From ScienceDaily: The ability to make a Lower Paleolithic hand axe depends on complex cognitive control by the prefrontal cortex, including the “central executive” function of working memory, a new study finds. PLOS ONE published the results, which knock another chip off theories that Stone Age hand axes are simple tools that don’t involve higher-order executive function of the brain. “For the first time, we’ve showed a relationship between the degree of prefrontal brain activity, the ability to make technological judgments, and success in actually making stone tools,” says Dietrich Stout, an experimental archeologist at Emory University and the leader of the study. “The findings are relevant to ongoing debates about the origins of modern human cognition, and the role Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne makes a surprising admission on the origins of altruism in a recent post titled, David Sloan Wilson tells the BBC that the evolution of altruism in humans is “solved”: it’s group selection (of course). In his no-holds-barred critique of David Sloan Wilson’s “group selection” theory of how altruism arose, Coyne is refreshingly frank in his acknowledgement of what scientists don’t know about altruism: The fact is that human ‘altruism’ is a mixture of diverse and complex behaviors, only one of which corresponds to the real evolutionary issue of altruism: reproductive self-sacrifice by people that benefits unrelated people who give nothing back. And we simply haven’t the slightest idea whether that form of altruism evolved, or even if Read More ›

I’d like to follow-up on Barry Arrington’s announcement of UD’s 10th birthday. When I started UD 10 years ago to the day (April 15, 2005), I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. Blogging was fairly new at the time. Moreover, I had a strong preference that my best writing efforts should go into longer sustained arguments as appear in articles and books. Still, it was a time of ferment for ID. The Kitzmiller-Dover trial was gearing up. Interest in media for intelligent design was high. I had lots of speaking engagements. And I was curious how much influence a blog might have. If I had to say the best thing that’s come out of UD, it’s the camaraderie of Read More ›

On April 15, 2005 Bill Dembski posted the first post on UD. Ten years later we have had 14,507 posts accompanied by 330,807 comments. From that humble beginning we have grown so that today we get hundreds of thousands of page views and over 50,000 unique visitors each month. We have 49,502 registered users. So I say, thank you Bill for kicking this site off and thank you to our authors, regular readers, and commenters for continuing to make it interesting and worthwhile.

Again, I extend my hearty thanks to Seversky for breaking the dike here. Now other materialists are following his brave lead and admitting the obvious (but nevertheless frequently resisted) implications of materialism: Graham2 There doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable in what Sev has said. Its little more than what us heathens have been repeating. Indeed Graham2. Why don’t you tell RDFish, who is still resisting with all his might? Mark Frank: As a materialist and subjectivist I agree with Seversky: A ) Personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. B) There is no such thing as objective good and evil. C) Statements about good and evil are expressions of Read More ›

As an adaptation, if it is even that, here: But, some theorists argue, religion is actually a bad adaptation. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne attributes Americans’ doubt about Darwinian evolution theories to religious faith, which, he claims, correlates highly with social dysfunction. He goes on to claim that the United States is “one of the most socially dysfunctional First World countries.” That’s a tough contest to judge, considering the cutbacks riots and secularist-Islamist clashes that are increasingly common in secular post-modern Europe. And it is, in any event, difficult to discuss social dysfunction if societies do not even share basic values. These theories about religion (useful, useless, harmful) have two things in common: First, they typically spill forth with no real Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Neanderthals from the French region of Poitou-Charentes cut, beat and fractured the bones of their recently deceased companions, as revealed by the fossil remains of two adults and a child found at the Marillac site. These manipulations have been observed at other Neanderthal sites, but scientists still do not know whether they did this for food or ceremony. Since the Marillac site in France was unearthed, the discovery of fossil remains of animals (90% belonging to reindeer), humans and Mousterian tools has enabled the site to be identified as a hunting area for Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). But the most surprising thing about the site is the presence of a large quantity of bone remains of these hominids, many Read More ›

Finally, an honest materialist. In comment 93 to my last post a materialist finally admits the obvious. Why is that so hard for the rest of them? I don’t agree with everything Seversky says, but the general thrust of his comment is spot on from a materialist perspective. @ Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on Read More ›

In the context, “evolution” typically means Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Anyway here: President David Alexander of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) sent a letter to the campus over the weekend, defending the decision to lay off tenured theology professor Thomas Jay Oord. Alexander said budget cuts necessitated the move. A professor in the school’s counseling department was also affected by the layoffs. Oord was notified of his firing by email while on break, which Alexander said lacked compassion. “I want to publicly apologize to Dr. Tom Oord for the way in which he learned of the change,” said Alexander in his email. “Discussions occurred via mail and email due to spring break and the March 31st notification deadline. That was Read More ›

Here: Evolutionary Science ‘Stuck’ on Wrong Track, Situation ‘Out of Control’ … František Baluška, a native of Slovakia, is founder and editor-in-chief of two scientific journals, Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative & Integrative Biology (Landes Bioscience, publisher) where more of his provocative thinking can be found. Freedom in science is crucial, he says, and we need “open-minded” journals. A decade ago Baluška began organizing international conferences on plant neurobiology as well. His thinking about “plant intelligence” has been partly inspired by Lynn Margulis, specifically her paper “The Conscious Cell.” The theme of plant intelligence was more recently explored in a magazine article by Michael Pollan in which Baluška is cited as well as Darwin’s 1880 observation that the plant Read More ›

I sometimes despair of even the possibility of rational discourse with the ID opponents who post regularly on these pages. In this post I will try to give you a template for rational, logical discourse using my last post as an example. Before I do that, I will give you a couple of hints about the basics. All arguments rest on premises. Here is the classic: 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Socrates is mortal. In order to refute an argument you must do one of two things: Show that it is invalid or show that is unsound. “Invalid” means the conclusion does not logically flow from the premises. In other words, an invalid argument Read More ›

From Eurekalert: The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic “beacons” to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness. “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances — and thus when the universe was younger,” said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA’s Department of Astronomy and Steward Read More ›

And Mae-Wan Ho: Ho’s lucubrations on evolutionary biology, as revealed in an interview she gave to Suzan Mazur at PuffHo, are just as bad. The piece, “Mae-Wan Ho: No boundary really between epigenetic and genetic”, is replete with misstatements, errors, and distortions on the part of both interviewer and subject. Mazur, as you may recall, is a gonzo journalist driven by one Big Obsession: modern evolutionary biology is wrong and she’s going to show how rotten it really is. Mazur tried to win renown by reporting on the infamous “Altenburg 16,” a group of biologists who convened a meeting in Austria, originally intending to debunk the Modern Synthesis, but later retracted their claws and claimed only to “extend” the synthesis. Read More ›

New York Times commentator David Brooks, who wrote one of the worst novels imaginable, based on evolutionary psychology (PZ Myers seems to agree with me on this), allows us to know that he is paid to be a narcissistic blowhard. He has one thing down right: He made sure they paid him. Yes, okay, okay, otherwise a narcissistic blowhard. But why must the world keep getting bulletins about it? From the Guardian review of his book length lecture, The Road to Character: The Road to Character feels like an abrupt plunge that goes far deeper. Though not explicitly religious, Brooks’s language evokes theology: for example, he doesn’t shirk from using the word “sin”, not in a scolding sense, but to refer Read More ›

Here: As Scruton notes: “Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace.” But this isn’t just about the handful of protests the student clubs get up to. The problem has leaked into all of the humanities – the once sacred home for all forms of inquiry. It’s about dismantling anything connected to the past, anything that suggests we can learn from the people who came before us: “The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of Read More ›