From “Mystery of Disappearing Bird Digit Solved?” (ScienceDaily, Sep. 4, 2011), we learn the answer to one of life’s little mysteries: How does the three-toed bird foot map onto the five-toed mammal foot: Evolution adds and subtracts, and nowhere is this math more evident than in vertebrates, which are programmed to have five digits on each limb. But many species do not. Snakes, of course, have no digits, and birds have three. Yale scientists now have a good handle on how these developmental changes are orchestrated in the embryo. But there is still one outstanding debate on birds: Which digits are they? A thumb with index and middle fingers, or the index, middle and ring fingers? As it turns out, Read More ›

Funny thing about scientific evidence, it doesn’t go away. After a century of playing whack-a-mole with Lamarckians, the evolutionist’s worst nightmare keeps reoccurring. Like Bill Murray forever waking up to I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher, evolutionists are continually reminded that the science isn’t going anywhere soon.  Read more

At age 90 as of 2011, my father is one of the few living scientists who developed the atomic bomb during WWII. He named me after the great physical chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis, under whom my dad earned his Ph.D. in his early 20s while working on the Manhattan Project. When I was a child in the 1950s rumors spread that the communist Chinese were developing an atomic bomb. I asked my dad, “Why don’t we just keep it a secret from them?” My dad replied, and I’ll never forget it, “Gilbert, the secret is in nature, and it’s there to be found by anyone who looks hard enough.” Of course, my dad was talking about the nature of the Read More ›

From time to time, some of the more thoughtful skeptics who contribute to Uncommon Descent have asked what assumptions the fine-tuning argument makes about the nature, mind and objectives of the Intelligent Designer of the universe. In this post, I have endeavored to answer their questions to the best of my ability. The views expressed below are my own. As far as I can make out, the fine-tuning argument makes five assumptions about the Designer and about the universe He designed. Here they are. (Note: Although I frequently use the term “He” to refer to the Designer, no inference should be drawn that the Designer belongs to the male sex or the masculine gender. And although I regularly refer to Read More ›

When Darwin’s Dilemma, a film that examines evolution in light of the scientific evidence, was booked at the California Science Center’s IMAX theater two years ago, evolutionists from around the country were furious. They made sure the booking was cancelled. So while the CSC censored the film, their censorship was by no means an independent action. The CSC was at the tip of the spear, but evolutionists near and far drove that spear home. And those evolutionists were by no means limited to life scientists. For evolutionary thought is about much more than merely the origin of species. Consider, for example, Hilary Schor, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Law at the University of Southern California.  Read more

In “Antibiotic resistance found in ancient bacteria” (CBC News, Aug 31, 2011), Emily Chung reports, The same genes that make disease-causing bacteria resistant to today’s antibiotics have been found in soil bacteria that have remained frozen since woolly mammoths roamed the Earth. “We’ve shown for the first time that drug resistance is a really old phenomenon and it’s part of the natural ecology of the planet,” said Gerard Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. Five years ago, Wright had discovered harmless soil bacteria, Actinobacteria, that showed resistance to antibiotics (not, presumably, directed at them). He then sought bacteria that had never been exposed to human efforts against microbes. Geologist Duane Forese suggested taking soil samples from under Read More ›