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 […]
Month: July 2015
Another Climate Alarmist Shibboleth Debunked
This time it is the “97% of scientists agree” lie. See here. Which, once again, leads to the question: If the science is so solid, why do they constantly lie?
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]