July 2014

This weekend, the Apollo 11 Moon Landing happened forty-five years ago to day and date.  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRwKUScppvQ I remember sitting on the stone ledge of our patio after church on Sunday, July 20, 1969 sipping a drink as radio carried the story of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Then, that evening my Dad tuned to a shortwave station in the darkened living room as we heard, live, the story of the Moon Walk. The next morning, the Gleaner headline was I think two inches high in block capitals. Let us remind ourselves of this now long ago but still important event in the history of science and technology. END

Without the usual nuttery. As Ross Pomeroy tells it, Feynman was a jerk where women are concerned, except when he regarded them as colleagues. Ashutosh Jogalekar, who penned the article at Scientific American, described having a similar reaction to Feynman’s “casual sexism,” which also manifested in more than just social arenas. But, he noted, though some of his actions are “disturbing and even offensive” when viewed from the socially-evolved lens of today, “they were probably no different than the attitudes of a male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.” Thus, Jogalekar reasoned, we should not condemn Feynman wholly as a sexist. Actually, in a lot of places, a guy who behaved that way was viewed as a jerk in Read More ›

These days, it is fashionable among science writers to claim that the difference between humans and other animals is one of degree. Well, here’s one clear-cut difference: only human beings are aware of what other individuals can see, while guide dogs appear to be blissfully unaware that their owners cannot see. A 2008 study by the French anthropologist Florence Gaunet, titled, “How do guide dogs of blind owners and pet dogs of sighted owners (Canis familiaris) ask their owners for food?” (Animal Cognition, July 2008, 11(3):475-83) was the subject of a recent blog article in Discover magazine (Seriously Science, July 1, 2014). The design of the experiment was simplicity itself: Dr. Gaunet reasoned that if guide dogs understood that their Read More ›

Our longtime commenter Jerry several months ago asked a question about DNA (regarding complementary strands). I presume he got an answer by now. At the time, I wanted to respond to his question with this video, but I just never got around to it! But the video would still be incredibly valuable to all our readers. If I showed this video to ID sympathizers, it’s rather easy to persuade them of ID. It’s only about 13 minutes long, but you’ll learn a lot about DNA, chemistry, and ID (indirectly if you know what I mean), and the history of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution. I love the narrator’s fast talking. Slow talking puts me to sleep!

A new study out of Harvard continues to find problems with the spider evolution story. This time it is a massive genetic study demonstrating that spiders that create orb webs do not fall into the expected evolutionary pattern. As usual, the problem cannot simply be explained away as a consequence of methodological problems and evolutionists are left with convergence or extinction as their only explanations. Either orb weaving evolved multiple times, or it evolved once, proliferated, and then a bunch of species became extinct. Ever since Darwin this denouement has repeated itself over and over—evolutionists apply their theory to a particular problem, their predictions turn out false, and they respond by accommodating the new findings. Skeptics say the theory is failing and Read More ›