May 2011

Further to “Recent Uncommon Descent posts reveal starkly different standards of evidence out there” (Uncommon Descent, 18 May 2011), this ScienceDaily story (May 18, 2011) about a trapped spider is instructive:

Imaging Technology Reveals Intricate Details of 49-Million-Year-Old SpiderScientists have used the latest computer-imaging technology to produce stunning three-dimensional pictures of a 49 million-year-old spider trapped inside an opaque piece of fossilized amber resin.

Writing in the international journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists showed that the amber fossil — housed in the Berlin Natural History Museum — is a member of a living genus of the Huntsman spiders (Sparassidae), a group of often large, active, free-living spiders that are hardly ever trapped in amber.

The amber had grown dark so until they tried X-ray computed tomography, they couldn’t get a good image, but then, especially through a short film revealing astounding details, the scientists showed that even specimens in historical pieces of amber, which at first look very bad, can yield vital data when studied by computed tomography.

So we know it can’t be a huntsman spider because they “hardly ever” get trapped in amber: Read More ›

He sniffs that he might, in the end, review it, as time permits. One hopes he’ll read it first. Some readers of reviews like that sort of thing, and there is simply no accounting for tastes.

PZ Myers, however, has threatened to read the book.

Farrell (“Jonathan Wells’s “The Myth … of the Myth of Junk DNA,” May. 20 2011) claims that the idea that Darwinists ever thought that stuff was junk is itself a “myth”:

T. Ryan Gregory at Genomicron has tirelessly pointed out the problems with the myth argument over the past few years. He cites a number of articles from the journals of the time to show that scientists never dismissed junk DNA in the literature.

Oh? Indeed. But does Gregory cite the ones where they actually did dismiss it explicitly because it was the very junk that Darwinism predicted?

Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin provides the missing citations in the Forbes combox, suggesting that it sounds as though Farrell has not read the book. Read More ›

JGuy made the following comment in response to my comment in that thread: I like your comment on the guys from three hundred years ago. This is the kind of stuff that amazes me…today, we think we (conditioned society) are so much more civilized and evolved.. bah!.. I say, you take the most intelligent person three hundred years ago, and put him in all the same schools as today’s most intelligent person. I’d put my bets on the less degenerate genes/mind of 300 years ago. The guys I referred to were the great mathematicians Lagrange and Euler, who lived almost 300 years ago and came up with the basic mathematics we now use in computational fluid dynamics. JGuy is a Read More ›

From paleontologist R. Glenn Northcutt’s “Evolving Large and Complex Brains”(Science, 20 May 2011) we learn: During the Mesozoic (~250 million to 65 million years ago), two distantly related groups of reptiles—the cynodont (or mammal-like) reptiles and the coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs—gave rise to mammals and birds, respectively. Both mammals and birds evolved brains some 10 times as large, relative to a given body weight, as those of their ancestors (1). In both groups, these brains contributed to the evolution of the ability to control body temperature (endothermy) and complex social interactions, including parental care and a reliance on learning that even involves tool use (2, 3). The size of most parts of the brain increased in birds and mammals, but the Read More ›

Or anyway, they babble political correctness and call it accuracy. We looked at the “Goldilocks number” used to manipulate public opinion. In “The Marginalization of Christians continues in Canada” (May 21, 2011), journalist and author Michael Coren talks about politically correct manipulation of crowd numbers. For example, the government broadcaster, tax-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation underestimates the crowd for pro-life rallies by multiples; in the case Coren mentions, CBC underestimated by 200%. But it overestimated the Gay Pride parade in Toronto by five times the police figure:

We can only thank our publicly funded stars that the same network — joined by most others in the mainstream media — tells us every year that more than a million people attend the gay pride parade in Toronto, when the police privately inform journalists that 200,000 is closer to the mark. For a million people to be present, the crowd would have to stretch from the southern tip of Toronto to Barrie, Ont., more than 100 km north.

(See especially, Coren’s Why Catholics Are Right (McClelland & Stewart), on the bestseller list for five weeks.) Read More ›

The term “Goldilocks zone” sometimes references Earth’s position, as just right for carbon-based life. The number, as it happens, is a phantom, but a powerful force in shaping opinion nonetheless. Marvelous fun fromBrooke Gladstone at Slate(May 19, 2011) about the Goldilocks number, 50,000, used in media to gin up scare stories. Here’s an interesting item by the same writer on “objectivity” in journalism. Now, as I have said for years, there isn’t really any such thing as objectivity in journalism. One’s bias isn’t a bad thing in principle, it is simply the place one stands when covering a story. One can make allowances for it, to the extent that one recognizes it. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

From “Young Graphite in Old Rocks Challenges the Earliest Signs of Life” (ScienceDaily, May 21, 2011) we learn:

The team — which includes researchers from Boston College, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Naval Research Laboratory — says new evidence from Canada’s Hudson Bay region shows carbonaceous particles are millions of years younger than the rock in which they’re found, pointing to the likelihood that the carbon was mixed in with the metamorphic rock later than the rock’s earliest formation — estimated to be 3.8 to 4.2 billion years ago.

