Jonathan Witt here: For instance, through much of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that microscopic life was relatively simple, little more than microscopic sacks of Jell-O. The scientific community also accepted the idea of spontaneous generation—that creatures sprang to life spontaneously out of things like dew and rotting meat. Taken together, these pieces of conventional scientific wisdom suggested that the origin of the first living cell deep in the past was hardly worthy of the term mystery—a material explanation seemed obvious. But in 1861 Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments that discredited the notion of spontaneous generation. And in the next century, scientists began amassing evidence of just how complex even the simplest cell is. Today we Read More ›

CHartsil has now earned UD objector poster-child status, regarding a talking point he used to try to divert a News thread: If ID is science, then put it through the scientific method. You don’t just get to say it’s a valid alternative when evolution has been put through the wringer and ID proponents have failed to produce so much as a single mechanism of design. Let’s take this in steps of thought: >> If ID is science, then put it through the scientific method.>> 1 –> This raises the issue as to what science properly understood is, and what its methods are. As there has been a recent agenda to redefine science as applied materialism dressed up in a lab coat, Read More ›

Further to: Darwin trolls: Meet a genuinely anti-science group… (The (Islamist) authors of the document also urged women to refrain from “exploring science”): Here’s real anti-science, if anyone is interested: From Reuters: Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures. A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq’s pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, had pillaged the 3,000-year-old site on the banks of the Tigris River. The assault against Nimrud came just a week after the release of a video showing Islamic State forces smashing museum statues and carvings Read More ›

Here. And plenty of comments here (Not YouTube .) He seems to have managed not to put his foot in it this time, but perhaps he had help. Whether his thesis is relevant or believable is a separate question. News blogging light until later this afternoon. See also: Darwin’s followers are going to have to limit access to public records New Mexico museum edition: Such requests create needless contentions about the use of public money Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to Media’s methane-based life: No it is NOT just sensationalism, it is cheerleading for a worldview (one that permits, even encourages, fiction to stand in for fact): At Forbes, philosopher of science Henry Miller identifies a similar pattern at National Public Radio, which receives federal funds: Among the most egregious transgressions of fair, professional journalism was a series of programs called “The DNA Files” which set up a false moral equivalence by juxtaposing the views of Princeton University Professor Lee Silver against those of Margaret Mellon, long-time NGO-dweller, troglodyte and antagonist of any and all applications of biotechnology. This pairing was a paradigm of NPR’s notion of “balance”: a mainstream, non-ideological academic versus an intransigent, anti-industry, anti-technology, uneducable activist. Read More ›

Further to: Darwin event at museum scuttled when some engineers ask for equal time for ID, here is a story from the Albuquerque Journal: Museum plunged into evolution, religion debate Advocates of “intelligent design” say the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science preferred to cancel Darwin Days events rather than provide an opportunity to present an alternative theory of evolution. Not so, said Mary Ann Hatchitt, communications director for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, which oversees the state’s museums. “There was nothing to cancel because there were no Darwin Days events planned or scheduled” for 2015, she said. A public records request told a different story: The emails provided via the IPRA request and shared with Read More ›

Here at Retraction Watch: Psychology has been home to some of the most infamous cases of fraud in recent years, and while it’s just a few bad apples who are spoiling the bunch, the field itself has seen an overall increase in retractions, according to a new paper by Jürgen Margraf appearing in Psychologische Rundschau and titled “Zur Lage der Psychologie.” That increase, Margraf found, is not entirely due to its most well-known fraudsters. More. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing. 😉 See also: If peer review is working, why all the retractions? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to Eric Anderson’s “Scientists Create Methane-Based Life: Science Reporting Stoops to a New Low, From ScienceDaily: NASA Ames reproduces the building blocks of life in laboratory “We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, cytosine, and thymine, all three components of RNA and DNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,” said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. “We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate conditions in outer space, can make several fundamental building blocks used by living organisms on Earth.” An ice sample is deposited on a cold (approximately -430̊F) substrate in a chamber, where it is irradiated with high-energy ultraviolet (UV) photons from Read More ›

