2011

In “Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans’ Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes”
(ScienceDaily, June 3, 2011), we are told

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department. Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

Parents of autistic children will wonder about that. One such knowledgeable source commented, “But a feature of autistic/Asperger’s people is that their focused attention is generally toward things that do not provide important survival skills and that they are not as aware of their surroundings ”

Language warning: Present tense of observable fact is used in the main text sentence above and in those below. Read More ›

In “Ancient Hominid Males Stayed Home While Females Roamed, Study Finds (ScienceDaily, 2011), we learn,

The team, which studied teeth from a group of extinct Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus individuals from two adjacent cave systems in South Africa, found more than half of the female teeth were from outside the local area, said CU-Boulder adjunct professor and lead study author Sandi Copeland. In contrast, only about 10 percent of the male hominid teeth were from elsewhere, suggesting they likely grew up and died in the same area.

If these results are replicated, early human culture encouraged the idea that women should go live with their husbands instead of staying with their folks. Let’s give that one time to sink in. It’s novel …  Read More ›

This ScienceDaily piece, (June 3, 2011) “Mass Extinction Victim Survives: Snail Long Thought Extinct Isn’t” looks at a recent local extinction of snail species (limpets) of which, it turns out, there was a survivor:

… a major mass extinction took place in North America in the first half of the 20th century, when 47 species of mollusk disappeared after the watershed in which they lived was dammed. Read More ›

Vid. (opens on click), courtesy Wintery Knight Here’s a summary:

Behe’s first book – the bacterial flagellum

Keith Fox: Here are a couple of papers that show how parts of the flagellum evolved

They are possible pathways.

Michael Behe: No, those are studies that show that there are similarities between bacterial flagella in multiple organisms

Similarities of proteins between different organisms do not necessarily imply a developmental pathway Read More ›

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 8:00 am EST tomorrow, June 5. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Tyro, Drew, Ray Moscow, Andrei, Dr. I. Needtob Athe, Anatman, Chris McNeely, Marcello, John Salerno, Miles, Mark, TheShortEaredOwl, Solomon Wagstaff, Evan Guiney, KP, Sven DiMilo, Patrick, Kevin Anthoney, Ftfkdad, Happy Cat, Prof. Pedant, Ben Goren, Qbsmd and Tim Byron. Most of these guys are card-carrying atheists, but by the time you’ve finished reading this post, you’ll absolutely love them.

I have argued before (see here) that the best refutations of arguments for atheism are often those written by atheists themselves. But wait, there’s more! Funnily enough, it turns out that atheists can do a better job of defending key religious doctrines than religious believers themselves.

As readers are well aware, Intelligent Design Theory is not about defending any religious doctrine: its methods are scientific, and its concern is with patterns in Nature that are best explained as the product of intelligent agency. Nevertheless, many Intelligent Design proponents are religious believers, and this post is on a topic that will interest those who are. One key religious doctrine that has been getting a lot of attention lately (see this article by Darrel Falk at Biologos and this recent article by Richard Ostling in Christianity Today) is the doctrine that all human beings are descended from a single pair: Adam and Eve. Read More ›

Sorry for judging delay. The contest, you’ll recall, riffed off New Scientist’s offer of a Mars rock: Tell New Scientist what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. The winner gets a copy of The Nature of Nature , where Guillermo Gonzalez discusses the constraints of the galactic habitable zone.

(Note: That New Scientist contest is still open until June 15. )

There were lots of good, fun entries. The winner is:

14 MedsRex
“hold on, i’ll start collecting bacterium samples in a bit…let my update my, facebook status first!” Read More ›

The average American commentator would likely say of the Ark Encounter venture, under way in Kentucky, what Americans United for Separation of Church and State head Barry Lynn did in fact say:

“The state of Kentucky should not be promoting the spread of fundamentalist Christianity or any other religious viewpoint … Let these folks build their fundamentalist Disneyland without government help.”

After all, the project’s purpose is to prove that Noah could have fitted two of every animal onto the Ark.

Here are some constraints on any decision: Read More ›

Here, Liz Else (New Scientist, (3 June 2011) tells us, that “recursivity” or “thoughts within thoughts” make us human:

Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don’t tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films – there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most – but not all – language depends on this capability.

