2011

Bob McDonald, the science guy  at Canada’s government broadcaster, CBC, critiques (April 28, 2011) the spending on the Royal Wedding, contrasting it with the small amount required to keep the recently defunded, 50-year-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program going: … Until recently, their efforts had been hampered by the fact that they had to beg for borrowed time on telescopes, when they weren’t being used for other research. But thanks, in part, to the generosity of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the Institute finally got its own instrument — an array of 40 telescopes, each six metres in diameter, set in the desert 300 kilometres north of San Francisco. But building a telescope is only the first part of Read More ›

Hey hey, ho ho Six planets in a row here, April 30 (and maybe eight planets if you have binoculars).

Shimon Malin explains, Nature Loves to Hide (Oxford University Press, p. 6), why you don’t need science for that: One role of science is to explain phenomena, anf an explanation is different from “economy of thought.” Consider the example of tides. People made accurate tables of the times of high and low tides in many locations, but the phenomenon of tides was not understood until Newton came along and explained it as the joint effect of the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon on the waters of the oceans. This discovery did not make it possible to calculate the times of high and low tides in specific locations. These depended on many complicated factors such as the contours Read More ›

Here’s Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) on Francis Collins’s curious affection for C.S. Lewis and other thinkers who assumed the reality of the mind, while believing just about anything else that Darwinism throws through the mailbox: Theistic evolutionists … Simply take what Collins calls “the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God” as a feature of human nature that is entrenched enough to be self-validating. But is their dismissal anything more than an arbitrary theological intervention? If humans are indeed, as the Darwinists say, just on among many species, susceptible to the same general tendencies that can be studied in the some general terms, then findings derived from methods deemed appropriate Read More ›

This one’s for DNA buffs: Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world’s foremost ancient-DNA labs.Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ — when, that is, they’re not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most Read More ›

From best known early twentieth century Catholic writer and apologist [take this, current Pontifical Institute!] G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (book text here:

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. Read More ›

An apparently reasonable thesis re the origin of human societies is offer by an archaeology team that argues (Science 22 April 2011), Early Farmers Went Heavy on the StarchRecent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their interpretation dovetails with the observation that hunter-gatherer societies do not, as a rule, innovate much over millennia. Innovation happened rapidly, by comparison, in Read More ›

A curious feature of science literature in a materialist age is the frequent appearance of stories about things everyone knows are true that we are now assured are “proven by research.” Take the fact that animals have personalities: This ScienceDaily story (April 28,) and this related one (May 30, 2007) both announce that research shows that animals have personalities.

From the first,

An individual’s personality can have a big effect on their life. Some people are outgoing and gregarious while others find novel situations stressful which can be detrimental to their health and wellbeing. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that animals are no different.

and from the second,  Read More ›

Why are they

?? fronting Darwinism to Christians “You can have Jesus and Darwin too”, apparently unaware of the fact that many once-virtuous, still faithful evolutionists  are checking out of Darwinism into the great unknown, due to evidence? Why doesn’t the evidence that Darwinian mechanism probably doesn’t work as  advertised mean anything?

= Why do Christians need to be the last people on the planet to believe in and defend the big Darwindunit? Read More ›

Remember this as you direct your aid dollar wisely:

Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We’ve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues.

What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice. Read More ›

Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008):

Our first witness is the poster boy Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who led the US National Institutes of Health’s drive to map the human genome. His recent bestseller, The Language of God, recounts how his bohemian upbringing resulted in a spiritual emptiness that only came to be filled upon reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as a graduate student in biochemistry. This small fact is telling. Lewis, a colleague of J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford, is often recommended to open-minded people to ease them into the Christian faith. Read More ›

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg analyzes the recent “Cooling on Global Warming”: Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.) Note: Climate change is not, in principle, UD’s “thang” exactly – after all, in a designed universe, humans could indeed futz up the climate Read More ›

In The Nature of Nature , Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse offers us his take on ethics: “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators.” (—Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, 1985), p. 855)

Wilson has since dropped off this vine, so let’s just go with Ruse:

What kind of metaethical justification can one give for the love commandment or a Rawlsian justice-as-fairness? I would argue that ultimately there is no justification that can be given! Read More ›

From “What Can Twins Tell Us About Mate Choice?” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 26, 2011), we learn:

What factors influence our choice of a mate? Is it our genes? Does a man look for someone like his mother and a woman someone her father? None of the above, according to a study of Australian twins.

Body size, personality, age, social attitudes, and religiosity played little role in identical twins’ choice, but get this:

A twin’s spouse was much more similar to the twin and co-twin than the twin’s opposite-sex parent.

That suggests that the strong influence is actually the family environment. The identical twin would be more highly motivated than most people to seek out someone who is “like me.” Singletons consider ourselves lucky to get “someone who understands me.”

Twin studies should be taken with a gallon of salt anyway:  Read More ›

In “The Middle East is ripe for a scientific revolution”, (New Scientist 27 April 2011) Ahmed Zewail offers, I see three essential ingredients for progress. First is the building of human resources by promoting literacy, ensuring participation of women in society and improving education. Second, there is a need to reform national constitutions to allow freedom of thought, minimise bureaucracy, reward merit, and create credible- and enforceable- legal codes. Few would argue with that; it’s an essential foundation for intellectual civilization. But many sources question whether the actual state of science in the Western world today, especially in sensitive areas like evolution, provides grounds for hope that intervention will help. Trying to “Islamize” Darwin would hardly produce a happier Middle Read More ›