Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Multiverse strikes back

Readers will remember Peter Woit, a most interesting mathematician at Columbia, who is not a creationist (Except insofar as the term no longer means anything except “shut UP about our tax/donor-funded nonsense!!”) Noting the continued promotion of multiverse theory, he reports, Symmetry, the FNAL/SLAC run online magazine funded by the DOE, today is running a piece of multiverse mania entitled Is this the only universe?. It’s a rather standard example of the pseudo-scientific hype that has flooded the popular scientific media for the last 10-15 years.Besides the usual anthropic argument for the size of the CC, the evidence for the multiverse is string theory: … The multiverse is  all ridiculous, of course and has nothing to do with serious science Read More ›

Stressed plants send out animal like signals?

From ScienceDaily: For the first time, research has shown that, despite not having a nervous system, plants use signals normally associated with animals when they encounter stress. … “We’ve known for a long-time that the animal neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is produced by plants under stress, for example when they encounter drought, salinity, viruses, acidic soils or extreme temperatures,” says senior author Associate Professor Matthew Gilliham, ARC Future Fellow in the University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. “But it was not known whether GABA was a signal in plants. We’ve discovered that plants bind GABA in a similar way to animals, resulting in electrical signals that ultimately regulate plant growth when a plant is exposed to a stressful environment.” Read More ›

“Pions” explain universe’s invisible matter?

Pions? There’s been a long-running question as to why most of the universe’s matter remains unaccounted for. According to Live Science, Now, a team of five physicists has proposed that dark matter might be a kind of invisible, intangible version of a pion, a particle that was originally discovered in the 1930s. A pion is a type of meson — a category of particles made up of quarks and antiquarks; neutral pions travel between protons and neutrons and bind them together into atomic nuclei. Most proposals about dark matter assume it is made up of particles that don’t interact with each other much — they pass through each other, only gently touching. The name for such particles is weakly interacting Read More ›

Beware feathered dino fossils hoaxes

Says Cosmos Magazine here: National Geographic’s senior editor Christopher Sloan had seen a feathered dinosaur fossil or two. But the specimen he described in the magazine’s November 1999 issue, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, took his breath away. … Archaeoraptor would later be dubbed “Piltdown chicken”. Cut n’ paste job. But even smart folks have been taken in. The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. Rather than being excavated by palaeontologists on fossil digs, most of the region’s fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums. More. Gotta have one? Don’t pay more than you would for some other souvenir. How about a stuffed gotta-have-one toy dressed as Read More ›

Darwin can fix economics?

From New Scientist: Earlier this year, several dozen quiet radicals met in a boxy red building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, to plot just that. The stated aim of this Ernst Strüngmann Forum at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies was to create “a new synthesis for economics”. But the most zealous of the participants – an unlikely alliance of economists, anthropologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists – really do want to overthrow the old regime. They hope their ideas will mark the beginning of a new movement to rework economics using tools from more successful scientific disciplines. More. Every time this stuff has been tried, millions starved. Maybe, with new methods, they will transform it to billions. Biologist Peter Read More ›

Darwin on vax vs. anti-vax

In case anyone wondered … From Chapter 5 of Descent of Man, With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to Read More ›

Neanderthals are big, apparently

In medicine, some place. Keep in mind, unlike evolutionary psychology, medicine is a serious science. From Nature: Neanderthals had outsize effect on human biology Using de-identified genome data and medical records from 28,000 hospital patients, Simonti and Capra looked for differences in traits and medical diagnoses between people with a particular Neanderthal gene variant and those with the H. sapiens version of the same gene. They found that the Neanderthal variants seemed to slightly increase the risk of conditions such as osteoporosis, blood-coagulation disorders and nicotine addiction. Another analysis, which looked at the combined effects of many DNA variants, painted a more mixed picture. It revealed links between Neanderthal DNA and depression, obesity and certain skin disorders, with some variants Read More ›

Key prediction of Darwinian evolution falsified?

