2011

A most interesting discussion has got started here at “But ‘Lucy’ herself is mostly an artifact”. Commenter KL got it going, I suspect, by observing that

I certainly don’t consider you hicks. However, my spouse and associates are primate researchers, physical anthropologists, geologists and archeologists. It’s strange to come here and see their work dismissed as a just so story. Some of them have been in the field extensively and have published many, many papers. Are you guys saying that somehow all these people are simply mistaken?

Yes, it  is quite possible.

My question is, is there anything fronted by “evolution researchers” that KL wouldn’t believe? How about the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution? Or Marc “Well, the monkeys talk to me!” Hauser? How about any single item on this list? Is there nothing that KL would even wonder about? Does he know that E. O. Wilson has retracted his own kin selection theory?

Two things: Read More ›

Courtesy Britain’s Royal Society. A friend notes that three Nobel Prize winners were among the speakers: Read More ›

Here is a great source of cellular movies, for example ” The Inner Life of the Cell”, courtesy Harvard University.

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

———————————————

Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

<<<<<>>>>>

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

Read More ›

And tells us a bit Explaining the history and diversity of life is simply not an issue of great concern to most people except as a marker of belief system. On that score, many “evolution believers” have knowledge that is just as shallow as creationists. They simply nod and smile in response to different cues. Professing a belief in evolution or creation is a not-so-secret handshake that signals membership in a loose clan. That’s why the press is so insistent that presidential candidates take some position on the issue; it marks them like a scarlet letter. before freaking out: But many [creationists] are well practiced in the art of debate and will not easily play into your hands. They will Read More ›

In “Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?” (The Scientist , 2011-03-01) , Andrew D. Ellington, a University of Texas biologist tells us,

The Lamarckian idea that giraffes’ reaching for leaves resulted in longer-necked progeny seems silly to us today, primarily because we know so very much about the underlying mechanisms of genetics. And yet Lamarck may have a last laugh—think inheritance patterns in ciliates, or the effect of diet on the coat color of agouti mouse offspring. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics. An even more far-reaching consequence is that it may prove possible to engineer epigenetics, as Bob Kingston’s Thought Experiment tacitly suggests. If so, will epigenetic engineering be subject to the same restrictions as genetic engineering? Or will this be a way that we can not merely treat disease, but possibly engineer human health into future generations?

And in the face of so momentous a revolution in our thinking, his worry is

We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design.

Such limited aims in the face of so vast an ocean of possibilities.

Not only is he right in his concerns, such as they are, but it helps to see why he is right. In the  first place, the modern Darwinism enforced in schools is a narrow cult compared to what Darwin actually proposed about how evolution occurs. For example, as David Tyler notes, Read More ›

A friend writes to say that Nature of Nature can be had at Amazon for just shy of $18, commenting “Given the tiny price for the huge interesting proceedings of the Baylor conference, I hope that tons of us will buy the book.”

Yes, indeed, It is indispensable for whistling bores and broomsticks out of one’s life. In Nature of Nature, both sides on the ID controversy give it their best shot. Including Nobel Prize winners.

No bores, no broomsticks, no trolls, no truthing.

Just think! For a mere $18 plus shipping, and a few hours time, you can Read More ›

Gil Dodgen offers below a comparison between Mozart and “Lucy”, noting “I can’t think of anything in my wildest imagination that could be more absurd or preposterous.”

Good point. My question is, how much is “Lucy”* an artifact of the imagination?

With Mozart (1756-1791), we are looking at a portrait of a young man about whom we know a good deal, in historical time – the word of contemporaries and the documentary records, as well as his corpus of work and the well-documented circumstances of his time (18th century Vienna).

The worst we can say of the portrait painter of old is that he tended to flatter. If that painting didn’t look like Mozart at all, he wouldn’t get paid.

With Lucy, we are looking at an artist’s rendering of a reconstruction of a few bones, with details about Lucy’s life that are, beyond the most obvious (eat, sleep, etc.), almost entirely a work of someone’s imagination. The more letters that person can put after their name and the greater the number of years “in the field” and shazzam!! Imagination converts to fact, via the assured results of modern science: “Shed’ve … done this.”

For now. Until someone else comes along, with the same or more attributes, makes bigger shazzam!! and behold: “Shed’ve … done that!”

And as for the rest of us: Shut up, you morons, and believe.

Then, faced with this stuff, Read More ›

This is what Darwinists would have us believe. I can’t think of anything in my wildest imagination that could be more absurd or preposterous. Lucy Mozart Ascertaining the inherent idiocy of Darwinian orthodoxy is not difficult.

In his forthcoming chapter, Does the Universe Need God?, Sean Carroll (the physicist, not the geneticist) argues that while invoking god as an explanation for natural phenomena was once reasonable, now we can do much better. It is an example of the extent to which otherwise very smart people resort to special pleading to get the right answer.  Read more

Here, Aman Batheja reports that an “Arlington lawmaker’s bill would protect questioners of evolution” (Star-Telegram, Mar. 17, 2011):

The measure from Republican state Rep. Bill Zedler would block higher education institutions from discriminating against or penalizing teachers or students based on their research into intelligent design or other theories that disagree with evolution.

The really surprising thing about this story is that it is fair and Batheja did his homework. (I am ashamed to admit what a rarity that is on these sorts of subjects these days, so he deserves a great deal of credit.)

Yes, we hear (as expected) that Read More ›

In “Q&A: Who is H. sapiens really, and how do we know?” (BMC Biology 2011, 9:20doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-20), Mason Liang and Rasmus Neilsen explain reasons for thinking that humans and Neanderthals interbred: Is it true that modern humans have Neanderthals and other archaic species in their direct ancestry?  According to two recently published papers by Green et al. and Reich et al., the answer to this question is yes. Human genomes are in part composed of DNA from other archaic hominin species that traditionally have not been counted among our ancestors, although the proportion of archaic DNA in the genome depends on your ethnicity. On the basis of analyses of ancient DNA, Green et al. report that, on average, 1 to 5% Read More ›

“Dark matter could make planets habitable” (New Scientist, 30 March 2011), Maggie McKee tells us:

No one knows what dark matter is – astronomers merely detect its gravitational pull on normal matter, which it seems to outweigh by a factor of five to one. But many researchers believe it is made of particles called WIMPs, which interact only weakly with normal matter but annihilate on contact with each other, creating a spray of energetic particles.[ … ]

But Read More ›

We have been told for years that evolutionary biology is pure science and has no religious implications. Theistic evolutionists emphasise the concept of complementarity, pointing out that evolutionary theory seeks to explain how? questions whereas theism is concerned with why? questions. There appear to be many non-theists, including most organisations representing scientists, who say something very similar. These people have adopted the NOMA approach popularised by Stephen Jay Gould. For more on this, go here. However, you do not have to read far in the intelligent design literature (or in the creationist literature) to realise that this approach is controversial. These sources claim that all science has metaphysical presuppositions that are of a religious nature. There is a consistent message Read More ›

(My latest MercatorNet column reviews an  attempt to refound morality on a  materialist basis: Commonsense notions of the mind must be abandoned in favor of a purely brain-based approach because we are our neurons: Churchland is partial to a theory that morality originates in the oxytocin-vasopressin network in mammals. One outcome is stunners like this: “The social life of humans, whether in hunter-gatherer villages, farming towns, or cities, seems to be even more complex than that of baboons or chimpanzees.” Now, why in the world would that be? We never get a clear idea how Churchland think morality works, though we do get more than a glimpse of her politics. Go here for more.