2013

As those who live among them will know, the 17-year insect, the cicada, emerges en masse this year after five larval stages, mates and dies. They are an ongoing puzzle: In 1665, the first volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society included a report from New England concerning “swarms of strange insects, and the mischiefs done by them”. Charles Darwin also puzzled over them. Even now, entomologists are trying to understand how the insects’ peculiar life cycles evolved, how they count the years underground and how they synchronize their schedules. “They are one of the big ecological mysteries out there,” says Walt Koenig, a behavioural ecologist at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Interesting: … Read More ›

I think the NCSE got tired of defending Darwinism. I guess the Discovery Institute promoting ID and the creationists promoting creationism was bad enough, but when mainstream scientists began to join the anti-Darwin fray, it was too much. So what did the NCSE do? They found something to replace Darwinism as the central core of science education. See for yourself what this new core of science education is here. 🙂 NOTESThis post was filed under humor. Don’t take it too seriously, but I think there is a grain of truth to what I said. UPDATEsince this is a humor post, I’ve decided to make this UD’s first official OPEN THREAD. Have at it guys, but keep it civil and family Read More ›

WK has pointed out a vid sequence at YouTube, in which Dr Gonzalez lays out a good summary of the privileged planet thesis. Here is the start: WK (what, you haven’t bookmarked and speed-dialled this blog yet? tut, tut!  . . . ) summarises on points of significance for reflection: There’s more there too. Such as, this thought or two on design inferences in the broader sense: I think this vid sequence  is a very good use for an hour of our time. END PS: This review paper on the habitable Zones concept is also well worth perusing.

COMPLEXITY =/=> EVOLUTION Many Darwinists equate complexity with evolution. They see the fossil record of increasing complexity with time as precisely what defines Evolution. But is increasing complexity always a good thing? The history of computers is instructive. Your iPhone and laptop computer are constructed using base-2, principally because flip-flops and early binary circuits were easy to make, even the earliest electronic memory based on circular ferrites was two-state. This base-2 necessity led to an explosion in the study of Boolean Algebra and binary logic in the 1950’s, which demonstrated that everything you could do in base-10 could be done in base-2. By the late 50’s, the Russians were falling further and futher behind the US in computer technology, and Read More ›

Joe Felsenstein is an evolutionist that has a unique distinction of having his work favorably cited by creationists and bible scholars (except where he disagrees). For example, religious scholars are using Joe’s work to find descendants of the line of priests from the time of the Bible’s King David. See: Y-Chromosomal Aaron. Joe is also widely credited with coining the phrase “Muller’s ratchet”, a concept articulated in a paper 40 years ago! He must have written that when he was really young, 1973 was a while back. The wiki entry on Muller’s ratchet: In evolutionary genetics, Muller’s ratchet (named after Hermann Joseph Muller, by analogy with a ratchet mechanism) is the process by which the genomes of an asexual population Read More ›

A few years ago we reported on fascinating eye movement research. If you stare at a horizontal line first, then a circle appears stretched out, like an ellipse. This simple fact was ingeniously used in an experiment to study how signals from the eye are processed. Our eyes move several times per second. If we were aware of what our eyes were seeing we’d have difficulty making sense of such rapid movements. As it is we don’t sense such movements, and one theory held that the signal processing in our vision system deleted certain scenes to keep the image steady in our brains. But when human subjects were shown a horizontal line too quickly to be sensed, they nonetheless then saw a Read More ›

Casey Luskin did a fine job today defending academic freedom on the Michael Medved show against Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). Regardless of what you think about intelligent design, you should consider helping Eric Hedin (pictured left), the physicist at Ball State University who has come under fire merely for allowing students to opt to take a class exploring issues like intelligent design. Read the full details here. What can you do to help Eric Hedin? In his support, you can sign the academic freedom petition which you can find here.

For the holiday weekend LK and I jumped on our hawg, joined some dear friends and headed to the Black Hills of South Dakota.  There is nothing like a long motorcycle ride for contemplation.  The hypnotic thrumming of the big V twin scant inches beneath my seat, the passing scenery, the wind and sun, and above all the absence of any need to converse all combine to create ideal conditions for reverie.  Here are some of the topics I turned over in my mind as the hawg chewed up the miles: Subject-Object  As we were winding our way through Custer State Park I became aware of myself looking through my eyes as if they were a window.  I had a Read More ›