Recently, as John Biello tells it in “High temperature, low oxygen and permanent darkness are no problem for a previously unknown species of nematode,” (Scientific American, June 1, 2011), researchers found a nematode worm that lives more than a kilometre underground in South African gold mines. The species, called Halicephalobus mephisto, is believed to consume bacterial biofilms that themselves consume minerals. Read More ›

They forget assumed species differences, that is.

In “Researchers Solve Mammoth Evolutionary Puzzle: The Woollies Weren’t Picky, Happy to Interbreed” ScienceDaily (May 31, 2011), we learn that DNA studies suggest that the woolly mammoth interbred with a “completely different and much larger” species 12,000 years ago (it went extinct 10,000 years ago). They suggest, Read More ›

One common theme which often permeates discussions pertaining to embryology and developmental biology — particularly (but not limited to) within ID circles — is the idea that an organism’s DNA sequence may not wholly be responsible for the development of the three-dimensional structure and architecture found within cells, organs and body plans. Read More>>>

Here’s an intellectually respectable “Blast from the past” to understand the motives, a (August 23, 2008), “The Soviet ape-man scandal” by New Scientist’s Stephanie Pain:

When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes. “If he crossed an ape and a human and produced viable offspring then that would mean Darwin was right about how closely related we are,” says Etkind. Read More ›

In “Mars ‘remains in embryonic state’”( BBC News, 27 May 2011), Jennifer Carpenter floats an interesting idea about Mars:

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, more quickly than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth. Read More ›

Ben Shapiro, the author of the national bestsellers Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President, has just written a hard-hitting expose of Hollywood, entitled Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. From the editorial review at Amazon.com:

The inside story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history has become a propaganda tool for the Left.

Primetime Propaganda is the story – told in their own words – of how television has been used over the past sixty years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image. Read More ›

This from Martin Eiermann’s (The European, 30.05.2011) interview with Stewart Brand, author, biologist, and environmental activist from the 1960s onward:

Brand: Steven Pinker [materialist cognitive scientist (Harvard)] is currently working on a book about the decline of violence through human history. We like to think that we are living in a very violent time, that the future looks dark. But the data says that violence has declined every millennium, every century, every decade. The reduction in cruelty is just astounding. So we should not focus too much on the violence that has marked the twentieth century. The interesting question is how we can continue that trend of decreasing violence into the future. What options are open to us to make the world more peaceful? Those are data-based questions.  Read More ›

At Evolution News & Views (May 31, 2011) science historian Michael Flannery reviews James Hannam’s The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, which mostly tells us what Christians should be ashamed of not knowing:

The standard rendering that the medieval Church stood in the way of scientific advance and spent its time persecuting the leading intellects of the day like Galileo until free and open inquiry was rescued by the Renaissance humanists is shown to be utterly false.

Flannery and Hannam (who ends up falling in later, unfortunately) are quite right to say what they do. But one gets the sense that something is missing from these scholarly discussions. How about the role of, for example, Christian Darwinists in fronting the idea that any Christian who does not believe in the ape Adam and Eve depicted recently in Christianity Today is actually causing the hostility of materialist atheists? That, of course, may be true. But if so, what about it? Why is Karl Giberson allowed to feel humiliated about the Christians he feels superior to, because he is prepared to believe in such disgusting follies? Why are the BioLogians willing to alter any timeless Scriptural teaching in order to cater to them? But more, why tolerate their arrogance?

