September 2012

Gallup has updated their origins survey:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?
1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process,
3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

They found:

since 1982 . . .
the 46% who today choose the creationist explanation is virtually the same as the 45% average over that period — and very similar to the 44% who chose that explanation in 1982. The 32% who choose the “theistic evolution” view that humans evolved under God’s guidance is slightly below the 30-year average of 37%, while the 15% choosing the secular evolution view is slightly higher (12%).

See: In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins Read More ›

Part of me feels like letting the TSZ thread go to a full 1,000 comments, but then my sense of responsibility to UD’s bandwidth budget kicks in. So, let us continue the discussion of the topics from the thread on TSZ issues and Jerad’s concerns continue here. To prime the pump, let me clip two posts in the thread: ______________ >>912 JeradSeptember 30, 2012 at 4:07 am KF (911) – ooo, spooky Are you unable to see that when those individual configs come in clusters that are functionally distinct, it is relevant to think about the relative statistical weights of the clusters? Hitting a cluster would have a higher probability than hitting a single configs but only because a cluster Read More ›

Where is the best place to find low-cost, easy-to-produce, natural, robust and non toxic antibiotics? Easy, in our own bodies. Nature so often provides the solutions we are looking for and, as an aside, that is why the preservation of species from extinction is so important. In this case the solution is natural antibiotics which University of California at Berkeley researchers have confirmed to exist in the tails of certain proteins called cytokeratins. These proteins help our eyes, for example, ward off infections. The eye’s cornea is remarkably free of pathogens and the research reveals something about how these wonderful proteins work. Once again, however, the research was not motivated by evolutionary theory.  Read more

Let’s take again that quotation out of Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333)”, published as many ages ago as the year 2009, quoted at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes. Now, what here Dawkins calls a “remarkable fact”, turns out only three years later to be known (such that even he agrees, as the above link shows) to be totally false. It’s not even close; it’s as large an error as one could make in a propositional statement. Not only that, but, this totally false statement is in an Read More ›

At PhysOrg.com, here’s something hot off the press. Here are some delicious quotes from the PO blurb: Researchers, led by Dr David Ferrier of The Scottish Oceans Institute at the University of St Andrews, found that some modern-day animals like sponges, comb jellies and placozoans (a flat, splodge of an animal with no head, tail, gut or limbs) may have actually evolved by losing some genes and perhaps became simplified from a more complex ancestor, from which the entire animal kingdom evolved. Dr Ferrier and his team studied key genes, known as Hox and ParaHox, which are renowned for building the bodies of nearly all modern-day animals. They control where ribs develop in humans or where wings develop in flies, Read More ›

I thought you all might be interested in an article I wrote titled Mathematics and Theology: Seeing to Infinity. The basic purpose of the article is to show how the “limit” concept from mathematics can be incorporated into theological reasoning. The larger purpose is to get theologians thinking more deeply about mathematics as a tool in theological reasoning. One of the disheartening things about modern theology is how disconnected it is from the rest of human knowledge. It doesn’t need to be disconnected — it’s just that there is a habit of thought that has developed over the past two centuries that separated out theology as “other” (perhaps as a euphemism for “fictitious”) and math and science as “real”. This Read More ›

Just over a century ago a gracefully aging scholar quietly left the world with these wise words:  Read more

Here’s a good one, over at Evolution News: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Dawkins, 2009: DNA… it’s full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… how embarrassing for those creationists who say it shouldn’t be! Dawkins, 2012: DNA… it’s not full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… nothing for the creationists to take advantage of here, move along! Those of us who doubt Dawkins’ rationality find this response to a new discovery to be exactly what our prior theories predicted. 🙂

There has been much discussion in the blogosphere about a recent study entitled, “New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal agents,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208724109, PNAS September 17, 2012) by Alex Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell Gray, demonstrating that crows have a tendency to attribute the movements of an inanimate object (e.g. a stick) to a causal agent whom they know to be in the vicinity, even when that agent is hidden from view, and that crows react with fear when they witness the movements of an inanimate object in the absence of any nearby causal agent. The authors of the study conclude that crows are capable of reasoning about a hidden causal Read More ›

