In his book Evidence and Evolution Elliott Sober chastised those silly creationists for deducing that god created the species. “If this simple formula were enough to explain the observations in question,” the evolutionary philosopher warned, “there would be no need for science. Not only would Darwin’s own theory be unnecessary; there would be no need for theories in any other area of science, either.” Darwin’s theory unnecessary? Unthinkable. The “god did it” hypothesis is strictly unscientific. In fact Sober applauds Darwin’s refutation of creationism in proving evolution. In a PNAS paper Sober writes:  Read more

In “Early human fossils unearthed in Ukraine” (BBC News , 20 June 2011), Jennifer Carpenter tells us,

Ancient remains uncovered in Ukraine represent some of the oldest evidence of modern people in Europe, experts have claimed.Archaeologists found human bones and teeth, tools, ivory ornaments and animal remains at the Buran-Kaya cave site.

The 32,000-year-old fossils bear cut marks suggesting they were defleshed as part of a post-mortem ritual.

Done, probably, so that the skeleton could remain as a memorial. Neanderthal peoples used red ochre in burials (signifying continued life?). Read More ›

As you read these words a frenzy of activity is taking place as the light entering your eye triggers a highly detailed sequence of actions, ultimately causing a signal to be sent to your brain. In fact, even a mere single photon can be detected in your vision system. It all starts with a photon interacting with a light-sensitive chromophore molecule known as retinal. The interaction alters the retinal molecule and this, in turn, influences the large, trans-membrane opsin protein to which the chromophore is attached. This is just the beginning of the cellular signal transduction cascade. In the next step the opsin causes the activation of hundreds of transducin molecules. These, in turn, cause the activation of cGMP phosphodiesterase Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (July 1, 2011), we learn, “Adult Stem Cells Carry Their Own Baggage: Epigenetics Guides Stem Cell Fate”:

Adult stem cells and progenitor cells may not come with a clean genetic slate after all. That’s because a new report in the FASEB Journal shows that adult stem or progenitor cells have their own unique “epigenetic signatures,” which change once a cell differentiates. This is important because epigenetic changes do not affect the actual make up in a cell’s DNA, but rather, how that DNA functions. Epigenetic changes have been shown to play a role in a wide range of diseases, including obesity, and have been shown to be heritable from mother to child.

Here’s an interesting take from a geneticist: Read More ›

At Eurekalert (June 29, 2011), we learn: “Finding showing human ancestor older than previously thought offers new insights into evolution.” In the current episode, new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show that modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus. The find counters previous hypotheses – which it must, in order to qualify as an episode:

The new story supports the “multiregional” model of human evolution. Read More ›

Here:

The leaders are divided on evolution. Slightly more reject the idea of evolution (47%) than believe in theistic evolution, the notion that God has used evolution for the purpose of creating humans and other life (41%). Few (3%) believe that human life has evolved solely by natural processes with no involvement from a supreme being.

Did the 3% understand the question? Read More ›

At Adam’s Lost Dream, Jay Hall, who teaches math at Howard College in Texas, comments on the Christianity Today’s simian Adam and Eve, courtesy BioLogos: Collins claims that humanity came from a group of 10,000 ancestors around 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. That is, mankind came from a group and not Adam and Eve. Elizabeth Mitchell comments, “Search the Christianity Today article much as you will, it never explains how the conclusion that there had to be 10,000 original people was reached. Oddly enough, neither does the BioLogos website.”According to A. Gibbons, writing in Science, “… researchers have calculated that ‘mitochondrial Eve’ – the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people—lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago Read More ›

Here, at Telic Thoughts (posted June 17, 2011) is an interview (vid) with University of Otago biochemist Michael Denton. Not an ID guy exactly, he wrote Evolution: A theory in crisis (1986) and Nature’s Destiny (2002), providing a comprehensive look at evolution without Darwinism. A floodlight at last.

Many people first became interested in the fundamental question – Darwinism and “science” vs. evidence and real science – from reading Denton – including Phillip Johnson, who first brought the ID guys together to ask the key question … and so now? Read More ›

Move over, Professor Richard Dawkins. Atheism has a new champion.

Dave Mullenix has recently come up with not one but two philosophical arguments for atheism. Mullenix’s arguments, unlike Dawkins’, aren’t based on inductive inference, but on the unassailable facts that (i) a certain minimal amount of information (usually several bits) is required to represent a proper name; and (ii) a very large amount of information is required to represent all of the rules we follow, when speaking a language. Any Being that knows your name must be able to keep your name in its mind. That means its mind must be able to store more than one bit, so it can’t be the simple God of classical theism. Moreover, any Being that knows all the rules of a language (as God does, being omniscient) must be extremely complex – much more so than the first cell, say. And if it’s very complex, then its own existence is inherently even more unlikely than that of the living creatures whose existence it is supposed to explain.

I believe in addressing arguments for atheism head-on, especially good ones, so here goes.

Commenting in response to a question which I had previously posed to Dr. Elizabeth Liddle, “Why does a mind require something brain-like?”, Dave Mullenix argued as follows:
Read More ›

In “A Testimony of Grace and the Plasticity of the Brain” (Trinity International University, July 2, 2011), Heather Zeiger reflects on one striking case: We never know how God is working in someone’s life, even as they are in the twilight of their lives or in a coma or navigating through the fog of Alzheimer’s. We know so little about how the brain actually works, and to say that someone is as good as dead when he or she is in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s or in a coma is short-sighted. There are still many mysteries about the mind/brain connection and just how plastic the brain is. The mind makes up its mysteries as it goes along, and the brain Read More ›

At Discovery Magazine (July 1, 2011), Ian O’Neill tells us that “We May Not Live in a Hologram after All”. Hard to say who’ll be more shocked, those who thought we did and those who never supposed that anyone had even considered the idea, but

In a nutshell, GEO600 — a mindbogglingly sensitive piece of kit — started to detect what particle physicist Craig Hogan interpreted as quantum “fuzziness.” This fuzziness, or blurriness on the smallest possible scales, could be interpreted as evidence for the “holographic universe” hypothesis.

This hypothesis describes the 3-dimensional universe we live in as a projection from a 2-dimensional “shell” at the very edge of the universe. As with any projection, the projected “pixels” will become fuzzy the closer you zoom in on them. The quantum fuzziness GEO600 seemed to detect could be evidence for this projection effect. The Universe is therefore a hologram, so the idea goes.

[ … ]

However, Read More ›

For example, Tufts University cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, of whom William Lane Craig* notes, Vilenkin and, more famously, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking have proposed models of the universe that Vilenkin candidly calls exercises in “metaphysical cosmology.” In his best-selling popularization of his theory, Hawking even reveals an explicitly theological orientation. He concedes that on the Standard Model one could legitimately identify the Big Bang singularity as the instant at which God created the universe. Indeed, he thinks that a number of attempts to avoid the Big Bang were probably motivated by the feeling that a beginning of time “smacks of divine intervention.” He sees his own model as preferable to the Standard Model because there would be no edge of Read More ›

To support discussion at the ongoing design inference thread, I briefly clip my briefing note, on the Trevors-Abel FSC concept, a way to visualise CSI: Read More ›

In response to onward use of the talking points that CSI is not calculable etc., I have updated the CSI Newsflash post of April 14, 2011, to explicitly incorporate the dummy variable for specificity, and by adding a 1,000 coin demonstration calculation to go with the already existing use of the Durston et al calculation of FSC that was fed into three cases of a biologically relevant Chi_500 value.

I show the clip below: Read More ›