During the summer between my sixth- and seventh-grade education in public school, I became enamored with Greek mythology, and read the great classic, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. When I entered seventh grade, on the first day of school, our English teacher asked us what books we had read over the summer. I responded with Edith Hamilton’s classic. The Hydra was a hideous serpent-like creature with nine heads who terrorized the population, and its blood was toxic. The worst thing of all was that, as Hercules quickly discovered, once you bashed in or chopped off one the heads, two more instantly grew in its place! Fortunately, Hercules’ trusty charioteer and companion came with a torch and cauterized the Hydra’s severed head stumps Read More ›

Next up in our Engineering and Metaphysics conference lineup is Baylor’s William Jordan. Jordan compares the way that physics models relate to engineering with the way that theological models relate to religious practice. He looks at how innovation works in both theological and physical models, and how engineers and practitioners should treat them. He also looks at the way in which realism affects education in both systems. I don’t have slides for this, but you can see the slides pretty well on the video.

It is fundamental to the methodology of science that hypotheses are proposed and tested. The human face of science surfaces when researchers enthusiastically endorse false positives, when hypothesis testing is less than rigorous, and when false dichotomies are proposed (i.e. if hypothesis B is falsified, hypothesis A is declared to be verified). The science of origins is well-supplied with examples of hypotheses that were once widely accepted as valid, but which are now discredited. A significant example has recently become apparent and is the theme of this blog. In 2009, Zhang et al. considered integumentary filaments of the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, knowing that Lingham-Soliar and colleagues had proposed that dino-fuzz filaments are structural collagen fibres released by processes of decay. Read More ›