Monthly Archives: March 2015
Darwin’s followers dogmatic? No! Say it’s not so!
| March 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Human evolution, News |
We spotted a Darwin profbot earlier, and now over at The Blaze, Casey Luskin comments: Wood and Grabowski are both fully committed to an evolutionary paradigm, but they close their chapter with a striking admission. Although “it is difficult to believe,” they note, “the last time a review looked at the whole of what we […]
We are told: Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.
| March 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
For example, Discover: Mosquitoes that colonized the London Underground in 1863 are now so different they can no longer mate with their above-ground relatives. Chinook salmon from Alaska to California needed just a human generation to become smaller and shorter-lived after an increase in commercial fishing in the 1920s. Adaptation is happening right under our […]
Junk DNA turns out to have function again
| March 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
Peter M. Waterhouse & Roger P. Hellens, ” Plant biology: Coding in non-coding RNAs,” Nature (March 25, 2025) Dominique Lauressergues, Jean-Malo Couzigou, Hélène San Clemente, Yves Martinez, Christophe Dunand, Guillaume Bécar, & Jean-Philippe Combier, “Primary transcripts of microRNAs encode regulatory peptides,” Nature (March 25, 2015) G C S Kuhn, “‘Satellite DNA transcripts have diverse biological […]
Dark matter darker and weirder?
| March 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, News |
So they say: Dark matter’s presence is known only by its interactions with normal matter through gravity. It does not, however, interact via the electromagnetic force, which is why we cannot directly see it — it does not emit, scatter or reflect light — it is more “invisible” than “dark.” In this new research, Harvey […]
A NASA review of Suzan Mazur’s Origin of Life Circus
| March 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, Origin Of Life |
Here: One of the most fascinating sections of the book is “Circus Toy Models” where Mazur interviews those scientists involved with efforts to make life in the lab – from Jack Szostak and Matt Powner to Vincent Noireaux and Albert Libchaber to Steen Rasmussen and Norm Packard. Mazur also chats with James Simons (“Impresario Extraordinaire”) […]
Some profbot explains why he defends Darwin
| March 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, News |
I don’t care why this profbot defends Darwin, but why would anyone go into debt for a degree for this kind of thing: I realized early on that many instructors teach introductory biology classes incorrectly. Too often evolution is the last section to be taught, an autonomous unit at the end of the semester. I […]
Off topic: Jerry Coyne gets something right
| March 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intellectual freedom, News |
He likes Ayaan Hirsi Ali Yeah, yeah, that guy, still selling Darwin’s used cars [!]. But never mind, get this—he likes Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Below is Hirsi Ali’s interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. Kelly did a far better job than Jon Stewart, who tried to argue that Islam is no worse than any […]
New book on information as foundation of universe
| March 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Informatics, Intelligent Design, News |
Readers, do you remember: What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness? And Being as Communion? Here’s a new one: It From Bit or Bit From It?: On Physics and Information (The Frontiers Collection) The essays in this book look at the question of whether physics can be based on information, or – as […]
Why not dump all non-Darwin museum donors?
| March 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, News |
Possibly in advance of a political victory in 2016 that will provide unlimited public purse power, a Darwin follower muses thus: I can name one large museum (but I won’t) that totally avoids human evolution (but not necessarily evolution in general) because there are private donors who don’t think humans evolved. The aforementioned human evolution […]
Parallel universe on temporary hold
| March 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Multiverse, News |
Hey, not much religion news today, as the new atheists must be on vacay or something. But our old fave Peter Woit is back, and offers this re discovering the parallel universe: The plan has been to inject a beam into the LHC this week, leading to a news item in the UK Daily Express […]
Failure of the “compensation argument” and implausibility of evolution
| March 29, 2015 | Posted by niwrad under Biophysics, Intelligent Design, thermodynamics and information |
Granville Sewell and Daniel Styer have a thing in common: both wrote an article with the same title “Entropy and evolution”. But they reach opposite conclusions on a fundamental question: Styer says that the evolutionist “compensation argument” (henceforth “ECA”) is ok, Sewell says it isn’t. Here I briefly explain why I fully agree with Granville. […]
Darwin and Wallace: “Even if you’re a Victorian gentleman, you want to be first”
| March 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, News |
In a review of Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species, from the Weekly Standard, we read: In this deeply absorbing book, James T. Costa seeks to establish Alfred Russel Wallace as the fully vested co-creator of what he feels we should once again call the “Darwin-Wallace Theory” of evolution by natural selection. That Wallace had […]
Bumblebee research casts doubt on integrity of science?
| March 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Media, News, Science |
From New Scientist: Do neonicotinoid pesticides kill bumblebees? We still don’t know, but the latest research is alarming – and casts doubt on the integrity of science. … “This is a scandal,” said Matt Shardlow of the charity Buglife, which has campaigned on the issue. “The scientific process appears to have been deliberately manipulated to […]
How Darwin gave us post-modernism
| March 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Here, Excerpt. from Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes:, When postmodern thought was applied to literary theory, it gave rise to an offshoot called deconstructionism. Recall that for postmodernism, individuals are constituted by their membership within a community. The implication is that individuals do not really have […]
Newly discovered lobster-like predator half a billion years old
| March 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Cambrian explosion, News |
From ScienceDaily: The study presents evidence that Yawunik was capable of moving its frontal appendages backward and forward, spreading them out during an attack and then retracting them under its body when swimming. Coupled with the long, sensing whip-like flagella extending from the tip of the claws, this makes the frontal appendages of the animal […]
Another non-Darwinian biologist we need to know about: Mae-Wan Ho
| March 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Says there is no boundary between genetics and epigenetics Interviewed by Suzan Mazur: Suzan Mazur: Over the last few decades there have been several movements regarding deficiencies of the Modern Synthesis. “The Osaka Group” was one of them, “theThe Altenberg 16” another, and now “The Third Way of Evolution” — otherwise known as “the Oxford […]
Denis Noble on physiology “rocking” evolutionary biology
| March 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Biology, Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, News |
In case you didn’t know it was free, here’s Denis Noble: The ‘Modern Synthesis’ (Neo-Darwinism) is a mid-20th century gene-centric view of evolution, based on random mutations accumulating to produce gradual change through natural selection. Any role of physiological function in influencing genetic inheritance was excluded. The organism became a mere carrier of the real […]
Adam and Eve existed, says the Guardian. But never met.
| March 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
From the Guardian: Humans are evolving more rapidly than previously thought, according to the largest ever genetics study of a single population. Scientists reached the conclusion after showing that almost every man alive can trace his origins to one common male ancestor who lived about 250,000 years ago. The discovery that so-called “genetic Adam”, lived […]
Stephen Hawking Should Visit Elfland
| March 27, 2015 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Some people say that Stephen Hawking is the smartest man in the world, and doubtless he is a brilliant physicist. But when it comes to metaphysics he has said some silly things. Consider his famous universe-from-nothing quote: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Read […]
Rob Sheldon tries to help Darwin follower get over ENCODE findings
| March 27, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism |
PZ Myers whiffles here re little junk DNA. (The world yawns and marches on.) Rob Sheldon responds, Thomas Kuhn gave a name to this phenomenon, he called it a “paradigm shift”. And it is essentially unresolvable for reasons that haven’t changed in 100 years, which is why I’m partial to Max Planck’s version: “Science progresses […]
