In the current discussion on [Mis-]Representing Natural Selection, UD commenter Bruce David has posed a significant challenge: . . . it is not obvious that even with intelligence in the picture a major modification of a complex system is possible one small step at a time if there is a requirement that the system continue Read More…
Month: December 2011
Darwinism and climate change: Go on then, make a PREDICTION!
If such studies don’t enable us to predict anything, why are they important for understanding the outcomes of anthropogenic climate change?
Philo and Origen are not your friends, Dr. Alexander: A short survey of what two Biblical allegorists taught about Adam and Eve
Dr. Denis Alexander, who is the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University, is an eminently qualified molecular biologist with a very odd combination of theological beliefs. In a recent article in The Guardian (December 23, 2011) entitled, Evolution, Christmas and the Atonement, he rejected belief in a literal Adam Read More…
Human evolution: Why we walk upright – because savannah replaced forests …
Hmmm. If walking upright makes so much sense, why didn’t various wildlife start doing it?
Japanese getting in on string theory hype?
So says Peter Woit in “This Week’s Hype” at Not Even Wrong.
So how did Darwinism gain such authority? Barzun asks
“Why was evolution more precious than scientific suspense of judgment?”
More from Barzun: Any questioning of the materialist assumption looked like superstitious folly …
“At the same time, the age-old passion for uniformity drove the scientists to explain by material cause the inner life of man which alone gave value to the things. “
Jacques Barzun critiques Darwinism (1941): “difficult not to fall down and adore the theory”
“Even better than a machine, in that it really provides for perpetual motion; the struggle for existence is constant, so is variation; improvement should therefore be endless. “
More popcorn: A virtual tour of the cell (and a link to another)
Courtesy North Dakota State U: embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt (And for those wanting a narrated version of the famous XVIVO vid, cf here.) Remember, we are looking at these videos in light of Denton’s remark of 1985: To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify Read More…
Status of most celebrated Ediacaran fossils to be revoked?
“It was indeed the fossil record that had let us down, not the textbooks, and certainly not the exciting new insights from molecular clocks. All was not as it seemed, however, and … “
The traditional atheist/agnostic is indispensable to the intellectual world—Part II
“At one time, popular beliefs sought the recognition of religion; today, they are more likely to seek the recognition of science. “
Michael Shermer: “New research on self-control explains the link between religion and health”
The reason Shermer’s approach won’t usually work is that the people who need the help don’t even want to “will themselves to loftier purposes.”
A Scientific Study In Evolutionary Musicology
Darwinism has been the most prolific progenitor of junk pseudoscience in the history of junk pseudoscience. One might even call Darwinism the universal common ancestor of junk pseudoscience in the last century and a half. (“Junk pseudoscience” is not redundant. Pseudoscience is worthless. Junk pseudoscience is less than worthless, that is, destructive.) Once unsupported Darwinian Read More…
Who’s the most common type of scientific miscreant?
“a bright and ambitious young man working in an elite institution in a rapidly moving and highly competitive branch of modern biology or medicine … “
There is no brilliance in mechanism and reductionism any more.
Mechanists and reductionists just bypass the hard math questions and award themselves a prize, cheered on by their equally tenured fellows, and increasingly irrelevant to what happens.