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 […]
Month: March 2015
We are told: Some species are evolving far more quickly than Darwin ever imagined.
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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”
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?
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
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
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 […]