Recently one of our materialist friends made a comment along the lines of “we’ve known life can come from non-life since the concept of ‘vitalism’ was debunked by the synthesis of urea from inorganic elements.”  Our friend is wrong.  Let me explain why.  It is true that prior to the nineteenth century many chemists believed organic compounds were too complex to be synthesized and organic matter was somehow endowed with a mysterious “vital force.”  This is the essence of vitalism.    It is also true that vitalism was largely debunked in 1828 when Friedrich Wohler produced urea, an organic constituent of urine, from inorganic ammonium cyanate.    Moreover, it is true that since the famous Miller-Urey experiments in the 1950s, scientists have Read More ›

A new paper has just been published in Advanced Functional Materials, on the use of teeth of teeth belonging to the snail species Cryptochiton stelleri to improve solar cells and batteries. Science Daily reports on the new paper: An assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering is using the teeth of a marine snail found off the coast of California to create less costly and more efficient nanoscale materials to improve solar cells and lithium-ion batteries. The most recent findings by David Kisailus, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering, details how the teeth of chiton grow. The paper was published Jan. 16 in the journalAdvanced Functional Materials. It was co-authored by several of his current and former Read More ›

Should Christians reject evolution because it violates the Bible by leaving no room for Adam and Eve and the Fall, or should Christians accept evolution because it is the obvious scientific conclusion? That, according to one history professor, is how the debate will be framed at an upcoming conference. If so, it would be an unfortunate repeat of a centuries old false dichotomy and what would be missing would be any discussion of what evolution really is.  Read more

You can find here an utility to calculate the probabilities of random sequences of symbols. It tries to answer questions like this: “a random process generating sequences of length L from an alphabet of S symbols in T trials of t seconds each, involving c chemical reactions, does exceed the resources of the universe (age, max number of chemical reactions, universal probability bound)?”. The user interface is meant to be self-explanatory. The “Demo” button has the function to preset an example of input values. After the “Demo” you can eventually change some or all inputs and click the “Calculate” button to obtain your new output results. Otherwise if you want to start from entirely different inputs you may click the Read More ›

Our indefatigable Bornagain 77 has provided a link to a video documentary, The Signs: [youtube UASU-AjPA7M] (NB: Cf. notices at the linked. Of course, this is a challenge, showing it is not tantamount to endorsing everything claimed therein — such as, some claims on the Golden Ratio. {Added, 01:16: At the 1 hr 43 min mark, there is an Islamic declaration of faith in a context of an excessively dismissive discussion of the fossil hominids, which we should take due note of, and note the response to here, here and here [more details].Also, from 1 hr 46 mins on there is an Islamic tract.} However, it is a refreshing shake-up to all too comfortable schemes of thought dressed up in the Read More ›

Art may not imitate life but evolution certainly does. Once the leading edge in biology was breeding and so evolution was cast as a natural breeder. Now the state of the art is genetic engineering and, so, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer. And of course the unquestionable trending topic of our time is Information Technology. Just check the employment pages. Do you know Networking, Epic, SAN Citrix, Notes, NextGen, BES, Android, VMware, TCPIP, UNIX, Windows, Active Directory, EMC, Peoplesoft, iPhone, iPad, LANWAN, blade, VoIP, CAT5 and Avaya? If so then you’re trending. And so is evolution. After all, as Matt Ridley explained, “it’s from information technology.” Or as Paul Davies writes this week, “Life’s origins may only be explained through Read More ›

The Guardian features an interesting article by Paul Davies: “The secret of life won’t be cooked up in a chemistry lab: Life’s origins may only be explained through a study of its unique management of information.” Davies writes, The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible? A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place. “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he Read More ›

Features our own Steve Fuller (although, unfortunately, he doesn’t contribute much to the discussion). Largely another media setup — why does the media always opt to bring on unsophisticated representatives of the Darwin-doubting viewpoint? Where are the molecular biologists who have come to doubt Darwin?

Hitler called it the Big Lie. To convince people your mythology is unquestionably true, small lies won’t do because the average person, who tells small lies himself, will not be fooled. But we believe outrageous, big lies, because we can’t believe anyone would have such audacity to promote them so forcefully. It must be true. And while we have always had myths and shamans and priests to tell them to us, this time is different because the lie comes in the form of science, such as exemplified in this latest BBC video which we pick up at the 2:25 mark where evolutionist Matt Ridley, in response to the softball question of whether there is any debate in science about the Read More ›

(To comment, kindly go here) The title of this post is taken from a 2004 book by Forrest and Gross, which further intensifies the earlier accusation that Intelligent Design is “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” Given the agenda-driven hatchet job on Intelligent Design presented as a neutral point of view objective survey of Intelligent Design (as has been critiqued here on at UD in recent days . . . ),  it is unsurprising to see this accusation summed up in the lead of the Wikipedia article on the Wedge Strategy: The wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Read More ›

Here’s a question for skeptics. Is there any evidence that would convince you that the laws of Nature can be suspended, and that miracles do indeed occur? Interestingly, modern-day skeptics are divided on this issue. Professor P. Z. Myers and Dr. Michael Shermer say that nothing would convince them; while Professor Jerry Coyne and Professor Sean Carroll say that if the evidence were good enough, they would provisionally accept the reality of the supernatural. (See here and here for a round-up of their views.) So I was surprised when Professor Jerry Coyne, in a recent post on the works of the great agnostic Robert Ingersoll (pictured above left), approvingly quoted a passage from his 1872 essay, The Gods, in which Read More ›

The largest large quasar group LQG ever has been discovered, stretching an enormous 4 billion light years from end to end. That is 40,000 times larger than our Milky Way galaxy which is only 100,000 light years across. This LQG contains 73 quasars! See: Largest Structure in the universe discovered “The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.” Original publication: Astronomers discover the largest structure in the universe Royal Astronomic Society, Monthly Notices, January 11, 2013. If stochastic homogeneity is disproved, is there an intelligent design based argument for the existence of such an enormous Large Quasar Group?

( To comment, kindly go here) One of the objections to the markup of the Wiki ID article is that this is tilting at a windmill. I disagree. It should already be plain that the Wiki article is representative of a standard set of talking points used to polarise the unwary against design theory, and to lead them to think there is nothing serious to see here, move along. But, as has been shown step by step over the past several days, this is based on a willfully constructed false narrative. One, that brings Wikipedia’s vaunted commitment to a neutral point of view and to objectivity into serious question. However,  there is a second good reason to putting on record Read More ›

( To comment, kindly go here) Last time, we showed how Wikipedia’s article on Intelligent Design flagrantly distorts the history of the origins of ID as a modern movement. Today, our focus is on a subtler distortion: From the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents were supported by the Discovery Institute, which, together with its Center for Science and Culture, planned and funded the “intelligent design movement”.[16][n 1] They advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”, and that the school district’s Read More ›

Perhaps the biggest myth in today’s origins debate is that evolution is the result of good, objective scientific research. And so anyone who would reject evolution’s mandate that the world arose spontaneously must be religious while those who, on the other side, insist on our modern-day Epicureanism are simply all about science. In order to prop up this myth we must tell ourselves that all those scientific arguments against evolution are nothing more than disingenuous ploys by those religious rascals, and that all those religious mandates for evolution also don’t matter because they are nothing more than helpful explanations offered up by the secular good guys. Both of these are false of course. The significant scientific problems with evolution are Read More ›