Koonin: “We don’t know evolution is true.” I like Eugene Koonin. As we have pointed out many times on these pages, he is refreshingly candid about the utter bankruptcy of the “chance dunnit” origin of life hypothesis. To be sure, he has a Loony Tunes answer for that difficulty (the multiverse dunnit). That’s OK. We can argue about that another day. At least he admits the truth in regard to the key question — if we are talking about the probablistic resources available on this planet in the last four billion years, “chance dunnit” is a non-starter. Thanks to UD News, we now know that Koonin is equally candid about the sheer idiocy of assertions like this: The statement that Read More ›

Most people have heard of genes, but few understand how they work. The textbooks say that the human genome has almost 30,000 genes and that a gene typically is used to create a protein molecule. But in fact it is difficult to speak of a gene as a thing. For example, proteins are usually not simply constructed from a given stretch of DNA that we would call a gene. Instead, proteins are constructed from several different stretches of DNA. In other words, our “genes” are often a collection of smaller segments that are separated in our DNA. These different DNA segments, which are given the uninteresting name of exons for “expressed regions,” are first copied, and then the copies are combined or Read More ›

I recently spent some time answering questions in a comment thread here at Uncommon Descent. It seems that people appreciated me taking the time to do this. Unfortunately, this is not something that I typically have the time to do. So, I thought I’d try an experiment. I have created a Google Moderator page, where you can submit and upvote questions you’d like to see me answer. https://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=21afd2&t=21afd2.40 Some ground rules: Don’t be abusive or insulting: I will simply pull the plug on the experiment. Don’t ask non-research questions: I’m here to talk about my research, not where I grew up. Don’t ask questions about research unrelated to mine: I’m sure biogeography is a wonderful subject, but its outside of my area. Read More ›

Basically, a new polyploid plant species has had more than one separate origin in Scotland. And we still don’t know how that works.* Polyploidy—the heritable condition of possessing more than two complete sets of chromosomes—has always been something of a mystery, and this new find both illuminate it and suggests we should pay more attention to it: Polyploidy is the heritable condition of possessing more than two complete sets of chromosomes. Polyploids are common among plants, as well as among certain groups of fish and amphibians. For instance, some salamanders, frogs, and leeches are polyploids. Many of these polyploid organisms are fit and well-adapted to their environments. … Well, from ScienceDaily: Dr Vallejo-Marin added: “It is impossible to say whether Mimulus Read More ›

Veteran science writer, specializing in origin of life, Suzan Mazur interviewed Eugene Koonin, Senior Investigator at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) recently at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: You’ve said you think faint signals remain in tracing early ancestry. Carl Woese told me that these things are simply being inferred, that there’s no way to know… Eugene Koonin: Indeed, if you want to be rigorous in a way, there is nothing we can know about the past. Everything we’re saying about the past is inference — yet, inference is not a derogatory term. We are very confident about much of this inference. We are confident that all animals had a common ancestor about 700 million years ago, a little less. Although, do Read More ›

Here: Before we start, let’s invent two things: self-repairing AI supervisors that can direct projects lasting many millennia; and vehicles that can reach close to the speed of light, maybe riding on laser beams or driven by miniature black holes – which according to recent calculations by physicists at Kansas State University may be possible. When we reach the Singularity or the Omega Point or whatever flim flam destination is on offer, we might pause to wonder this: Why do people likely to credit every a-crock-alypse from nuclear winter to human-caused global warming also wonder if we can engineer the universe? Especially when they think it all just happened randomly anyway. See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe Read More ›

Jeff Leek, at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins U), writes the Simply Statistics blog, at which he noted today the tyranny of the idea in science. In business, he says, startup ideas are a dime a dozen and only winners are rewarded. In science, startup ideas are rewarded, and the people who made them matter are forgotten. He gives, as an example, Higgs Boson – Peter Higgs postulated the Boson in 1964, he won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for that prediction, in between tons of people did follow on work, someone convinced Europe to build one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment ever built and conservatively thousands of scientists and engineers had to do Read More ›

From Rob Sheldon: The ideas of the Big Bang theory have been resisted by astronomers and cosmologists for decades if not millennia. Plato was against, Augustine was for a creation event. In modern times, the initial idea was put forward by a Belgian priest, Fr Georges Lemaitre in about 1927. Albert Einstein hated the idea, and preferred to insert an “anti-gravity” term into his famous set of gravitational equations to balance the attraction of gravity, and thereby obtain a steady-state, static, unchanging and eternal universe. It was only after Willem deSitter showed that Einstein’s solution was unstable, and Edwin Hubble showed that all the galaxies were moving away from us at increasingly faster speeds the further away they were, that Read More ›

