Consensus science. Chronicle still hasn’t released a free version of the bad news about consensus science, but a brief quote may be permissible: While the public remains relatively unaware of the problem, it is now a truism in the scientific establishment that many preclinical biomedical studies, when subjected to additional scrutiny, turn out to be false. Many researchers believe that if scientists set out to reproduce preclinical work published over the past decade, a majority would fail. This, in short, is the reproducibility crisis. The NIH, if it was at first reluctant to consider the problem, is now taking it seriously. This scandal, of course, is where consensus gets us: Everyone is wrong for all the right reasons. Incidentally, we also happened Read More ›

Which doesn’t mean there is no hope or no information. Read on. Further to Origin of life: Is the real story mainly the comments now?, physicist Rob Sheldon writes I had to write just to defend the poor chemist, John D. Sutherland. The problem of making ribose and proteins-a la Miller and Urey, is that the reaction removes a water molecule when making the bond between amino acids–so it only works in a dry environment–on the other hand, the other reactions for making glycine or amino acids need a wet environment. If I recall correctly, the same dichotomy applies to synthesis of RNA, DNA and nucleotides, in which some bonds are broken by water, some are made in water. In Read More ›

Yeah, that guy. Him. This time here. Motivation guru and author Dr Deepak Chopra on Friday challenged Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying it is “consciousness” and not “random mutations and natural selection” that explains where the human beings today are. “Charles Darwin was wrong. Conscsiousness is key to evolution and we will soon prove that,” the celebrated motivational guru said at the India Today Conclave 2015 in New Delhi. More than a 100 years ago, Darwin had established that all species of life descended from common ancestors. More: Actually, Darwin did not establish common ancestry so much as he made it an excellent living for otherwise possibly useless people. His cause means, for example, that if human beings have justice Read More ›

No one shut it off? Here: Billions Of Planets In Our Galaxy ‘May Hold Life’ Billions of stars in our galaxy could have as many as three planets orbiting them that could support life. Astronomers used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope which has already confirmed that 1,000 planets are orbiting stars in the Milky Way – with another 3,000 possibles. The researchers made their claim after calculating the chances of planets orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the region around a star which could contain planets capable of supporting liquid water. Danish researcher Steffen Kjaer Jacobsen, from the University of Copenhagen, said: “According to the statistics and the indications we have, a good share of the planets in the Read More ›

Featured in an article, Amid a Sea of False Findings, the NIH Tries Reform? BioLogos is a group that wants Christians to believe in evolution, whatever that means. Today, of course it means Darwinism. Didn’t Templeton give them $$millions? One must pay to read the rest. News doesn’t want to pay because it’d just be the usual blather. Always promising reform but won’t root out causes. End story. See also: John West has updated Darwin Day in America (with Afterword) (read free excerpt, includes Collins) Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science, says West. And see the role of BioLogos founder. Question from usual pew sitter: Not how did these people get to be Read More ›

There are many ID’ers who complain about the AVIDA simulation, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why this is so.
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Here. Suzan Mazur: It’s clear to me from reading your papers that you have issues with neo-Darwinism. Luis Villarreal: The issues first came up when I began looking at quasispecies in the early 1970s. I was a researcher in the lab of the late John Holland, where there was real enthusiasm for studying evolution theory in the context of actual virus measurements, because the whole concept derived from thinking about RNA viruses. I wasn’t interested really in evolutionary theory at a deep level. I was interested in persistence, and for this the Modern Synthesis didn’t seem to be working. I just assumed that the theory didn’t apply or work in the specific situations we were studying involving persistence, such as Read More ›

The following story is from Section 5.1 of my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” For a more scientific version of this story, see my 2013 BIO-Complexity article, “Entropy and Evolution,” which is now Chapter 4. The new Chapter 1 is an article published by Human Events in December 2013. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Even most scientists who doubt the Darwinist explanation for evolution are confident that science will eventually come up with a more plausible explanation. That’s the Read More ›

Some science pubs want to survive as trusted sources? This from Real Clear Science: Technically, the headlines are not incorrect. Yet, to me and others, they imply something more radical than what was actually observed. To cut to the chase, an individual photon cannot be observed acting as both a pure particle and wave at the same time. But if you assemble a group of many different photons, you can observe some acting like particles and others acting like waves. Many stories did not make this clear. The researchers who performed the experiment, published in Nature Communications, are on the same wavelength with this assessment. “I also believe that a lot of people are overinterpreting the significance of these data,” senior Read More ›

Here. … Notices of concern regarding papers in Science2, Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS)3,4,5, Journal of Material Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry and Chemical Science have been published in the past few months and now the first retractions of these papers has been coming into effect – one paper in Science2 and three in JACS. Hey, here’s a solution: Just blame creationists. That way no one need ask what’s broken. Maybe one of Darwin’s frat boys in the combox can compose the PR for us. Alternatively keep up with Retraction Watch Follow UD News at Twitter!

What’s really interesting about the latest claim (Science) to have (maybe) solved the origin of life conundrum is the comments. Here’s one: I’m pretty much shocked at the emotionally charged comments. They are simply testing hypotheses for the building-blocks of life and how they were assembled. The intent is not to disprove your god(s) or say ‘haha, we are right.’ … Of course, the commenter is at best mistaken. The reality is that naturalism has gotten nowhere with origin of life and has nowhere to go anyway. The emotional uproar is an outcome of that fact. Nothing will work with origin of life until information is factored in. See also: Suzan Mazur’s interview with an origin of life society president Read More ›

Well, then it sure isn’t “evolution” as National Geographic understands it. This just in from Andreas Wagner at Aeon: How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.) A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible Read More ›

Recently, Larry Moran critiqued ID’s approach to evolutionary biology. Here I will explain how Larry Moran has misunderstood both ID and modern evolutionary theory.
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Recently on niwrad’s thread we have had a lively discussion about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and its potential application to the question of a materialistic abiogenesis scenario. kairosfocus has followed up with another useful post. In the present thread I provide a high level view of some of the key issues and misconceptions surrounding the 2nd Law arguments. Please note, I do so not as any kind of official spokesperson for intelligent design, but based on my experience debating this issue and my individual thoughts on the matter. My intelligent-design-inclined colleagues may disagree with my assessment, but hopefully I have provided some food for thought and, perhaps, an avenue for more productive discourse in the future. Discussions on this Read More ›

About anything except what he thinks? Some of us would be curious to know where he stands on falsifiability?