Actually, no, other sources say, Read More ›

Two interesting papers contribute significantly to our understanding of science education debates. The first, by Joachim Allgaier, considers newspaper accounts of a UK school (Emmanuel College) that was accused of teaching creationism in science classes. The goal of the study was to find out what sources journalists used, and how the sources of education journalists compares with the sources used by science journalists. The issue is important because of the potential for media accounts of issues like this to mould public opinion and shape responses. The two types of journalists can be distinguished in a broad-brush way: “Science journalists, for instance, visit scientific conferences, talks and presentations, read and follow scientific journals and receive ’embargoed’ press releases from scientific institutions Read More ›

A guy who has been a hack, a flack, and a prof tells us what we suspected …

Journalists, on the other hand, usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone’s statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant. If no evidence is available for an argument a journalist wishes to include in a story, then up pop weasel words such as “it seems” or “some claim” to enable inclusion of the argument, no matter how shaky its foundation in reality. What’s more, too many journalists believe that their job description does not require them to adjudicate between competing claims of truth. Sure, there are “two sides”—and only two sides—to every story, according to the rules of objectivity. But if both sides wish to deploy lies and other forms of deliberate deception for their own purposes, well, that’s somebody else’s problem.- Eric Alterman, “The Professors, The Press, The Think Tanks—And Their Problems,” Academe Online, (May/June 2011)

more here

Reflection: Read More ›

Here, we meet Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman, described by a dean as ““a rock star in so many ways,” who wants to do for neuroscience “what Carl Sagan did for astrophysics.”

Which is what?

A fan of “possibilianism” (which writer Lewis describes as “a kind of anything-goes agnosticism”), Eagleman has focused on neurolaw, the idea that people are not responsible for their actions, but are the victims of their brain processes. For such a man he is oddly deficient in normal intuitions,as Lewis notes:

He thinks a lot, and he thinks hard, but for a man whose father was a New York psychiatrist (his mother was a high school biology teacher), he’s surprisingly unreflective. When the family moved to New Mexico, his father kept busy by dealing guns, serving in the Army Reserve, and volunteering in the police force mounted patrol. Musing out loud that such a man presumably had a law-and-order mentality, I asked Eagleman how his dad felt about his son’s latest research, which encourages the justice system to focus more on rehabilitation and less on punishing criminals. “You’re right,” he said. “I think he’s closer to the retributivist side of the argument.” Then he stopped, nonplussed, as if I’d made an uncannily accurate conjecture. “How did you guess that? That’s interesting . . .” Which left me, in turn, nonplussed that he thought it was a guess.- Jim Lewis, “Mind Games,” Texas Monthly (June 2011).

Which has left many people, of all persuasions, wondering why Read More ›

We’d noted his disappearance from BioLogos here and taken heat for so doing. Now Biologos president Darrel Falk, says he’s resigned from that and from his position as Professor of Physics at Eastern Nazarene College in Boston, to … create more time for writing. At some point he hopes to find a “writer in residence” position at a Boston area college, but for now he is happy with the “writer in his sunroom” position he currently holds. We at BioLogos are deeply appreciative of Karl’s seminal role in the formation and ongoing impact of this organization. Can’t say fairer than that. Update: Uncommon Descent has been in touch with Karl Giberson, who told us today: “My resignations had nothing to do Read More ›

And not even just a different story read backwards, like I thought?

Liberty University biology prof David A. DeWitt, author of Unraveling the Origins Controversy, commented on my characterization of the overlapping codes of the genome. Seeing that Christianity Today is actually taking BioLogos and yesterday’s science seriously, I had written,

A friend, a faithful Christian in science, was dismayed by the story. He is an information theorist. … The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)

and DeWitt replies,

In the mitochondrial genome the overlapping codes are for different subunits of the same protein complex (ATP Synthase). So it is not even that “backwards is a flawless different short story” it is another volume in a series of short stories involving the same characters!

which all happened, of course, merely by the magic of Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutations. But presumably Christian Darwinists are free to dress it their unbelievable scenario in God talk as long as they feel like it.  Only,  Read More ›

Here. Pulled up off the coast of the province of Prince Edward island (Canada). Said to be a 4 million to one shot. This one’s for the aquarium, not the table. Mutation explained here. Apparently, there is a trade in blue crayfish for aquariums, but any similar trade on blue lobsters depends on finding another one, of the opposite sex. Lobster society discussed here.

Or so they say. At CBC News (June 2, 2011), Emily Chung reports, “‘Impossible’ physics feat traces path of light”:

Canadian researchers have traced the average path of single light particles through two slits, probing the limits of a famous physics principle that seemed to suggest doing so wasn’t possible. Read More ›