Because nothing is a problem for a theory like Darwin’s. (Or Freud’s, for that matter.) Further to Berlinski’s Question Remains Unanswered, embryologist Jonathan Wells writes to say, Regarding the first line in the comments (by eigenstate): Haldane’s “rabbit in the Cambrian” suffices as a simple example of a devastating find for evolutionary theory’s basic model. In 2009, Steve Meyer and I spoke at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. The day before, the museum’s curator of invertebrate paleontology, Dr. Stephen Westrop, made a pre-emptive strike by giving his own talk about why the Cambrian explosion poses no challenge to Darwinian theory. He concluded by taking exception to J.B.S. Haldane’s claim that finding a fossil rabbit Read More ›

Yes, yes, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong. From Nautilus: Woit’s major complaint about the theory, then and now, is that it fails to make testable predictions, so it can’t be checked for errors—in other words, that it’s “not even wrong.” Contrast this with general relativity, for example, which enabled Einstein to predict, among other things, the degree to which a star’s light is deflected as it passes the sun. Had measurements of this effect not agreed with Einstein’s prediction, general relativity would have been disproved. Such falsifiability is a widely cited criterion for what constitutes science, a perspective usually attributed to philosopher Karl Popper. Plus, general relativity took Einstein only 10 years. String theory has taken more than 30 Read More ›

From The Guardian: Research has revealed that so-called neurobabble is surprisingly convincing – here’s a quick guide to harnessing its persuasive powers … Among the strategies offered by British neurologist Jules Montague: Make grand claims about mirror neurons For example: “Mirror neurons are the basis of human empathy, the entire emergence of human culture, and the shaping of our civilisation.” What it means: This is absolute codswallop. Mirror neurons, which fire when monkeys do something or see a fellow monkey doing it, have been called “the most hyped concept in neuroscience”. But the research is not yet proven to apply to humans. If you can shout “Parklife!” at the end of your sentence with the word “hippocampus” “or “fusiform gyrus” Read More ›

From John Cook, climate communications guy at the University of Queensland at The Conversation: Ironically, the practice of throwing more science at science denial ignores the social science research into denial. You can’t adequately address this issue without considering the root cause: personal beliefs and ideology driving the rejection of scientific evidence. Attempts at science communication that ignore the potent influence effect of worldview can be futile or even counterproductive. Actually, the first thing one should do is look at the personal beliefs and ideology of those presenting the evidence. Then compare them with those who reject the evidence. About fifty years ago, I was in a hospital, on the bookshelf of whose coffee room was an encyclopedia from about Read More ›

The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics suggests ten principles to guide research evaluation. Here’s the .pdf (which may download automatically). Data are increasingly used to govern science. Research evaluations that were once bespoke and performed by peers are now routine and reliant on metrics. The problem is that evaluation is now led by the data rather than by judgement. Metrics have proliferated: usually well intentioned, not always well informed, often ill applied. We risk damaging the system with the very tools designed to improve it, as evaluation is increasingly implemented by organizations without knowledge of, or advice on, good practice and interpretation. Here’s one guideline: 5. Allow those evaluated to verify data and analysis. To ensure data quality, all researchers Read More ›

There is a reason why Aristotle’s ideas persisted for thousands of years—they advance fundamental themes in how we think. And no, those ideas did not become outdated with the rise of modern science, as the textbooks explain. Consider a recent paper on the flight of bats which stated that the bat’s specialized airflow sensors evolved in order “to guide motor behaviors” and that vertebrate nervous systems, in general, “have flexibly adapted to accommodate anatomical specializations for flight.” The infinitive form is the key. Evolutionary theory is supposed to have rejected teleology. Whereas Aristotle explained natural phenomena as a consequence of final causes, modern science, so the textbooks state, is free of such mysteries. After Bacon it was all about empiricism, mathematical descriptions and Read More ›

In a recent post I asked the following question. I have a question for non-ID proponents only and it is very simple: Is there even one tenet of modern evolutionary theory that is universally agreed upon by the proponents of modern evolutionary theory? Then I waited for the answers to come in. I was not disappointed, and I would like to express a hearty “thank you” to the proponents of modern evolutionary theory who participated in the exercise. I have gone through the comments, and the proponents have nominated the following list as tenets on which all proponents of modern evolutionary theory agree: 1. Common descent 2. Modern organisms descend from very ancient ones. 3. The differences among related lineages Read More ›