2011

Richard Carrier thinks so. Someone suggested this idea for an Uncommon Descent contest: Watch the vid and count the logical fallacies. If it seems interesting, note your responses here, and we’ll count your comment as an entry when the contest is announced.

Here.

Here’s the paper. PowerPoint here.

Here’s the news story.

Here’s Sewell’s comments.

Uncommon Descent adds its commendation to the editors of Applied Mathematical Letters for doing the right thing:

From Retraction Watch:

Three points regarding my withdrawn article, that I don’t believe have been made elsewhere: 1. Although it is fair to call it “ID friendly”, it does not actually mention ID or Darwinism, and does not even conclude that the second law has definitely been violated here, it just makes the rather obvious point that if you want to believe it has not, you have to be honest and admit that what you really believe is that what has happened here is not really extremely improbable (in the sense of footnote 4); you cannot hide behind the truly absurd “compensation” argument of Asimov, et.al. 2. Elsevier should be given credit for doing the right thing, given the mess created by the Read More ›

The UK education scene is buzzing with the news that 14 professors are setting up a “New College of the Humanities” and are claiming to offer a “new model of higher education for the humanities in the UK” (here and here). The concept of education being privately-funded is not widely held with approval, and feelings against it can be very strong. Yet, we do have one privately-funded university (the University of Buckingham), which co-exists peacefully with those in the state system. With massive changes to the funding regime for universities, the team of academics, led by Professor A.C Grayling, has set out its business plan for a college that aims to compete at the highest level of UK higher education. Read More ›

Math journal retracted one of our UD authors’ accepted article only because Darwinist blogger complained

A brief, lay-friendly, look at Sewell’s stifled paper is here. Comment on it’s significance here.

This just in: Granville Sewell on the controversy.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Here, John G. West reports (Evolution News & Views, June 7, 2011) that University of Texas, El Paso math professor Granville Sewell has receive an apology and $10,000 because Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just before publication, based on the say so of a Darwinist blogger:

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.  Read More ›

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency. Read More ›

You learned about DNA and proteins in your high school biology class, but you may not remember much about the cell’s membrane which is based on a dynamic, fluctuating sandwich structure. This cellular envelope controls what chemicals enter and exit the cell, partly due to molecular machines such as channels and pumps in the membrane, and partly due to the sandwich structure itself. This sandwich structure is a barrier to certain types of chemicals. But the membrane permeability and the operation of the molecular machines depend on the details of the sandwich structure. And as recent research has been finding, contra evolutionary expectations, organisms actively maintain and fine-tune the sandwich structure in response to environmental challenges.  Read more

In “Coping With Climate Change: Can We Predict Which Species Will Be Able to Move Far or Fast Enough to Adapt?” (ScienceDaily, June 4, 2011), we learn:

As global temperatures rise, suitable sites for many plants and animals are shifting to cooler and higher ground. Can we predict which species will be able to move far or fast enough to keep up? A new study says the secrets to success in the face of a warming world are still elusive.

[ … ]

But when researchers working at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis took a closer look at recent range shifts, they noticed a peculiar pattern: some species are migrating much farther and faster than others.

What chance this fact can be used to predict rates of evolution? For example, Read More ›

“A new find has muddied the waters on the origins of Homo erectus,” Nature confides. Hammered them to bits, actually.

Reid Ferring, an anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues excavated the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. They found stone artefacts — mostly flakes that were dropped as hominins knapped rocks to create tools for butchering animals — lying in sediments almost 1.85 million years old. Until now, anthropologists have thought that H. erectus evolved between 1.78 million and 1.65 million years ago — after the Dmanisi tools would have been made. – Matt Kaplan, Human ancestors in Eurasia earlier than thought”, (6 June 2011) Read More ›

It would be useful to know, in light of the recent Christianity Today cover story on Christian Darwinism in general and Francis’ Collins’s BioLogosin particular. Here, for example, in Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith, they inform us,

We suggest that Darwin’s theory of evolution, now that it has been confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt by science, offers the sane sort of help in understanding the Genesis creation story as Galileo’s work helped his generation to better understand the psalmist’s references to the mobility of the earth. (p. 89)

Are the following not reasonable doubt? Read More ›

Recently, Uncommon Descent’s vjtorley posed seven questions to physicist Sean Carroll, Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Carroll had written an article, “Does the Universe need God?” for The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. Now Carroll has answered the questions, and given us permission to post his response here:

1. In your article, you’ve argued that the ultimate explanation of why events happen is that things are simply obeying the laws of nature – in particular, the laws of physics. What do you mean by the term “law of nature”? Specifically, are the laws of nature (a) rules which prescribe the behavior of objects, or (b) mere regularities which describe the behavior of objects?

To this and the other questions, Carroll responds:

I wanted to thank Vincent Torley and Denyse O’Leary for the opportunity to write a guest blog post, and apologize for how long it’s taken me to do so. I’ve written an article for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, entitled Does the Universe Need God?, in which I argued that the answer is “no.” Vincent posed a list of questions in response. After thinking about it, I decided that my answers would be more clear if I simply wrote a coherent argument, rather than addressing the questions individually. Read More ›

Noticing what Steno did here, that animal rights activist philosopher Peter Singer is moving toward the idea that morality has an objective basis, anti-ID Catholic philosopher Ed Feser responds. Noting that Singer is looking for an “intuitive” basis for morality, he writes,

Moral intuitions track objective moral truth in only a very rough, general, and mutable way. Practically they are useful – that is why nature put them into us – and they might provide a useful heuristic when philosophically investigating this or that specific moral question. But intuition does not ground moral truth, it is not an infallible guide to moral truth, and it should never form the basis of a philosophical argument for a controversial moral position.

But that won’t work. Read More ›

How common is common descent?A question worth asking, in light of a new paper: Casey Luskin advises (Evolution News & Views, June 3, 2011) that “Study Reports a Whopping “23% of Our Genome” Contradicts Standard Human-Ape Evolutionary Phylogeny”:

We’ve recently discussed different genetic studies on primate relationships were finding contradictory evolutionary trees. As discussed, one recent study found data that conflicted with the standard primate phylogenetic tree, reporting that “for ~0.8% of our genome, humans are more closely related to orangutans than to chimpanzees.” We then commented: 

0.8% of our genome might not sound like a lot, but that equates to over 20 million base pairs. That’s means that over 500 times more raw genetic information than was used in the PLoS Genetics paper (to purportedly create a “robust new phylogenetic tree”) is supposedly pointing in the wrong phylogenetic direction. Read More ›

In Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, Don Johnson discusses the trilobite eye:

Physicist Riccardo Levi-Setti observes, “In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. ” Read More ›