Last Friday RealClearReligion.org, featured an article titled, The Pope Believes in Evolution (Aleteia, 13 June 2014) by M. Anthony Mills, a Ph.D. candidate in the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame University. Mills’ article was written in response to an earlier article by George Dvorsky (io9.com, March 16, 2013), titled, Does the new Pope believe in evolution? In his article, Dvorsky argued that Catholicism and Darwinism don’t mix: you cannot accept both. Darwinian evolution, according to Dvorsky, is “a God killer,” “a stand alone system,” a “fully autonomous process that does not require any guiding ‘rationality’ ([Pope] Benedict’s term) to function.” In his reply to Dvorsky, Anthony Mills makes several concessions that are quite remarkable, for a Catholic Read More ›

Having experienced recently an injury to my arm with breaks in three places, I have a fresh appreciation of the remarkable properties of bone. The focus of this blog is not the healing process, but rather the remarkable strength of bone and its ability to withstand intense impacts. The research work under consideration looked at the molecular structure of bone, which means we look with the perspective of nanotechnology. Like many materials, bone has crystalline regions and amorphous regions. The crystalline components (made up of calcium phosphate platelets) are located within a disordered material (the collagen protein matrix). There is also a significant amount of water within bone, and much of it appears to be structural. “[U]p to 28% of Read More ›

In Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution the engine of progress is death. Nature is one big Malthusian battlefield as natural selection kills off the less-fit designs. As David Hume had put it a century before, “A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” and nature is so arranged so as “to embitter the life of every living being.” In Darwin’s day Alfred, Lord Tennyson found that nature was “red in tooth and claw” and Herbert Spencer summarized Darwin’s new theory as the “Survival of the Fittest.” Or as Nietzsche lamented, it is the weak “who most undermine life.” But there’s only one problem: this is all the result of junk science. For every Serengeti Plain there are untold stories Read More ›

In a series of recent posts, RDFish has made several penetrating criticisms of the Intelligent Design project, which can be summarized as follows: (i) the ID project does not currently possess an operational definition of “intelligence” which is genuinely informative and at the same time, suitable for use in scientific research; (ii) the explanatory filter used by the Intelligent Design community assumes that intelligence is something distinct from law and/or chance – in other words, it commits itself in advance to a belief in contra-casual libertarian free will (the view that when intelligent agents make a decision, they are always capable of acting otherwise), a view which is appealing to “common sense,” but which is highly controversial on both scientific Read More ›

Here. An intriguing look at what today’s science-minded public reads: 1 QUIET by Susan Cain. Crown. Introverts — one-third of the population — are undervalued in American society. (1) (Could be the introverts don’t get out enough.) 8 THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY by Denise Kiernan. Simon & Schuster. Thousands of women took well-paying jobs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War II, not knowing that the government project where they worked was enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. (7) This is interesting, but sounds like it is really history, not science. Indeed, it is interesting how much of the list is really about history or struggling with mental issues, and such. Not a criticism, just an observation. This Read More ›