Here’s a quote from a paper I ran into a few months back. I’ve been meaning to post it. I certainly have Liz Liddle in mind as I do so.

I would ask that you resist your urge to ‘google’ the quote, and simply ask yourself the question: when was this paper published. Then have a gander. It’s a paper by Hampton L. Carson. From the abstract:

The experiments reported in this paper are designed to test the effect of raising
the genetic variance in experimental populations in a different way, namely, by
the use of large doses of X-rays delivered frequently to all the adults in the popu-
lation. The populations were thus closed ones in which the mutation rate was
artificially maintained at a very high level. Under these conditions, the experi-
mental populations represent a sensitive system for the detection of the effects of
newly induced genes that cause increase in fitness, whether these effects may be
manifested in the heterozygous condition, the homozygous condition, or both.
The results clearly show that there is no sustained increase in fitness despite an
increased genetic variance as indicated by an observed increase in genetic load.
There is thus no evidence for single-gene heterosis or for the induction of new
genes having a favorable effect on any of the fitness characters.

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I have written this essay in response to a skeptical critic of Intelligent Design, who denies that the cosmos is beautiful in any objective sense. My aim is to defend two propositions: (i) mathematical beauty is an objective reality; and (ii) the cosmos instantiates this kind of beauty, and can therefore be called objectively beautiful. I will then endeavor to show that Intelligent Design is the only hypothesis which satisfactorily explains these truths. In my essay, I shall be quoting liberally from the writings of a number of atheist mathematicians and physicists, some of whom are pictured above: Bertrand Russell, G.H. Hardy, Paul Erdos and Steven Weinberg (with acknowledgements to photographer Larry D. Moore for the image of Professor Weinberg). Read More ›

As you remember from high school biology plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, and animals take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. But what about the recently discovered loriciferans—tiny animals at the bottom of the ocean where oxygen is hard to come by? The loriciferans, living two miles under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, apparently spend their entire existence in anoxic conditions.  Read more

You know the drill, scientific findings refute evolution’s everything-is-just-a-fluke expectations, evolutionists are flabbergasted, evolutionists re-engineer their theory for the (n+1)th time, evolutionists sing the praise of Darwin, saying their theory explains the evidence so well, and the findings become yet another proof text for our creation myth. This time the finding is that DNA does more than sit at the center of everything like Jabba the Hutt. Evolution’s geno-centric, DNA-is-king myth expects DNA—which is supposed to hold the keys to the phenotype (remember how DNA mutations were supposed to create the dinosaurs, and everything else?)—to receive care and feeding from its various cyto-servants. Remember selfish and greedy DNA?  Read more

In “Antimatter surplus is not dark matter’s smoking gun” (New Scientist, September 6, 2011), Stuart Clark explains, Antimatter enthusiasts will love it; dark matter hunters not so much. NASA’s FERMI satellite has confirmed a previous hint that there is more antimatter than expected coming from space. The bad news is that the result almost certainly rules out dark matter as the source. Bad, dude. Antimatter is matter with the charges reversed – positrons (+), instead of electrons (-), for example. It is present today in small numbers. Dark matter is a theoretical concept: Matter that emits no light signal, hence the name. It may very well exist, but so far no such particle has been captured. Dark-matter theorists had been Read More ›