Here is a paper out of the PRCthat raises some awkward questions about the intellectual climate surrounding global warming. Apparently with all the blackballing, peer-review control, publication manipulation, and funding and career threats, the Chinese suspect there might be some manipulation of information at work.  Read more

I had originally intended to post this in the comment thread to my first article here as a guest author, titled, Does It Matter What We Believe About Morality? In the end, however, it turned out to be sufficiently long and detailed that it seemed to warrant a new original post. If it’s preferred that this type of thing simply stay in the comments section then please let me know for future reference. In comment #39 for that article, Popperian made some thoughtful contributions. This is a reply to that comment, with most of his original text reproduced for reference. —————————————- Popperian, you said:   Think of it this way… Before one could actually apply any set of objective moral principles, wouldn’t this necessitate a way Read More ›

Why is it that the same structures in similar species are constructed, during embryonic development, in different ways? Why is it that the master control genes which direct the embryonic development of complex structures, such as the eye, must have arisen long before those complex structures arose, if evolution is true? One might have thought that the much celebrated field of evodevo (the study of the evolution of embryonic development) might have resolved such thorny questions. Instead it seems to have simply raised more questions about evolutionary theory. In fact one recent review reads like something out of the Intelligent Design movement:  Read more

Here’s a news article from Phys.Org on a lamprey study. Actually it’s a study concerning phylogenetics and using gene regulatory mechanisms to figure out the relationships that exist. It turns out that in the lamprey, which is part of the Cambrian explosion, the same kind of hind brain gene regulatory mechanisms are in place as in “jawed” vertebrates, including mammals. From the article: The team at Stowers, collaborating with Marianne Bronner, Ph.D., professor of biology at Caltech, focused on the sea lamprey because the fossil record shows that its ancestors emerged from Cambrian silt approximately 500 million years ago, 100 million years before jawed fish ever swam onto the scene. The question was, could the hindbrain gene regulatory network that Read More ›