In my essay here, paragwinn asks, “You’ve been quite prolific lately with these testimonials. What gives?” Note the 136 comments at this writing, which eclipses most all recent posts by an order of magnitude. This is not an atypical consequence of my posts at UD. So, what gives? What gives is a sea change in the history of science. For centuries it was thought by the “scientific” elite that materialism (i.e., chance and necessity) would eventually explain everything, and there was (what turned out to be ephemeral) evidence that this might be the case, as a result of the advancements of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. But something happened in the latter half of the 20th Read More ›

A recent blogger has announced that a few million simulated monkeys really could reproduce Shakespeare. This is such a hoary chestnut, that of course, everyone had to go and read just exactly what the fellow actually did, if only to ridicule it. Here’s how he describes his project, Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote… For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have Read More ›

The bartender says, “We don’t serve neutrinos here” A neutrino walks into a bar. The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported “faster than light” travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for “superluminal” transport. But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed Read More ›

I’ll just let the scientists speak for themselves. “In the last two decades there have been dramatic changes in our understanding of how evolution works,” said Gunter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and senior author of the paper. “We used to believe that changes only took place through small mutations in our DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case we found a huge cut-and-paste operation that altered wide areas of the genome to create large-scale morphological change.” Liz Liddle certainly continues to believe in “cummulative selection”, but some scientists have a differing view. Indeed, “These transposons are not genes that underwent small changes over long periods of time and eventually grew into Read More ›