made a horrible discovery: the spread-eagled body of an adult male chimp, his face battered and bruised, throat torn open and intestines dragged out. Read More ›

In Ferris Jabr’s “Early mammals were brainy and nosy,” (New Scientist, 19 May 2011), we learn:

The evident importance of smell and touch to these tiny proto-mammals hints at their lifestyle. The 190-million–year-old animals probably navigated dark burrows and skittered through leaf litter hunting insects – activities greatly helped by sensitive smell and touch. 

And thus they avoided dinosaurs, except that Read More ›

… when he said, “We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those Societies most likely to survive. We assign them a higher value.” Even the interviewer, it turns out, didn’t know what he meant, and has been trying to find out.

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My article “A Second Look at the Second Law,” accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters in January, was, as some of you know, withdrawn at the last moment by the editor, not because of any alleged errors, but because “our editors simply found that it does not consist of the kind of content that we are interested in publishing.” I have now created a 22 minute video which presents the contents of this paper, at the end there is some additional information regarding the fate of the paper.

From a recent study: “More Americans Praying About Health, Study Says; No Correlation Found Between Prayer for Health and Lack of Health Insurance ScienceDaily, May 23, 2011)”:

While prayer about health issues increased across all groups, from 43 percent in 2002 to 49 percent in 2007, the data indicated that people with the highest incomes were 15 percent less likely to pray than those with the lowest incomes, and people who exercised regularly were 25 percent less likely to pray those who didn’t exercise. Women, African-Americans and the well-educated were most likely to pray about their health. Read More ›

Fox news reports that an armchair astronomer, David Martine, claims that he’s discovered evidence of intelligent life on Mars. In this YouTube video Martine speculates that it could be a bio lab, or a dwelling or garage (he hope’s its not a weapon. NASA is investigating. So, is this evidence of intelligent design? Is it a natural phenomenon of some sort? Or is it a hoax (albeit an intelligently designed one)? And how might one go about making the determination? Thoughts anyone?

Over the weekend, we’ve been discussing the Kentucky government offering tax incentives to the Ark Encounter theme park, as a job creation boost. Some oppose it on the grounds that it “establishes religion.” Others say that doesn’t matter if it creates jobs. A third group has pointed out that a tax incentive is not a gift, unless you think the government owns everyone’s labor. Here, the Kentucky government offers tax advantages relevant only if the Ark floats, so to speak. In which case, the job creation scheme will work.

Joshua Youngkin, a lawyer for Discovery Institute, offers us a legal comment: Read More ›

Some were surprised when I linked Christianity Today’s new semi-simian Adam and Eve with involuntary euthanasia. But the link is much more direct than some suppose.

There is, first, the whole, huge question of adjusting our thinking from the idea that we are descended from Adam and Eve to the idea that we are ascended from them. That is essentially a different religion from Christianity, and I was indeed surprised that Christianity Today failed to observe the fact. Would they have given over their pages to the proposition that perhaps Christians should be Buddhists? It would make more sense. Buddhism is not a dishonorable creed; far from it. Christians don’t think that Buddhism reflects ultimate reality. But there is world of difference between, say, Buddhism and Darwinism. Darwinism not only doesn’t reflect ultimate reality, it defaces it.

But here I want to focus on the argument for euthanasia. It was succinctly captured in the title of a movie some years back: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I rarely meet a convinced Darwinist who does not support euthanasia (and abortion, and human embryonic stem cell research).

I rarely meet Read More ›

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the forthcoming The Faculty Lounges .?.?. And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For” complains about high-price, low-impact education here, and says something interesting about legacy media journalism along the way:

Think about it this way: Suppose I start a print newspaper tomorrow. I might think I’m selling excellent journalism, while my “readers” are actually using my product to line their birdcages. It might work out fine for a while. But the imbalance in this transaction would make it difficult to talk in general terms about improving the product or whether the product is worth what I’m charging. I might think I should improve my grammar and hire more reporters. My customers might want me to make the paper thicker.- “What is a college education really worth?” (Washington Post, June 3, 2011).

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At UD we have many brilliant ID apologists, and they continue to mount what I perceive as increasingly indefensible assaults on the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection. In addition, they present overwhelming positive evidence that the only known source of functionally specified, highly integrated information-processing systems, with such sophisticated technology as error detection and repair, is intelligent design. [Part 2 is here. ] This should be obvious to any unbiased observer with a decent education in basic mathematics and expertise in any rigorous engineering discipline. Here is my analysis: The Forrests of the world don’t want to admit that there is design in the universe and living systems — even when the Read More ›

        Here: In Never Let Me Go, a novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (and now a motion picture), children at a boarding school in the beautiful English countryside are raised with little contact with the outside world. The truth about the origin and identity of the students of Hailsham School is veiled.But by picking up on subtle clues and hints dropped in guarded conversations, one might begin to figure out that the children are all human clones, whose sole purpose is to become, after reaching adulthood, sources for organ “donations.” After three or four such donations, a clone would “complete,” that is, die. It gets better … Salvo is currently fundraising and any donation will Read More ›

Yes, this, one, on why there is no Adam or Eve. Just ancestral primates who happened to become us  (and a key editor is mad at me (?) for complaining about the new spin.)

Meanwhile, Canadian Christian Darwinist Denis Lamoureux pffftt!! At BioLogos. No, really.

Here’s president Darrel Falk:

In general, our experience has been that theologians are in one of two camps. Either they work within the framework of a non-historical Adam and Eve or they believe the scientific conclusions will eventually prove to be deeply flawed and humans were not created through an evolutionary process after all.

Good strategy that. Backtrack after the damage is done.

Sources tell me Lamoureux wasn’t having any of that reasonable doubt stuff. Can’t reproduce what he wrote, as it has been sponged. Read More ›

How does NASA’s repurposing affect the search for life (of any kind, assuming reasonable expectations) on other planets? Here, Mark Baisley is CEO of Slipglass, a defense-intelligence contractor specializing in information security, comments on “whither NASA?”, Read More ›

In “Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans’ Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes”
(ScienceDaily, June 3, 2011), we are told

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department. Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

Parents of autistic children will wonder about that. One such knowledgeable source commented, “But a feature of autistic/Asperger’s people is that their focused attention is generally toward things that do not provide important survival skills and that they are not as aware of their surroundings ”

Language warning: Present tense of observable fact is used in the main text sentence above and in those below. Read More ›

In “Ancient Hominid Males Stayed Home While Females Roamed, Study Finds (ScienceDaily, 2011), we learn,

The team, which studied teeth from a group of extinct Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus individuals from two adjacent cave systems in South Africa, found more than half of the female teeth were from outside the local area, said CU-Boulder adjunct professor and lead study author Sandi Copeland. In contrast, only about 10 percent of the male hominid teeth were from elsewhere, suggesting they likely grew up and died in the same area.

If these results are replicated, early human culture encouraged the idea that women should go live with their husbands instead of staying with their folks. Let’s give that one time to sink in. It’s novel …  Read More ›