May 2011

The author of a new study claims that humans learned to walk upright primarily to beat each other:

“The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females,” says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. “Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.”

That also explains, Carrier says, why women find tall men attractive.

Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.”Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It’s an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are,” he says.

In the age of Evilicious, few others have noted this trend among academics. The study demonstrates that men hit harder in an upright position. Read More ›

The metanarrative that pervades materialism goes something like this: science (especially physics), as it grows, will continue to replace more and more spiritual ideas, until all we are left with are physical ideas. Unfortunately for the materialists, the history of science instead shows that physics itself only grows as it embraces spiritual ideas and incorporates them into our knowledge of reality.

Our favourite atheist philosopher Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), reflects on the Beckwith-Forrest-Synthese dustup which hit the New York Times last weekend. Noting that some philosophers have called for a boycott of Synthese because the journal’s regular editors disclaimed the tone of anti-ID pieces published in a special issue: Read More ›

Charles C. Mann reports at National Geographic (June 2011):

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

He is referring to Gobekli Tepe,

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

This site, older than Stonehenge, was constructed, archaeologists think, before writing, metal, pottery, or wheels, and – along with other recent finds – has changed the way archaeologists see prehistoric peoples.

Briefly, Mann says that the site has dealt a heavy blow to the reigning theory that sees agriculture as the organizing principle of prehistoric society, because the massive structures point so clearly to religion. The level of organization required is much greater than that required for village-level subsistence agriculture, and the consensus is that concern about a greater reality is the only plausible reason people fell led to bother. Incidentally, the site appears to have been purely ceremonial; no town grew up in its midst.

For the archaeologists, Read More ›

At ScienceDaily we learn that “New Evidence Shows Mobile Animals Could Have Evolved Much Earlier Than Previously Thought” (May 18, 2011): A University of Alberta-led research team has discovered that billions of years before life [animals?] evolved in the oceans, thin layers of microbial matter in shallow water produced enough oxygen to support tiny, mobile life forms. The researchers say worm-like creatures could have lived on the oxygen produced by photosynthetic microbial material, even though oxygen concentrations in the surrounding water were not high enough to support life. Worm tracks (trace fossils) have been found from 555 million years ago, and it’s suggested that the worms could have got their oxygen from photosynthetic biomats at a time when it was Read More ›

Hey, this phil sci jaw isn’t the GapYawnder you were expecting:

This month, we [Routledge, publishers] asked Alex Rosenberg – Professor of Philosophy at Duke Univversity and author of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction – to tell us about why philosophy of science matters, and got some answers we didn’t expect!

Here. As in Read More ›

Freshwater animals have been found at 435 million years ago, and were assumed to come later than saltwater ones. But “Come On In, the Water’s Fresh”, cries Sid Perkins at Science (17 May 2011):

Tiny burrows. A dense aggregation of U-shaped fossil burrows in 520-million- to 542-million-year-old rocks pushes back the appearance of freshwater ecosystems at least 85 million years, a new study suggests.Newly discovered fossils left by creatures burrowing in the sediments of an ancient riverbed push back the beginning of freshwater ecosystems by at least 85 million years. The find hints that there was little if any delay between the development of freshwater and marine ecosystems, contrary to what many biologists and paleontologists have proposed.

The theory had been that life started in the oceans and only later moved to fresh water because the latter lacked nutrients from organic substances, needed for life. Read More ›

Information on the forthcoming five-day UK intelligent design conference, which runs from July 18th to 22nd in Malvern, Worcestershire,  and details on how to apply, can be located here.

The programme is aimed primarily at a generalist audience with expertise across the relevant disciplines. Students or graduates in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, IT, theology, the arts and related disciplines are also encouraged to apply. Participants do not need to have a specialist background in science.

The summer school will run from Monday lunchtime to Friday lunchtime. There will be three presentations each day and an evening seminar which will feature a current issue related to Intelligent Design. The afternoons from Tuesday to Thursday will provide free time for sightseeing and other activities. A detailed programme will be available in due course.

The sessions will focus on: Read More ›

According to David Shiga (New Scientist 18 May 2011), they’ve been repurposed after the recent shutdown* when state funds dried up: “Alien-hunters focus in on habitable planets”:

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory are listening for alien signals from dozens of planets in the so-called “habitable zone” of their stars, the first time a targeted search of this kind has been undertaken.

“We’ve honed the list to the really exciting exoplanets,” says team member Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley

Essentially, they are looking for planets in habitable zones. Read More ›

Insurmountable problems, actually, or as Mike Behe would call them, the Edge of Evolution.

Ann Gauger writes to say,

The final podcast discussing the implications of Doug’s and my paper is available now. I also address the points raised by critics. I recommend it for those who might have found the paper too technical.

Here. (First pod is here.) Intro to this second one: Read More ›

They reveal the difference between “science” and science.

As a report on “science”, we offer “How many fields other than human evolution can cheerfully tolerate the following level of vagueness?”: Genetics researchers have discovered a shadowy, possible connection between certain genes and risk-taking tens of thousands of years ago.

From science by contrast, one expects rigor, not speculation based on a few possible pieces of evidence. Here’s why: Any reasonable person, with no knowledge of genetics and no specialized research, could replicate the findings reported in the linked story as follows: “Some people can accept more risk than others, and that sometimes seems to run in families. But you can’t rely on it.” And said reasonable person would be just as rigorous and accurate as the reported study.

That’s because “science,” at its best, doesn’t tell us more than common sense observation can. Linking its pretended discoveries to serious genetics is a frill.

And that’s at “science’s” best, mind! At its worst, “science” is the Bedrock of evolutionary psychology.

Science, by contrast, is about rigor and accuracy that potentially adds to our knowledge. For example, consider the recent post Read More ›

Dark matter theorist Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN director since 2009, told The European, , that “We Are Crossing the Boundary Between Knowledge and Belief” (17.05.2011), but just what that means is unclear, as is who the “we” are in this case:

The European: Can something as vast and as complex as the universe ever be reduced to the scope of human mental capacities, or are there natural limits to what we can know?Heuer: That is a difficult question. Every time we discover something, we open the door to new knowledge but find new sets of questions that are more complex and dig deeper into the subject. So there is no real limit, the process of discovery never stops. Maybe the time to answer these questions, i.e. to open these new doors, will increase, but eventually we will be able to open them.

[ … ]

The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?

Heuer: I doubt it.

The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? Read More ›

… figure out what they want to you say, then say it, acting like you believe it.

Why? Microbiologist Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think, having been driven from George Mason University for pointing out problems with Darwinism, found all academic doors closed. She was appointed to head up the IDEA Center

… but difficulties arose. Read More ›

In “Intelligent Design Making Headway into Texas Public Schools”, Eryn Sun reports at Christian Post (May. 13 2011): Reading the following, I am not sure that’s good news: Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), observes, First, despite how it’s typically portrayed in the anti-intelligent design literature, I maintain that Behe’s irreducible complexity argument is not a God-of-the-gaps argument at all. Behe is not saying that we don’t know (or can’t know) how irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum could plausibly arise naturalistically. Instead, Behe is giving positive reasons that the sequence of events that would have to happen for irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum to arise via an undesigned process is an improbable sequence, and hence the design hypothesis should be taken seriously. p. 115. Anyway, do people other than Christian Darwinists use the expression Read More ›