Kirk Durston writes Biological life requires thousands of different protein families, about 70% of which are ‘globular’ proteins, each with a 3-dimensional shape that is unique to each family of proteins. An example is shown in the picture at the top of this post. This 3D shape is necessary for a particular biological function and is determined by the sequence of the different amino acids that make up that protein. In other words, it is not biology that determines the shape, but physics. Sequences that produce stable, functional 3D structures are so rare that scientists today do not attempt to find them using random sequence libraries. Instead, they use information they have obtained from reverse-engineering biological proteins to intelligently design Read More ›

Origin of life: New model may explain emergence of self-replication on early Earth

From ScienceDaily: One question of the origin of life in particular remains problematic: what enabled the leap from a primordial soup of individual monomers to self-replicating polymer chains? A new model proposes a potential mechanism by which self-replication could have emerged. It posits that template-assisted ligation, the joining of two polymers by using a third, longer one as a template, could have enabled polymers to become self-replicating. More. Not again. Yawn. Isn’t this a point where we should be asking fundamentally different questions? For example: When Charles Darwin published his seminal On the Origin of the Species in 1859, he said little about the emergence of life itself, possibly because, at the time, there was no way to test such Read More ›

New forms of life found on Earth, none elsewhere?

Really small bacteria. From Quanta Magazine: At Tiny Scales, a Giant Burst on Tree of Life DNA sequencing is at the heart of this current study, though the researchers’ success also owes a debt to more basic technology. The team gathered water samples from a research site on the Colorado River near the town of Rifle, Colo. Before doing any sequencing, they passed the water through a pair of increasingly fine filters — with pores 0.2 and 0.1 microns wide — and then analyzed the cells captured by the filters. At this point they already had undiscovered life on their hands, for the simple reason that scientists had not thought to look on such a tiny scale before. “Most people Read More ›

Ancient lizards amaze scientists? But why?

Shouldn’t we be used to this “no change in 20 million years” stuff by now? Here: A community of lizards from the Caribbean, preserved for 20 million years in amber, have been found to be identical to their modern cousins, say researchers. … “Most of ours had full skeletons, and details of the skin were impressed on the amber, providing very detailed images of tiny scales on the body and on the sticky toe pads,” she adds. More. What if we just changed our default assumption? Change doesn’t usually or randomly happen. Most of the time it doesn’t happen at all. And when it does happen, Darwinblather doesn’t explain it. Who knows, a science could come out of all this. Read More ›

Progressives, Fascism, and the Will to Power

So-called progressives are feeling pretty cocky nowadays, which is not surprising after they achieved a decisive victory on one of their key policy goals when the United States Supreme Court mandated that every state must adjust its laws to pretend that people of the same sex can marry one another.  Of course, it is the case and will always be the case that a man cannot marry another man any more than he can marry his left shoe.  Marriage is not an infinitely malleable concept; it has an irreducible essence, and that essence is defined by the mutually complementary design of male and female bodies.  Now the Supreme Court tells us we must, insofar as our civil laws are concerned, Read More ›

You know ID is winning when …

Big Darwin hollers are fronting money all over the world against it: Templeton Foundation gives almost US$ 2 million to a Brazilian anti-ID group: Really? Will the group now employ local “Jesus Hollers Against Design” types? Maybe Pos-Darwinista can tell us. See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible? Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista Follow UD News at Twitter!

Finally, a book on the ID debate that addresses actual issues

From David Snoke’s review at the Christian Scientific Society of Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0: Breaking the DeadlockBetween Darwin and Design Perry Marshall is a well known, successful expert on internet marketing, and his career has included developing new algorithms and paradigms in business and market analysis. For several years, he has been involved in online discussions about intelligent design and evolution. He has now come out with a book giving a comprehensive presentation of his views. The book will be quite useful as an introduction to the debate, especially for those who are not experts in biology. His writing style is easy to read and to the point. Here are some of the things I like about the book: 1) Read More ›