Don Johnson, author of Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, will be on a speaking tour: A West-Coast fall tour starting in the Northwest on Oct 22, ending in Southern California on Dec 6 (with an Arizona excursion Nov 14-17). More details will be available when the “Programming of Life” DVD is released around Aug 1. More. Don Johnson has earned Ph.D.s in both Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and in Chemistry from Michigan State University, was a senior research scientist for 10 years in pharmaceutical and medical/scientific instrument fields, was an independent computer consultant for many years, taught 20 years in universities in the US and Europe, and since “retiring,” has done consulting, speaking Read More ›

At Access Research Network (7/22/11). And offers an answer: For 20 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has undertaken surveys of science literacy that incorporate these two true-false statements: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”, and “The universe began with a huge explosion”. Happily, changes have been recommended, but not all have welcomed their suggested replacement wording. The critics say that the revised statements are “surrendering ground to religion”. I will suggest below that both the engineers of change and their critics have something to learn about science surveys. More. See also: The Darwinist prediction that comes true time and time again Follow UD News at Twitter! —

According to the US Darwin lobby, the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Adds its Voice for Evolution:

The chorus of support for the teaching of evolution continues, with a
statement from the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, which works to promote the study of ecology and evolution in Canada and to raise public awareness of the importance of ecology and evolution to Canadian society.

Yes, a lobby. But not a very effective one. Not their fault, really. In Canada, public opinion splits on origins do not typically follow party lines, as they do in the US. Politicians really can’t gain from fronting the controversy and they rarely do. So, to politicize the issue, they and allied lobbies and sympathetic media were reduced to hounding the science minister about his personal views in 2009. Read More ›

Over at Design Matrix, in “First questions about LECA” (July 22, 2011), Mike Gene offers,

We have seen that science has discovered the last eukaryotic common ancestor was essentially as complex as a modern day eukaryotic cell (see here and here and here).

Okay, so in that respect, evolution did not happen. Can we get past that fact, or are we still stuck with funding propaganda from the Darwin lobby?

Furthermore, I have argued that this complex cell plan that has defined eukarya since the time of LECA has worked to facilitate the eventual emergence of metaozoan-type complexity. Read More ›

Troy Hooper reports on the discovery of “the finest mastodon site in the world” in Colorado in 2010 in “Curtains close on scientifically significant Snowmass bone dig …’” (Real Aspen, July 10, 2011):

The fossil excavation at Ziegler Reservoir came to a close a couple of days ago, yielding an Ice Age ecosystem of 4,826 bones and evidence detailing 26 different vertebrae creatures that also include giant bison, Columbian mammoths, super-sized ground sloths, deer, a horse, camel, otter, muskrat, vole, mink or weasel, chipmunk, bat, rabbit, beaver, mouse, salamander, frogs, lizards, snake, fish and birds.

They are between 43 and 150,000 years old.  Read More ›

One of the fundamental predictions of evolution is that life must have had simple beginnings. Life is complex and ever since Darwin evolutionists have tried to explain how that complexity arose over time, for life must have had simple beginnings. An obvious problem here is that even the fundamental unit of life—the cell—is itself profoundly complex. And this problem has not been aided by evolutionist’s attempts to reconstruct what that first cell might have looked like. The results were confusing due to the wide variety of genes between and amongst life’s three lineages. No clear picture of a simple progenitor emerged. Instead, the only solution seemed to be a super progenitor that already had most of the highly complex traits Read More ›

In his recent article in Scientific American on the multiverse, cosmologist Max Tegmark appeared unfazed by the fact that “if you tweaked many of our constants of nature by just a tiny amount, life as we know it would be impossible,” arguing that “[i]f there’s a … multiverse where these ‘constants’ take all possible values, it’s not surprising that we find ourselves in one of the rare universes that are inhabitable, just like it’s not surprising that we find ourselves living on Earth rather than Mercury or Neptune.” However, Tegmark’s argument fails to account for another surprising feature of the laws of nature: their beauty. Read More ›

A Muslim friend from London sent me a link to the following YouTube video: At around the 7-minute mark, the speaker makes a specified complexity argument (interestingly, attributing it to the Koran). The treatment lacks some nuance, but it’s in the right ballpark, and he’s clearly reading our stuff. I’m glad to see that these ideas are going cross-cultural.