That’s means Read More ›

Over at AITSE, headed by Expelled’s Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think, we learn (May 20, 2011) something that should not surprise us: Freeing students to think is an aid to learning: Do students learn better when taught by experienced lecturers in the traditional method or when given specific problems to solve in a small group setting? According to a study conducted with over 500 engineering students at the University of British Columbia, even if the teacher is inexperienced, students that are encouraged to read, solve problems, and bounce ideas off the teacher are more engaged, attend class more frequently, and achieve higher average exam scores (74%) than those who are forced to sit and listen to lectures (41%).One Read More ›

Let us imagine a strange alien race that sets out to learn about humanity. By chance they have encountered a single Scrabble tile imprinted with the letter “e”. Because these aliens are extremely thorough materialists, they undertake to study the tile as deeply as possible. Not only do they subject it to chemical analysis but, due to their superior technology, they are able to map out the exact position of every wood fiber and ink particle of the tile. After years of effort they create a three dimensional model of the Scrabble tile larger than a football field with all this nano information precisely reproduced and annotated. Read More ›

Non-adaptive origins of interactome complexity NATURE

According to the BBC

Ford Doolittle said “Darwinists are a little bit like the pre-Darwinists before them, who would have marveled at the perfection of God’s creation. We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying ‘this must have been highly selected for, it’s a tuned and sophisticated machine’. In fact, it’s a mess – there’s so much unnecessary complexity.”

Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, supporting the idea that natural selection is not the only means by which complexity rises.

Single-celled life gave rise to more complex organisms, and with them came ever-more complicated networks of gene and protein interactions.

Natural selection (praise be upon it) is a theory with no equal in terms of its power to explain how organisms and populations survive through the ages; random mutations that are helpful to an organism are maintained while harmful ones are bred out. But the “adaptive” nature of the changes natural selection (praise be upon it) wreaks may not be the only way that complexity grew.

Read More ›

The story “Lizard Fossil Provides Missing Link to Show Body Shapes of Snakes and Limbless Lizards Evolved Independently” starts off on the right foot (ScienceDaily, May 19, 2011): Until a recent discovery, theories about the origins and evolutionary relationships of snakes barely had a leg to stand on. Not that we ever heard that then, of course. In a striking case of convergent evolution, a tiny, 47 million-year-old lizard fossil, Cryptolacerta hassiaca, offers “the first anatomical evidence that the body shapes of snakes and limbless lizards evolved independently.”: The fossil reveals that amphisbaenians are not closely related to snakes, but instead are related to lacertids, a group of limbed lizards from Europe, Africa and Asia. “This is the sort of Read More ›

In “The Alchemical Revolution,” Sara Reardon (Science 20 May 2011) tells us, A growing number of science historians hold that alchemists—”chymists” is their preferred, less-loaded term—were serious scientists who kept careful lab notes and followed the scientific method as well as any modern researcher and are testing that hypothesis by recreating their experiments. If the alchemists saw what they claimed, these researchers say, then it’s high time for an “alchemical revolution” to restore them to scientific respectability. In the view of these advocates, alchemists have been unjustly ranked with witches and mountebank performers, when in fact they were educated men with limited tools for inquiring into the nature of the universe. (You have to pay to read the article.) This follows Read More ›

Yup. In other news: “Woman is detained in NASA moon rock sting,”according to MSNBC (5/20/2011):

Tried to sell treasure for $1.7 million in Southern California, authorities say

It is illegal to sell moon rocks, which are considered national treasures. Read More ›

In “Dark energy does speed up universe’s expansion” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 19, 2011), we learn: Dark energy is real and it is causing spacetime and the universe to expand at an increasing speed, a new study says.The paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides the first independent confirmation of both the existence of dark energy and its rate of expansion. It has been put together by a team of 26 scientists including Chris Blake from Melbourne’s Swinburne University. It turns out that this is only “further confirmation” of a “mystery”: “Although the exact physics required to explain dark energy still remains a mystery, confirming it exists is a significant step in understanding Read More ›

Dave Coppedge (yes, that Cassini specialist who got fired from JPL) identifies “sciences” that ain’t. These days,  every fad, trend, and crackpot alley on offer struggles to call itself science: Happiness science: Advice found online: “the best way to increase your happiness is to stop worrying about being happy and instead divert your energy to nurturing the social bonds you have with other people.” Did that come from a religious counselor or family member? No, it was on Science Daily, touting what “psychological science” has concluded. Live Science added material on “why were’re not happy” and “how to be happy” based on research by psychologists at the University of Denver.Gossip science: Live Science presumed to explain “Why we love juicy Read More ›