Because information underlies the universe?
Month: March 2014
Jonathan Wells: We are far from a good theoretical model of organisms’ development
We are far from having a complete list of the components, as a matter of fact.
Jonathan Wells: Far from being all-powerful, DNA does not wholly determine biological form
Mutate a fruit fly embryo in every possible way, and observe only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly.
John Sanford: Accepting Darwinism’s collapse is a matter of scientific integrity
Sanford: The extremely sophisticated hardware and software systems that enable life simply cannot be built by any trial and error system.
Fixation rate, what about breaking rate?
Hats off to VJTorley for vindicating claims I’ve made about neutral theory (non-Darwinian evolution) for almost the last eight years at UD. He found this by PZ Myers: M]aybe we should be honest from the very beginning about the complexity of modern evolutionary theory and how it has grown to be very different from what […]
Claim: Crows’ causal understanding rivals that of 5-7 year old children
An ancient fable describing this very feat suggests it may not be exclusively the result of causal reasoning on the part of intelligent individual crows.
Oxford profs respond to and refute new atheist claims
Said to be an excellent discussion of faith, blind faith, certainty, proof, persuasion: Philosophy, Science and the God Debate: ‘Science disproves the existence of God’. Scientists and philosophers interviewed: Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion), Keith Ward (Why There Almost Certainly Is a God) and John Lennox (Gunning for God). This documentary shows Oxford professors responding […]
Fixation: the neutral theory’s Achilles’ heel?
The neutral theory of evolution appears to have won out over its rival, neo-Darwinian selection theory (see here and here). However, the neutral theory makes a very specific prediction about the rate at which mutations are fixed in a population, which I think warrants more testing and scrutiny. The evidence for this prediction which I’ve […]
New book by German economist friendly to design in nature
The book is doing quite well among philosophical books published in German (one of the top ten in philosophy).
Stone masks from 9000 years ago put on display recently
Museum director: The masks possessed a “striking connection” to 20th century artwork, … like something Picasso might have created.
Reviewer: Fashionable atheism has not made many inroads
Atlantic associate editor Emma Green’s review offers many useful statistics illustrating her point.
Owning the cosmos by accepting Tyson’s terms …
… whether he himself accepts them or not?
BA77’s off topic thread, Volume 4
I’ve found it helpful to UD to post a thread where people can vent some of their off-topic ideas and thus keep off topics out of other threads. As long as you aren’t being confrontational and are family friendly, you are free to speak their mind. Here are my off Topics: “dogmatic opponents of design […]
God’s Not Dead film: How be, God is alive but logic isn’t? Not at university, anyway
Bencze: [Hawking’s] words are so appallingly stupid that I thought they might have been invented by script writers. Well, they weren’t. Hawking actually wrote them …
Evolution: In blind cave fish, a protein change supports controversial evolution mechanism
Researchers: … the extent to which cryptic, preexisting variation provides a substrate for natural selection has been controversial. We provide evidence …