2014

Conclusion: Not even remotely close. See here. Yet we are still expected to bow and scrape to our lab-coated betters?  

My dictionary defines a “bogart” as: “a person who hogs or monopolizes something; or a person who acts in a tough or aggressive way.” In a recent exchange Upright Biped took down a bogart in his usual inimitable way. The last paragraph pointing out the position of many materialists is ultimately faith-based is a gem. Acartia_bogart: Finally: Scientists clearly admit that they don’t know how life originated, and will never know (unless they invent time travel). But they will narrow it down to a small number if good contenders. And intelligent design won’t be amongst them because that still leaves the question of how the intelligent designer originated. By definition, an intelligent designer must be alive. You can call it Read More ›

One of the most bizarre defenses of evolution, which I first encountered years ago, is that contradictory evidence doesn’t matter because it was investigated by an evolutionist. Like planting your flag on the Moon, or like a trademark or patent, the first one there, or the first one with the idea, gets to claim it for their own. Evolutionists discovered ORFans, for example, so ORFans cannot be contrary to evolution.  Read more

Conservation of sequence in the course of natural history has always been considered a sign of function. But does function always coincide with sequence conservation? And are there other important aspects which must be considered? This topic has been discussed recently with some passion here, so I will dedicate a series of two posts to it, in the hope that we can base our discussions on reliable data. I apologize in advance if some of the following discussion is necessarily rather technical. In general, in evolutionary analysis, conservation is considered a sign of function. Protein coding genes which are more strictly conserved in the course of time are usually considered as having greater functional constraint than those genes which change more. The Read More ›

Here: A well-replicated finding in the psychological literature is the negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence. However, several studies also conclude that one form of religiosity, church attendance, is protective against later-life cognitive decline. No effects of religious belief per se on cognitive decline have been found, potentially due to the restricted measures of belief used in previous studies. Here, we examined the associations between religiosity, intelligence, and cognitive change in a cohort of individuals (initial n = 550) with high-quality measures of religious belief taken at age 83 and multiple cognitive measures taken in childhood and at four waves between age 79 and 90. We found that religious belief, but not attendance, was negatively related to intelligence. The effect Read More ›

In his new book, “Social Physics,” Alex Pentland, a prominent data scientist at M.I.T., shows as much uncritical enthusiasm for prediction as Tucker, while making a case that we need a new science — social physics — that can make sense of all the digital bread crumbs, from call records to credit card transactions, that we leave as we navigate our daily life. (That the idea of social physics was once promoted by the positivist Auguste Comte, one scholar who would have warmed to the idea of Big Data, goes unmentioned.) What is social physics good for? It would allow us to detect and improve “idea flow” — the way ideas and behaviors travel through social networks. For example, Pentland Read More ›

Here: Allen Orr, my first Ph.D. student, has developed a thriving career as a popular book reviewer, and in this week’s New York Review of Books, he critique’s Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I made a few comments on this book a few days ago, saying that it was in the main pretty bad, though one part, the presentation of the case for genetic differentiation of human populations, was not too bad. But Wade’s main thesis was that differences between human societies, as well as rapid changes within human societies, was due to evolutionary change mediated by natural selection. That latter contention, I claimed, had no evidence behind it, though Wade argued otherwise. Read More ›

Here. By definition, no one can know what arrogance looks like. It wouldn’t be arrogance if we knew it. Here (Ethan Siegel) Now, philosophy doesn’t have the answers, but it does teach ways to consider the limits of our knowledge. And if you’re talking about the philosophy of science, so long as those doing the philosophizing are honestly and accurately representing the science (which is something they can only do if they actually understand it adequately themselves, which many?—?but not all?—?of them do), it can certainly give you a number of interesting possibilities to think about. Which is why I was incredibly disappointed to learn that Neil de Grasse Tyson went on the Nerdist Podcast, and absolutely ripped the entire Read More ›

Gravitational wave theory faces scrutiny here, at Nature: Cosmologist casts doubts on BICEP2’s analysis of cosmic microwaves, but the team stands by its conclusions.

In his recent debate with Paul Nelson, evolutionist Joel Velasco appealed to several evidences in making his case for evolution. In my previous posts I examined Velasco’s claims about the nested hierarchy and ORFans (hereand here). Here I will examine two more of Velasco’s evidences: the recurrent laryngeal nerve and a common genomic element known as an ALU.  Read more

Over at his Website, Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has put up a very brief post titled, What About the Origins of Life Itself? It reads as follows: We know that we descended from a common ancestor. We know this. Evolution is a fact. Many believers agree about this, even a growing number of evangelicals. But what about the origins of life itself? The answer is simple. Ready? Since the evolution of life has a natural explanation then so also does the origins of life, we just don’t know how yet. Give science time. Don’t punt to a god explanation just as believers shouldn’t have done before Darwin. Comprende? A commenter named formerlutheran responded: Science has yet to figure out exactly Read More ›