My friend Melissa Travis just posted this excellent blog post dissecting five of the top misconceptions about intelligent design. She writes, There are few things more frustrating than hearing the same tired old myths and misconceptions over and over again, particularly when they directly relate to the subject you’ve devoted your education and career to. Intelligent Design theory suffers this plight, even at the hands of Christians who freely criticize it without doing their homework. In this short post, I would like to list and comment upon the untruths I hear most frequently. Click here to continue reading!

UK Centre for Intelligent Design director Dr. Alastair Noble has written a report on the recent conference in Malvern featuring Professor John Lennox and Dr. Douglas Axe. He writes, The 130 or so delegates who attended the Intelligent Design Annual Conference at Malvern, England, on September 28/29, 2012, were treated to a real Darwinian eye-opener from world-class speakers Dr Doug Axe (Biologic Institute, Seattle) and Prof John Lennox (Oxford).  If you think neo-Darwinism is beyond scientific dispute and that the design debate is an irrelevance, you should have heard this. Particularly telling was Axe’s exposition of the current criticisms of Darwinian evolution in the scientific literature, made all the more powerful because they come from sources that do not apparently Read More ›

Over at the Biologic Institute blog, Douglas Axe responds to Larry Moran’s response to his work on the prohibitive difficulty of enzyme conversion. Dr. Axe notes, If it can be shown that natural selection actually has (present tense) the creative capacity attributed to it, then I will certainly join those who are calling everyone to accept this. But if the facts go the other way, as it seems they have, then perhaps the reality check should likewise go the other way. Click here to read the rest!

David, thank you for your post.  Let me start out by saying that I do not have a dog in the YEC/OEC fight.  My father, for whom I have an immense respect, love and admiration is a YEC, and he and I have discussed the matter extensively over the last three and half decades.  That I ultimately concluded that I could not embrace the YEC position did not decrease my esteem for him in the least.  He and I disagree in love and mutual respect, and I hope I can do the same with other YECs.  Indeed, my best friend is a YEC and some months ago he posed the “why couldn’t God have done it this way” question to me, and Read More ›

Okay, the thread of discussion needs to pick up from here on. To motivate discussion, let me clip here comment no 795 in the continuation thread, which I have marked up: _________ >> 795Jerad October 23, 2012 at 1:18 am KF (783): At this point, with all due respect, you look like someone making stuff up to fit your predetermined conclusion. I know you think so. [a –> Jerad, I will pause to mark up. I would further with all due respect suggest that I have some warrant for my remark, especially given how glaringly you mishandled the design inference framework in your remark I responded to earlier.] {Let me add a diagram of the per aspect explanatory filter, using Read More ›

Many of you may remember Paul Kurtz, the atheist philosopher and humanist activist. He sadly passed away on Sunday at the age of 86. You can read an obituary of Dr. Kurtz at the Center for Inquiry website.

Check out this spectacular cellular visualization featured on BBC Two last night. The hour-long documentary offers an accessible description of the internal conflict that occurs regularly in our bodies between viral pathogens and our immune defense mechanisms. Although the program is given an evolutionary spin (it features Steve Jones and Nick Lane), the design and engineering implications of what is being shown are clear. It is well worth the time-investment. For those who don’t have time to watch the full program, a 3-minute preview clip can be found here.

A recent paper in Science offers an excellent review of the “broad and multifaceted spectrum of activities in human cancer” played by pseudogenes. I intend to review the paper for Evolution News & Views so I will reserve my more detailed comments for there. Here, I offer a couple of highlights. From the abstract: Because they are generally noncoding and thus considered nonfunctional and unimportant, pseudogenes have long been neglected. Recent advances have established that the DNA of a pseudogene, the RNA transcribed from a pseudogene, or the protein translated from a pseudogene can have multiple, diverse functions and that these functions can affect not only their parental genes but also unrelated genes. Therefore, pseudogenes have emerged as a previously Read More ›

Two new papers (here and here) have just been released in Science entitled “Making the Moon from a Fast-Spinning Earth: A Giant Impact Followed by Resonant Despinning” and “Forming a Moon with an Earth-Like Composition via a Giant Impact.” For popular science press releases on the story, see New Scientist and Space.com. As the Space.com report explains, The moon did indeed coalesce out of tiny bits of pulverized planet blasted into space by a catastrophic collision 4.5 billion years ago, two new studies suggest. The new research potentially plugs a big hole in the giant impact theory, long the leading explanation for the moon’s formation. Previous versions of the theory held that the moon formed primarily from pieces of a mysterious Mars-size body that slammed Read More ›

From Slashdot: Richard Dawkins is an author and an evolutionary biologist. For 13 years, he held the Simonyi Professorship at the University of Oxford. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene helped popularize the gene-centric view of evolution and coined the word “meme.” Several other of his books, including Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, and The Greatest Show on Earth have helped to explain aspects of evolution in a way non-scientists can more easily understand. Dawkins is a frequent opponent of creationism and intelligent design, and he generated widespread controversy and debate in 2006 with The God Delusion, a book that subjected common religious beliefs to unyielding scientific scrutiny. He wrote, “One of the truly bad effects of religion Read More ›

To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences are producing a Kuhn-and-revolutions-themed special edition. The articles from this issue will be available for free on the journal’s website until the end of November 2012. You can download the articles here. Papers available on the website include: Hempelian and Kuhnian approaches in the philosophy of medicine: the Semmelweis case Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 159-18 Donald Gillies Composite paradigms in medicine: Analysing Gillies’ claim of reclassification of disease Read More ›

Human prehistory has descended into a state of chaos which can only be described as farcical. New research, summarized in an October 2012 review by Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin (“Revising the human mutation rate: implications for the understanding human evolution” in Nature Reviews Genetics 13:745-753, doi:10.1038/nrg3295) suggests that the molecular clock used to date events in hominid prehistory may run more slowly than previously thought, and at variable speeds, throwing the timetable of evolutionary events into confusion. The new research has staggering implications for the date of the split between the lineage leading to orangutans in Asia and the line leading to humans, chimps and gorillas in Africa: it’s been revised from 13-14 million years ago to anywhere from Read More ›

Over at the website of the Biologic Institute, Douglas Axe reflects on a new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by Donald Prothero and colleagues. The paper reports, The data show that birds and mammals at Rancho La Brea show complete stasis and were unresponsive to the major climate change that occurred at 20 ka, consistent with other studies of Pleistocene animals and plants. Most explanations for such stasis (stabilizing selection, canalization) fail in this setting where climate is changing. One possible explanation is that most large birds and mammals are very broadly adapted and relatively insensitive to changes in their environments, although even the small mammals of the Pleistocene show stasis during climate change, too. Dr. Axe comments, I work at Read More ›

From BBC News: Some of Europe’s most prominent scientists have opened a debate with philosophers and theologians over the origins of everything. The event, in Geneva, Switzerland, is described as a search for “common ground” between religion and science over how the Universe began. It will focus on the Big Bang theory. The conference was called by Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the wake of its Higgs boson discovery. Cern is the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, situated beneath the French-Swiss border region near Geneva. Professor Jim Al-Khalili explains what the Higgs boson is and why its discovery is so important The first speaker at the conference was Andrew Pinsent, research Read More ›