2011

This one, where Harvard pledged $1 million annually in 2005. One gets that impression from Sophie Wharton’s “Searching for life’s origins, on Earth and beyond”, Undergraduate Research Journal ( Spring 2009): After the $8 billion hit that Harvard’s endowment took a few months ago, there is fear that funding to the Origins of Life Initiative may suffer too. The progress of the Initiative is hindered by the lack of a dedicated space for labs, which are currently scattered throughout the University. Nevertheless, the development of a new science campus in Allston – on the other side of the Charles River – offers a promising solution. But it’s not hard to see what the problem is: Another group in the Initiative Read More ›

Where people who are prepared to blow $1 million a year on discovering the origin of life … when we hardly have a clue what to look for: Confidence in progress has now been replaced by postulation of change. Progress is achieved and can be welcomed, but change just happens and must be adjusted to. “Adjusting to change” is now the unofficial motto of Harvard, mutabilitas instead of veritas. To adjust, the new Harvard must avoid adherence to any principle that does not change, even liberal principle. Yet in fact it has three principles: diversity, choice, and equality. To respect change, diversity must serve to overcome stereotypes, though stereotypes are necessary to diversity. How else is a Midwesterner diverse if Read More ›

… of this paper by Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at University of British Columbia, Canada “Explaining Human Behavioral Diversity,” in Science (27 May 2011) People have been captivated and puzzled by human diversity since ancient times. In today’s globalized world, many of the key challenges facing humanity, such as reversing climate change, coordinating economic policies, and averting war, entail unprecedented cooperation between cultural groups on a global scale. Success depends on bridging cultural divides over social norms, habits of thinking, deeply held beliefs, and values deemed sacred. If we ignore, underestimate, or misunderstand behavioral differences, we do so at everyone’s peril. What is this paper doing in a science journal? How does one “co-operate” with people who honestly do not Read More ›

“Child-sized depictions of Charles Darwin to grow on” (May 23, 2011) are discussed by Katherine Pandora, who researches & teaches about science, the public & popular culture at the University of Oklahoma:

I was most amused to find that, despite the fact that the voyage figured extravagantly both in content and in the illustrations of the pile of children’s Darwin books that I had brought home to study, the picture my daughter chose to draw owed nothing to the rainforest theme which would supposedly transfix childish imaginations, but instead depicted a much more sedate locale, fitting comfortably within the domestic backyard setting of a local neighborhood in the northern hemisphere. And here the influence I think of the second unusual Darwin book, The Humblebee Hunter by Deborah Hopkinson kicks in, for in this author’s story the science literally does take place at home, as Darwin’s daughter Henrietta and other family members join her father to investigate how many times a bee will visit a flower in a minute.Once again, this story has fictional elements (while Darwin investigated creatures in his home environment, and the children sometimes assisted, we have no record of the observational study Hopkinson sketches), and the fictionalization allows for a girl “naturalist” to take center stage.

Yes, fiction. Read More ›

Justin Brierley (of the Unbelievable show on Premier Christian Radio) sent me this sketch, which I thought might be of interest, or perhaps amusement, to some of you:

Asked what might disconfirm their theories about how speciation occurs, Darwinian evolutionists reply, “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian”. How about Precambrian? Dave Coppedge (yes, him) observes that No such fossil has ever been found, partly because any stratum containing a rabbit fossil would never have been labeled Precambrian in the first place. – “Precambrian Rabbit or Evolutionary Transition?” (05/25/2011) That said, … evolutionists would be surprised at finding complex non-marine multicellular eukaryotes in Precambrian strata, and this has just been announced in Nature.A team led by Paul Strother of Boston College with help from Oxford University and University of Sheffield has announced “Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes.”1 “Direct evidence of fossils within rocks of non-marine origin in the Precambrian is exceedingly Read More ›

(This contest is now closed for judging.)

Here, Evolution News & Views struggles with what to call the practice of trashing an ID-friendly book without actually reading it. That happened recently when Forbes.com’s Farrell started to trash Jonathan Wells’s The Myth of Junk DNA and allowed as how he might read it some time. (PZ Myers has threatened to read it, however.) Discovery came up with “Ayala-ing” after the Templeton winner:

To “Ayala” a book is to attack it in review without having bothered to read or even read much about it, simply on the basis of what you think it probably says given your uninformed preconceptions about the author. The term comes from the wonderful instance where distinguished biologist Francisco Ayala pompously “reviewed” Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell for the Biologos Foundation website while giving clear evidence of not having cracked the book open or even looked at the table of contents.

