It is no secret that nature’s process of photosynthesis—which harnesses the energy in sunlight—is astonishingly efficient. And researchers have known for years that quantum mechanisms play a role in the protein antenna farms deployed in these marvelous molecular machines. Now new research, based on a experimental technique that tracks these proteins at the femtosecond level (there are a million billion femtoseconds in a second), elucidates some of these quantum mechanisms and, as usual, the results are surprising.  Read more

SSDD – Same Stuff, Different Darwinist. This time someone said at skeptical zone: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone So if someone has 500 fair coins, and he finds them all heads, that is consistent with expected physical outcomes of random flips? 😯 I don’t think so! Correct me if I’m wrong but if you have 500 fair coins, the expectation is 250 coins will be heads, not 500. Now if you have 261 of the 500 coins heads, that is still within a standard deviation of expectation, and thus would still be Read More ›

Some members of the Cornell University Creative Machines Lab have a little video on Youtube called [youtube z9ptOeByLA4 Evolving Soft Robots with Multiple Materials.]  The video is in conjunction with a paper put out by members of the Creative Machines Lab. You can all decide if you think evolution has finally been explained.  Enjoy!

A firestorm of controversy has been unleashed by the recent Uncommon Descent post, Economist John Maynard Keynes understood ID? (June 13, 2013), which claimed that whatever his merits may have been as an economist, John Maynard Keynes (pictured above) at least displayed an admirable grasp of the case for Intelligent Design, which he succinctly summarized in his classic work, A Treatise on Probability. No attempt was made to paint the man as an Intelligent Design sympathizer, and it was subsequently pointed out by Mark Frank that he was an atheist. Over at the Skeptical Zone, the author of the original Uncommon Descent post on Keynes was reproached in a post by KeithS for not including a follow-up quote from the Read More ›

In the comments of this UD post from yesterday, (comment #21) I referred to Nick Matzke’s rant over at the Panda’s Thumb yesterday as yet another illustration of the double standard’s Matzke’s has when it comes to his critiques of anyone who dares challenge Darwinian Orthodoxy.  In my comments yesterday, I gave an example of Matzke being guilty of the very same thing he (falsely)accuses Meyer of doing.  Today, I want to call out Matzke on another of his famous ploys: the bluff!  In earlier days, before he gained his current status among the defenders of the Darwinian Faith, Matzke posted and commented on various ID sites under various pseudonyms.  His favorite ploy was to use what we came to Read More ›