Over the past day or so, following a News post, the self referential incoherences of evolutionary materialism have been coming under the microscope here at UD. In the course of such, the indefatigable (but often “misunderestimated”) BA77 has again struck gold. As in per famed eccentric and insightful mystic, William Blake, Tiger, tiger, burning bright . . . And, how could we honour BA77 without a vid? So . . [youtube uuiusIIOqY4] (While we are at it, Eye of the Tiger, vid + lyrics.) Well worth headlining: _______________ BA77: >>I like the nuance that Dr. Pearcey draws out. It is not only that, under materialistic premises, our perceptions may be false, it is also that, under materialistic premises, free will, Read More ›

In this post the UD News Desk quotes from Nancy Pearcey’s new book concerning evolutionary epistemology: An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. Piotr thinks he has a cogent response to this: Does she believe “the ideas in our minds” are innate, or what? At best, it could be argued that the human mind has been shaped by natural selection in such a way that it can produce ideas which help us to Read More ›

We’ve done enough science news for one afternoon, so here is a scrap of total nonsense from our fave, PZ Myers at the Free Thought blogs: Do these big name universities intentionally inculcate obtuseness, or do they select for neo-reactionary thinkers? Case in point: Steven Pinker promoting Christina Hoff Sommers. What is this? Is he hoping that the flaming bigots of #gamergate will anoint him as Based Harvard Prof? It is impossible to take that hack Sommers seriously, unless you like that she supports your anti-feminist biases. While we mop up and stock up here at UD News, you can check this spit war between Darwin’s followers for yourself. Hey, you might be paying both of their salaries, hard to Read More ›

From Nature: Geneticists meet to work out why the rate of change in the genome is so hard to pin down. Wouldn’t that have some effect on the believability of time scales for human evolution?: A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Arthropods (they of a hard outer-skeleton, like crustaceans, spiders, and insects) very often have larval phases that are completely different from the adults — such as caterpillars and butterflies. Allegedly, one of the reasons crabs have been so successful is that their larval life habits (diet, locomotion, etc.) are decoupled from their adult life habits. Most ancient fossils display a suite of “primitive” features, consistent with their early evolution and allowing them to be distinguished from their modern descendants. But the fossil described in this paper, despite its age, possesses a very modern morphology, indistinguishable from many crab larvae living today. “It’s amazing, but if we did not know this was a 150-million-year-old fossil, we might think that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Concept of hibernation challenged: Bat species is first mammal found hibernating at constant warm temperatures (But then, as Thomas Nagel asks, What is it like to be a bat anyway?) The researchers monitored the activity of the bats during this period and found that they neither fed nor drank, even on warm nights when other bat species were active in the same caves. The researchers used heat-sensitive transmitters to measure the bats’ skin temperature in the caves. Then in the laboratory, they measured the bats’ metabolic rates and evaporative water loss at different ambient temperatures. The bats’ average skin temperature in the caves was found to be about 71.6̊F. Both bat species reached their lowest metabolic rates at Read More ›

They modulate gene expressions over cells’ lifetimes. From The Scientist : Not only do telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes, they also modulate gene expression over cells’ lifetimes. … New work led by Jerry W. Shay and Woodring Wright of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas demonstrates that telomeres are more than just buffer zones. The team found that as chromosomes fold within the nucleus, telomeres come into contact with faraway genes and alter their expression. As telomeres shorten, which happens with aging, chromosome looping and gene-expression patterns change. “I’m delighted with this evidence that the [telomere] sequence may actually be doing some regulation and that the decrease of the sequence in some cells may drastically affect Read More ›

What if it is the other way around? Just wondering, that’s all. Anyway, from New Scientist: “HOW on earth does the brain enable mind?” This line from the preface to Tales from Both Sides of the Brain by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga serves as the overarching question for his latest book. And it’s also a question that permeates The Future of the Brain, a collection of essays edited by psychologist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Jeremy Freeman. About Future of the Brain we learn, The technologies will generate lots of data, and neuroscientists will need large-scale simulations and brain models to make sense of it. Editors Marcus and Freeman say that we had better get used to seeing the brain as an Read More ›

Philosopher Edward Feser has written a thought-provoking critique of the Turing Test, titled, Accept no limitations. Professor Feser makes several substantive points in his essay. Nevertheless, I believe that the basic thrust of the Turing Test is sound, and in this post, I’d like to explain why. In his 1950 paper, Computing machinery and intelligence (Mind, 59, 433-460), computer scientist Alan Turing argued that the question, “Can machines think?”was a scientifically fruitless one, and that the question we should be asking instead was: would it be possible to construct a digital computer that was capable of fooling blind interrogators into believing that it was a human being, by giving answers to the interrogators’ questions that a human being would naturally Read More ›

Here: ENV is pleased to share the following excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s new book,Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other books. A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent? Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. An especially damaging form of contradiction Read More ›

And presumably, wood-burning stoves? Which he thinks are just like religion: And yet, the reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room. It is time to break the spell and burn gas—or burn nothing at all. Of course, if you are anything like my friends, you will refuse to believe this. And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion. Actually, most people, religious or otherwise, just plain have more fun than we suspect the average new atheist Read More ›

Not a chance. But here hack Ben Thomas unpacks the problem it creates: The trait that distinguishes scienceyness from actual science is that it’s got nothing to do with the scientific method at all. … Sciencey headlines are pre-packaged cultural tokens that can be shared and reshared without any investment in analysis or critical thought?—?as if they were sports scores or fashion photos or poetry quotes?—?to reinforce one’s aesthetic self-identification as a “science lover.” One’s actual interest doesn’t have to extend beyond the headline itself. And that, right there, is the difference between a love of science, and a love of scienceyness. Some suggestions: First, science journalists should lose the pom poms. Covering science is no different from covering sports Read More ›

That’s the claim in this ScienceDaily piece: Recently released research on human evolution has revealed that species of early human ancestors had significant differences in facial features. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found that these early human species also differed throughout other parts of their skeletons and had distinct body forms. The research team found 1.9 million-year-old pelvis and femur fossils of an early human ancestor in Kenya, revealing greater diversity in the human family tree than scientists previously thought. “What these new fossils are telling us is that the early species of our genus, Homo, were more distinctive than we thought. They differed not only in their faces and jaws, but Read More ›

Yes, if devolution is a big surprise. Here: The genus name, Aenigmatinea, (along with its common name) reflects the enigmatic nature of the moth’s morphology. The moth has an odd mixture of physical characters that made it difficult to place within an evolutionary framework: its wings and genitalia showed it to be primitive -– but how primitive? The most primitive moths have jaws, with one of the first steps in the evolution of advanced moths and butterflies being the development of a tongue. Aenigmatinea has neither – its mouth parts are almost entirely reduced. The solution to the puzzle was to rely on the moth’s DNA and compare its sequence to potential relatives. The answer was intriguing -– the moth’s closest Read More ›

The 2nd law of statistical thermodynamics states that in a closed system any natural transformation goes towards the more probable states. The states of organization are those more improbable, then transformations spontaneously go towards non-organization, so to speak. Since evolution would be spontaneous organization, evolution disagrees with the 2nd law. The tendency expressed in the 2nd law rules all physical phenomena and is clearly evident in our everyday life, where e.g. systems that were ok yesterday, today are ko, while systems that are ko, do not self repair and remain ko until an intelligent intervention. In short, things break down and do not self-repair, to greater reason they do not self-organize. All that can be related to the trend of Read More ›