Why can’t these Discovery people see that the whole point is not to read the book. Once you read it, you commit yourself to fact, and Darwinism is about fiction – publicly funded, court-ordered fiction. And we need to help them come up with a better term than Ayala-ing. Suggestions?

In my previous article, I discussed the background of one of the most commonly made arguments for primate common ancestry. In this article, I want to examine the first of the three layers of evidence offered by a popular-level article written about this subject. Read More>>>

Yes. About Uncommon Descent’s moderation policies in detail, and it is hosted by markf, who comments here.

So, if he comments here … does that … ? No, wait, this is the confused, illusory world of the Darwinist. It doesn’t have to make sense.

Hat tip: Our Cannuckian Yankee drew our attention to the continuation of the “overlong” MathGrrl’s thread over there,  here, by citing this comment.

Now, are we such hot stuff? Come to think of it, Satan doesn’t like us either, for some reason. And the ID guys are, in the view of a Christian Darwinist, an evil and adulterous generation.

Cannuckian notes,  Read More ›

… death ends all – my current MercatorNet article (26 May 2011):

… most people have not assumed that we survive death because they are “afraid of the dark,” as Hawking supposes. On the contrary, the oldest beliefs usually include ancestor worship, which includes propitiating the continuing spirits of unpleasant ancestors for fear they will otherwise harm us. Or, as Beauregard and I put it [in The The Spiritual Brain] , in such a society the problem isn’t that everyone dies, but that no one does. (p. 48)  Read More ›

This charming tale, “Crocodiles swam the Atlantic to reach America” should be true, but some are undecided.

Michael Marshall explains for New Scientist (11 May 2011), “Millions of years before Vikings crossed the Atlantic, crocodiles swam thousands of kilometres from Africa to colonise the Americas,”

… all four American species are most closely related to the Nile crocodiles of east Africa, and must have split away roughly 7 million years ago, long after Africa and South America began drifting apart 130 million years ago. By 7 million years ago, over 2800 kilometres of ocean lay between the two continents.

And no rest stops? Read More ›

It’s not the Church, exactly; it’s the fashions in who speaks for the church.

The work of biologists and astronomers “had no more ardent supporter” than Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), but

Although he was a giant of twentieth-century philosophy and (according to Pope Paul VI) a seminal influence on the Second Vatican Council, Maritain’s stock among Catholic thinkers was already in sharp decline at the time of his death. Deal Hudson has argued that the cause of this seemingly inexplicable neglect was the scathing critique of Teilhard de Chardin in one of Maritain’s last books, The peasant of the Garonne (1967). Read More ›

Richard Weikart, Cal State U prof and author of Hitler’s Ethic, wrote UD a note on the recent study in which fear of death supposedly increased support for ID (yes, that one where they stitched together a bunch of stuff to represent  ID theorist Michael Behe, including stuff he hadn’t written¹).

Weikart says,

This article is intending to suggest that people believe in Intelligent Design because of their “death anxiety” (rather than empirical evidence). However, the solution suggested by these researchers—to explicitly explain to people that evolution can provide meaning and purpose to their lives—is astonishing, if you really think about it. Read More ›

In The New York Times (May 22, 2011), Justin E. H. Smith raises for discussion, “The Flight of Curiosity” from philosophy, noting that today’s budding philosopher may not even find curiosity an asset, compared to showing colleagues how perfectly focused she has been in graduate school,” and how little she knows of anything “that does not fall within the current boundaries of the discipline.” A far cry, he says, from the days when science was called, for good reason, “natural philosophy”: Read More ›

Last week science writer John Farrell discussed the genetic evidence for evolution in his Technology article at Forbes. Farrell referenced evolutionist Stan Rice to argue the genome could not have been designed. Not only is it a clumsy design but it is susceptible to terrible, debilitating mutations. Such a design would never have been intended and must have evolved via the mindless play of natural processes. Farrell’s other source was evolutionist Larry Moran, who has convinced Farrell that Jonathan Wells has it all wrong in his new book, The Myth of Junk DNA. As Farrell summarizes:  Read more