As a hack, I first smelled a rat a decade ago Read More ›

Senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, Ann Gauger, reflects on “Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails”, Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011):

Up until now, the materialist, reductionist method has been very successful, because cells can be ground up, probed, measured and tested in a way that life forces or agency can’t be. But now molecular, cellular, and developmental biologists are drowning in a flood of data that we don’t know how to interpret. We do not know, for example, how to read a genome from an unknown new species to say what kind of organism it will produce. We can only determine what other genomes it most closely resembles. In order to predict the nature and appearance of the organism with that genome, we would need to know — just for starters — the maternal and paternal contributions to the egg and sperm, the whole of the developmental path from egg to adult, plus the particular effects of any mutations within that genome on its phenotype, not to mention its environmental history. Read More ›

Yesterday, I received a note from a high-ranking editor at Christianity Today who was pretty annoyed at what I wrote about the magazine’s June cover story on BioLogos. He hasn’t replied to my suggestion that I publish his note and my reply. So I will publish my reply here, with a couple of comments, and link to the pieces posted here at UD. Read More ›

Crossing swords with a professional philosopher can be a dangerous thing. I’m not one, of course; I simply happen to have a Ph.D. in philosophy. But Professor Edward Feser is a professional philosopher, and a formidable debating opponent, as one well-known evolutionary biologist is about to find out.

In a recent post of mine, entitled, Minds, brains, computers and skunk butts, I took issue with a recent assertion by Professor Jerry Coyne, that the evolution of human intelligence is no more remarkable than the evolution of skunk butts. (To be fair, Coyne was not trying to be offensive in his comparison: apparently he really did have a pet skunk for several years, and the simile was the first that sprang to mind for him, as a biologist.) In my post, I cited a philosophical argument put forward by Professor Feser, that the intentionality or “meaningfulness” of our thoughts cannot be explained in materialist terms, as thoughts have an inherent meaning, whereas physical states of affairs (such as brain processes) have no inherent meaning as such. However, Professor Coyne was not terribly impressed with this argument. He replied as follows:

I’ll leave this one to the philosophers, except to say that “meaning” seems to pose no problem, either physically or evolutionarily, to me: our brain-modules have evolved to make sense of what we take in from the environment. And that’s not unique to us: primates surely have a sense of “meaning” that they derive from information processed from the environment, and we can extend this all the way back, in ever more rudimentary form, to protozoans.

He shouldn’t have said that.

Professor Edward Feser has just issued a devastating response to Professor Coyne over at his Website. I’d like to invite readers at Uncommon Descent to have a look at it for themselves, here. It’s a very entertaining read. Feser concludes:

… if one is going to aver confidently that “‘meaning’… pose[s] no problem,” he had better give at least some evidence of knowing what the philosophical problem of meaning or intentionality is and what philosophers have said about it.

Wise words, indeed.

Read More ›

An individual who shall most certainly remain nameless insists on foisting on my notice the claim that 60% of up-and-coming new atheist leaders hail from Girth Central and thus demonstrate what happens when you diss the Bread of Life and grab the bread on the side. … Read More ›

Here’s David Tyler at Access Research Network (05/31/11), on “Non-marine life throughout the Neoproterozic”:

What do these findings mean for our understanding of life on the Precambrian Earth? Dr Charles Wellman, an author of the paper, is quoted by ScienceDaily as saying:

“It is generally considered that life originated in the ocean and that the important developments in the early evolution of life took place in the marine environment: the origin of prokaryotes, eukaryotes, sex and multicellularity. During this time the continents are often considered to have been essentially barren of life — or at the most with an insignificant microbial biota dominated by cyanobacteria. We have discovered evidence for complex life on land from 1 billion year old deposits from Scotland. This suggests that life on land at this time was more abundant and complex than anticipated. It also opens the intriguing possibility that some of the major events in the early history of life may have taken place on land and not entirely within the marine realm.” Read More ›

Whatever your theology, notice the significance of the fact that self-identified Christians were shown to be wrong because they made a prediction against God’s design in nature. It’s one thing to be wrong. It’s another to be wrong for discreditable reasons.

Here at Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011), Casey Luskin reviews Giberson and Collins’ The Language of Science and Faith, a book outlining Christian Darwinism, BioLogos-style. He focuses here on the Christian Darwinist contention that non-coding (“junk”) DNA shows that God didn’t design humans: Read More ›