May 2011

“’Exotic’ planet is densest of its kind: 55 Cancri e as dense as lead and has year less than 18 hours long,” we learn from Emily Chung, CBC News (Apr 29, 2011): 55 Cancri e is a super-Earth located in a very tight, short orbit around a yellow dwarf star similar to Corot-7b, above. Corot 7b was confirmed in 2009 to be the first rocky extrasolar planet. (European Southern Observatory/Associated Press)A rocky planet that is as dense as lead and where a year lasts less than 18 hours has been described by a team of U.S. and Canadian scientists.”On this world — the densest solid planet found anywhere so far, in the solar system or beyond — you would weigh three Read More ›

1997: …natural selection can be made to explain opposed and even mutually contradictory individual adaptations. For example, Darwinists claim that camouflage coloring and mimicry (as in leaf insects) is adaptive and will be selected for, yet they also claim that warning coloration (the wasp’s stripes) is adaptive and will be selected for. Yet if both propositions are true, any kind of coloration will have some adaptive value, whether it is partly camouflage or partly warning, and will be selected for. — Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, p. 130 Apparently, when his book appeared, Milton was accused of being a fundamentalist Christian, an accusation which not only offended but perplexed him. Surely that would never happen in 2011.

Here. Famed British philosopher Mary Midgley has examined the religious aspect of Darwinism/materialist humanism in some detail, pointing out that denying the reality of the mind leaves it with nothing but empty speculation about what ancestors did as a way of understanding human nature.  She also points out that the era of evolutionary psychology followed hard on the cult of behaviorism – equally stultifying and stultifying for the same reasons. The behaviourist sought to eliminate subjectivity from psychology, which meant eliminating people, which meant …

[Julian] Huxley, in fact, saw clearly – what few of those who now exalt science seem to have noticed – that this exaltation does not make sense unless we somehow enlarge the notion of reality to make room for mind. Doing science is, after all, a mental activity; it can hardly constitute the purpose of a purely physical universe. More widely, of course, Huxley’s whole way of conceiving evolution as purposive is itself profoundly religious. Darwin himself avoided such thoughts, as do most of those who claim to follow him today. Yet people still do often take it for granted that Evolution, like Progress, is directional – an escalator bound to carry us, or at least our descendants, safely on to higher levels. Read More ›

Sweden’s king decorated molecular cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria “Knight of the Order of the North Star” for his outstanding experimental work, which elucidated the molecular organization of the chromosome and its evolutionary path.

And his opinion of Darwinism is here. And as Suzan Mazur reports,

Lima-de-Faria does not consider Charles Darwin’s 1859 idea of natural selection — survival of the fittest — a theory. He writes in his classic book, Evolution without Selection. Form and Function by Autoevolution, that Darwinism and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, last dusted off 70 years ago, actually hinder discovery of the mechanism of evolution. [ … ] Read More ›

Here’s a discussion at New Scientist on proportional representation vs. “first past the post”: Can mathematics help? On 5 May, the UK will hold a referendum to determine which voting system the country should use in future elections, with voters asked to decide whether they want to adopt the alternative vote (AV) or stick with the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, which is currently used. Can mathematics tell us which system is the most fair?[ … ] Highlighting a more radical solution is David Maclver, a software engineer with a background in mathematics. In 1963 economist Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system can satisfy a few reasonable and democratic conditions – in other words, democracy is always unfair. MacIver points out Read More ›

… some of our good friends, patented experimental biologists (usually known as ‘wet’ biologists) who have read previous versions of this manuscript, slapped us on the wrist because they think what we are saying is overkill. They told us, ‘no one is that kind of Darwinian any more.’ We’d be happy if that were so, but there is good reason to doubt that it is. And if it is true, the news has not been widely disseminated even among wet biologists … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 91.

Consider some feature of the universe, such as its beginning to exist (assuming that it did begin to exist). There are various competing explanations we can consider for such a feature, and one of those explanations will be that the feature was due to an intelligent cause. We may judge this explanation to be the best one but it doesn’t follow that the explanation is true. The right account could be that there’s no explanation at all for why the universe has the feature that it does.

Thus, if the doctrine of intelligent design is as I’ve stated above, with the claim that the best explanation for the features is an intelligent cause, then I endorse intelligent design. Read More ›

Of course, it was put there by a Canadian poet.

Recently we learned that “An original piece of “living poetry” has been created in a lab in Canada.” Christian Bok encoded some of his verse into a DNA strip and got it inserted into an E.coli bacterium:

Dr Bok used cryptography to embed his poem into the genetics of the bacterium, devising a chemical alphabet in which each letter is represented by a specific triplet of nucleotides. So, for example, the nucleotide sequence “ATA” codes for the letter “y” and GTG stands for the letter “n”.

– Rachael Buchanan, “Poet writes verse in bug’s genes and receives reply”, BBC News (28 April 2011).

Better: Read More ›

WORLD GETTING CRAZIER, HE SAYS. IN A FEW HUNDRED YEARS THE WHOLE EARTH WILL BE OUT OF ITS MIND London Aug.1. The vision of a mad world and an era of lunacy was prophesied by Dr Forbes Winslow yesterday while expressing his dissent from the statement made at the Eugenics Congress by Dr Mott that increase in lunacy is more apparent than real. Dr. Winslow said: “There will be more lunatics in the world than sane people three hundred years hence. This prophecy is based on the present rate of the growth of lunacy revealed by recent returns. We are rapidly approaching a mad world. In every part othe world civilization is advancing and so insanity is bound to advance. Read More ›

                      Now it may be argued that Darwin’s hostility to Christianity is beside the point. Shouldn’t a scientific theory be judged on its own merits, rather than on the motives and psychology of its progenitor? Yes, of course – if the theory is truly scientific and confirmed by empiricl observation. Isaac newton was as strange as they come; as John Maynard Keynes pointed out., Newton’s private philosophical notebooks make one think of an ancient Babylonian magician. Bit Newton’s scientific theories were rigorously formulated. They can be tested ands shown to be true for most of material reality. But anideology dressed up as a science is a different matter. Theories like Read More ›

A late 2010 cosmology book features cosmologist Paul Davies as editor. Davies is known for a number of reflections on extraterrestrials.

Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics

“This is the anthology we have been waiting for … seminal papers deal with matter through the history of Greek thought, seventeenth-century materialism and twentieth-century dematerialism, the need for a new scientific world view in the light of the quantum nature of the universe, and the storage and transmission of information in biological systems with the new knowledge of their genomes and development … Philosophers, theologians and scientists all have their say, wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle in the universe.”

Professor Sir Brian Heap, St Edmund’s College, President, European Academies Science Advisory Board, German Academy of Sciences Read More ›

In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›

From the Max Planck Institute, we learn (April 21, 2011): Despite being closely related to the lyre-leaved rock cress, the thale cress has a considerably smaller genomeIt would appear reasonable to assume that two closely related plant species would have similar genetic blueprints. However, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, working in cooperation with an international research team have now decoded, for the first time, the entire genome of the lyre-leaved rock cress (Arabidopsis lyrata), a close relative of the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), the model plant used by geneticists. They discovered that the genome of the lyre-leaved rock cress is fifty percent bigger than that of the thale cress. Moreover, these changes arose over Read More ›

Brown University Catholic biochemist Ken Miller is to receive the Stephen Jay Gould Prize prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution because

Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method. Dr. Miller received his PhD in Biology from the University of Colorado and taught from 1974 to 1980 at Harvard University. While at Harvard he frequently interacted with and was inspired by Stephen Jay Gould. He first became aware of antievolutionism as a beginning professor at Brown University.

“The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.“ Read More ›