Further to Oldest human fossil found, 400k years “earlier than previously thought,” neuroscientist David A. DeWitt writes to say, That is a real problem since it means that humans overlapped with australopithcines including especially sediba which is a mere 2 million years old. Humans dated 2.8 million years ago? Sophisticated tools used by H. erectus? Neanderthal genes in modern humans? Range of variation in Dmanisi overlapping H. erectus to modern humans? A. sediba is a mixture of Homo and Australopithecine remains in South Africa? What we essentially have is a Cambrian explosion type phenomenon for human origins. Readers? See also: The ridiculous level of uncertainty in the field of human evolution DeWitt: “Look at how messed up this field is. Read More ›

From Darwin Day in America (with Afterword): The very issue Holdren was testifying about—climate change—provides a disturbing example of the growing effort to treat scientific dissent as heresy. One of America’s leading daily newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, announced in 2013 it would no longer publish letters to the editor that expressed skepticism about the human role in climate change. Since one of the original purposes of printing letters to the editor was to air community viewpoints that might differ from a newspaper’s official position, the Times’s decision represented a dramatic departure from historic journalistic standards. Others go much further, calling for the criminal prosecution of global warming skeptics. In 2014 Professor Lawrence Torcello at the Rochester Institute of Technology Read More ›

Here. Sheldon, an eight year-old sulfate tortoise, and Dolly, a three year-old American Pit Bull Terrier, were both rescued from HSNT and are now best friends! Their owner says they love to play chase like in this video and that Dolly even tries to get Sheldon to play with her favorite ball, though so far he’s had no interest. Look how speedy Sheldon is! These two are great examples of just how amazing rescued animals are and how friendship doesn’t see species! From the News desk’s perspective, the tortoise does seem to be playing (hostility seems absent), but we doubt he’ll “get” the idea of whacking a ball around soon. At one time, it was generally assumed that reptiles were Read More ›

Video, well worth watching: [youtube hdNNNJMZJ_c] (–> also cf the audio by John Lennox here. The Worldviews 101 here on may also be of help.) Full presentation (v. fat download). PDF, with notes. Abstract: The New Atheism claims being a scientist and a Christian is like being a vegan butcher. But both today and in history, many scientists, Mathematicians and engineers are motivated in their work by the uncovering of precise orderliness, underlying simplicity, and inherent beauty of God’s creations. Many not only study the creation., but have pursued the identity of the creator and have found Him in the foundational tenets of Christianity. Some of these scientists are: o Isaac Newton – the father of classical physics and co-creator Read More ›

Two thousand years ago the Epicureans believed that the world arose spontaneously. Their idea was that randomly veering atoms attained a great variety of configurations by chance, and would eventually find themselves forming stable, functional structures. And while this may seem unlikely, the immense universe provided a great many opportunities for those configurations to come about. In Cicero’s dialog, the Epicurean explains this to his stoic opponent:  Read more

Readers may vaguely recall: If anyone cares, Biologos (Christians for Darwin) will now actually review Darwin’s Doubt, which shows why the Cambrian explosion can’t be explained by the theory that guides their lives and work. Author Steve Meyer responds to their attempts to defend Darwinian naturalism here: In any case, it is not at all clear that BioLogos has declined to take an official position on methodological naturalism. In their description of the theory of intelligent design on their website, BioLogos affirms its commitment to explaining all natural phenomena (including presumably the origin of life and novel forms of life) by reference to strictly natural causes. As the website explains: [Intelligent Design] claims that the existence of an intelligent cause Read More ›

2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than previous ones. From LiveScience: An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say. And Michael Cremo is still wrong, right? NatGeo’s take here. See also: The search for our earliest ancestors: signals in the noise Follow UD News at Twitter!