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 ›

On Friday, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer joined Dr. Ravi Zacharias in a discussion on Moody Radio’s In The Market with Janet Parshall. You can read the details here. Hour 1, which you can download here, features Ravi Zacharias. The website’s description states, Respected apologist Ravi Zacharias was once sharing his faith with a Hindu who asked: “If the Christian faith is truly supernatural, why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians I know?” The question hit hard, and led Dr. Ravi Zacharias to write Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend. Dr. Ravi Zacharias will join us today to talk about the importance of equipping Christians everywhere to simultaneously defend the faith and be transformed Read More ›

I have just been listening to a talk on the subject of free will, by the British philosopher Jonathan M. S. Pearce, who contributes to the blog, Debunking Christianity. The talk was given to a meeting of Portsmouth Skeptics in a Pub on 14th June 2012, which was attended by about 50 people. A podcast of the talk is available online here. In this post, I’d like to focus on what I take to be Jonathan’s key argument against free will. After making this argument, he then goes on to critique dualism and put forward scientific arguments against free will. I have already addressed these criticisms in previous posts, so I won’t be rehashing them here. Instead, I’ll just list Read More ›

Over at Evolution News & Views, I have just published a blog post on the recent paper in the journal Cell regarding the molecular clutch of the dynein motor protein: Here at ENV, I have previously described the molecular flagellar clutch of Bacillus subtilis, the grass or hay bacillus, which allows the bacterium to cease motility upon biofilm formation. A new paper, published in the journal Cell, reports on the discovery of a similar clutch associated with the motor protein dynein. Click here to continue reading.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Suderman et al. reports on the discovery of the ability of early life experiences to influence DNA methylation patterns in the hippocampal region of the brain. The researchers examined the methylation patterns of the hippocampus in humans who have been victimised by abuse. There was also a control group of non-abused persons. The results were then compared with rats who, as infants, had been subject to different maternal care. The paper’s abstract reports, Early life experience is associated with long-term effects on behavior and epigenetic programming of the NR3C1 (GLUCOCORTICOID RECEPTOR) gene in the hippocampus of both rats and humans. However, it is unlikely that such effects completely Read More ›

An interesting new paper has just been published in PLoS One, describing the discovery of fossilised sea creatures off the coast of Florida, which purportedly shows that modern deep sea creatures (e.g. sea urchins, starfish) may have appeared far earlier than previously believed. The abstract reports, The origin and possible antiquity of the spectacularly diverse modern deep-sea fauna has been debated since the beginning of deep-sea research in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent hypotheses, based on biogeographic patterns and molecular clock estimates, support a latest Mesozoic or early Cenozoic date for the origin of key groups of the present deep-sea fauna (echinoids, octopods). This relatively young age is consistent with hypotheses that argue for extensive extinction during Jurassic and Cretaceous Oceanic Read More ›

Darwin’s solitary illustration of evolutionary branching has left a lasting impression in the minds of readers. From an ancestral form, speciation occurs and the diversity of descendants increases. This can be visualised as a cone of morphological variation, extending from the source. However, the Cambrian Explosion provides empirical evidence against this concept, as a large number of organisms appear abruptly. (For more, see here) Yet it has been tempting for Darwinists to interpret the Cambrian species in terms of a number of cones of increasing diversity that all have their origins deeper in the Precambrian. This was something Stephen Jay Gould attempted to counter by proposing an “inverted cone” model. But there is a need for a third model to Read More ›

Today’s first set of lectures in Mohamed Noor’s Introduction to Genetics and Evolutioncourse would seem downright bizarre to anyone not familiar with evolutionary thinking. Noor is teaching this course via through the coursera on-line service and the Earl D. McLean Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University is maximizing accessibility to his material by minimizing the course prerequisites. Non specialists are welcome and many newcomers to evolutionary thought, now seeing what is—or should we say what isn’t—have sunk back in their chairs with blank stares wondering what in the world evolutionists such as Noor are thinking.  Read more

Over at PhysOrg.com, there’s a study being reported highlighting a 520 million year old fossil arthropod with a highly-developed brain. So soon in evolutionary time, and an already developed brain??? (To go beside the very complex eye of the Trilobites) Here’s what one scientist said: “No one expected such an advanced brain would have evolved so early in the history of multicellular animals,” said Strausfeld, a Regents Professor in the UA department of neuroscience. Sorry, Darwinists, but IDers would expect it. And, to add insult to injury for our Darwinist brethren, here’s this confirmation of “genetic entropy” and Behe’s QRB “rule”: “The shape [of the fossilized brain] matches that of a comparable sized modern malacostracan,” the authors write in Nature. Read More ›

In Touchstone Magazine, Casey Luskin offers a scathing review of Giberson and Collins’s book The Language of Science and Faith: Each chapter of Language addresses a particular question; thus, the first chapter is titled, “Do I Have to Believe in Evolution?” The very framing of this question is telling. Why not title the chapter “Is There Good Evidence for Evolution?” or “Is Evolution an Option for Christians?” Such a formulation would imply that there is room for Christians to hold different views. But the authors’ formulation implies that a full embrace of Darwin may be required for Christians. Indeed, Giberson published a CNN.com op-ed (April 10, 2011) claiming that “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you.” But God Read More ›