At PhysOrg they have a blurb about a paper showing that an organism that is 99.99% (!!) identical has, nevertheless, found a way of dealing with the presence of Uranium in completely different ways. Absolutely fascinating! Obviously we’re dealing with two very different environments—one is in a volcanic spring, and the other is atop a pile of uranium waste apparently. One is liquid-based, the other land-based. What I suspect has happened—keeping Behe’s Edge of Evolution in mind—is that two different parts of the genome have had to make their own respective a.a. substitutions (2? 3?), since the ‘solution’ in water most likely has different constraints than the ‘solution’ for an atmosphere-based form of the same organism. Only detailed whole-genome analysis Read More ›

Going back to my undergraduate days, I have long been struck by the engineering elegance and intrinsic beauty of that familiar icon of intelligent design, the bacterial flagellar nano-motor. In tribute to this masterpiece of design, I have just published a detailed (31 pages, inclusive of references) literature review in which I describe the processes underlying its self-assembly and operations. My essay also attempts to evaluate the plausibility of such a system having evolved by natural selection. Here’s a short excerpt to whet your appetite. The bacterial flagellum is a reversible, self-assembling, rotary nano-motor associated with the majority of swimming bacteria. There exists a number of different models of this rotary motor (Pallen and Matzke, 2006; Soutourina and Bertin, 2003). Read More ›

We all know that Darwinists have junk for brains [ 😉 ]and this proves it. It appears that “long non-coding” RNA’s (lncRNA) play a role in the brain’s pineal gland, which is involved in circadian rhythms and such. This ‘junkiest’ of junk functions in activating, blocking or altering the activity of genes or influencing the function of the proteins, or acting as scaffolds for the organization of complexes of proteins. Here’s a quote from the senior author: “These lncRNAs come from areas of the genome that we thought were quiet, . . . “But current research in the field makes it unequivocally clear that the information-carrying capacity of the genome is a lot greater than we realized previously.” Ah, yes, Read More ›

Ever since Mendelian genetics was incorporated into Darwinism, evolutionists have believed that the gene is king. Genes, they thought, determine an organism’s design or, in technical jargon, the genotype specifies the phenotype. This fit their view that the species originated from the natural selection of biological change which did not arise initially as a consequence of need but rather as a consequence of random, spontaneous events. Those random, spontaneous, events were, for example, mutations in the genes. And later when the genetic code, which translates the information in those genes into proteins, was found to be essentially universal throughout biology, the story seemed complete. For if the species were designed why would their genetic codes be identical? But today, so Read More ›

New research continues to reveal biology’s complex adaptation capabilities broadly referred to as epigenetics. Simply put, individuals not only respond physiologically to environmental challenges by modifying their DNA, they also pass such adaptations on to their progeny. It is, by any other name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a concept evolutionists have resisted for almost a century. Now researchers studying mice have found that a mother’s diet not only during pregnancy, but before pregnancy, causes intelligent adaptations to occur that are passed on to the offspring—a finding that once was cause for blackballing. Now, molecular machines that (i) sense environmental shifts, (ii) produce the desired response, and (iii) pass that response on to offspring arose by chance, and were later selected. What was Read More ›

Because science is a search for causes, its practitioners are ethically bound to keep an open mind about the nature of those causes. The whole point of investigating any given phenomenon is to find a reasonable answer to the question, “why is this happening?” or “why did it happen?” In that spirit, the researcher develops a rigorous methodology that will address a narrowly-focused problem and facilitate the process of finding the most plausible solution, regardless of whose interests might be served. This is just as true for the practice of medicine as it is for the study of life’s origins. If, for example, a physician is about to decide on the appropriate therapy for his patient, he will, if he Read More ›