Butt heads like deer? Further to Oldest animal sperm to date, from ScienceDaily: “It is incredible to think that features found in deer such as the water deer, musk deer and muntjacs today were already represented 270 million years ago,” says Cisneros. The researchers found the Tiarajudens’ marginal teeth are also located in a bone from the palate called epipterygoid. “This is an extraordinary condition as no other animal in the lineage leading to mammals show marginal dentition in a bone from the palate,” says Abdala. In another group of mammal fossil relatives, dinocephalians — that lived at the same time as anomodonts, some of the bones in their foreheads were massively thickened. This can be interpreted as being used Read More ›

From 50 million years ago. Found in Antarctica inside a fossilized worm cocoon. From Nature: The researchers do not know what kind of worm left the sperm. Scanning electron microscope images show helical structures resembling drill-bits and beaded tails, which are characteristic of sperm produced by crayfish worms, leech-like creatures that live on freshwater lobsters. But these animals are found only in the Northern Hemisphere, so it would be surprising if they had existed in Antarctica 50 million years ago, Bomfleur says. “It could be an extinct relative with similar types of sperm.” There will be no extractable DNA left in the sperm fragments, Bomfleur adds, because the chemical make-up of the organic material would have changed from its original Read More ›

Anyone remember Stapel?: Some readers will recall the case of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, former dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, who was publicly exposed in 2011 for faking his data in several dozen published papers about human behavior that had made him famous – and who, after being caught, decided to publish a book about his con, detailing how and why he’d done it. Uncommon Descent ran a story about the case (see here), and another story about how it was exposed (see here), while James Barham discussed it at further length over on his blog, TheBestSchools.org, in an article entitled, More Scientists Behaving Badly. A story about the case appeared in Read More ›

U Chicago News obit: University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, SB’53, an innovative authority on evolution and mass extinctions, died of pneumonia July 9 in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. He was 82. Raup’s former students and colleagues uniformly praised his unique creativity along with his astute capabilities as an academic adviser, senior colleague and paleontological statesman. They remember him for the sweeping scope of the questions he asked, his analytical and quantitative rigor, and his skepticism and humility. “David Raup ushered in a renaissance in paleontology,” said Raup’s former student and colleague Charles Marshall, SM’86, PhD’89, director of the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Before Dave, much of the discipline was centered Read More ›

Huffington Post interview with Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus: One of Peter Saunders’ principal research interests is explaining the properties of complex nonlinear systems, and he’s long been a critic of the Modern Synthesis. But Saunders, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at King’s College London, thinks that at least some of the current angst in the neo-Darwinist camp in response to challenges regarding its theory of evolution simply has to do with confusion over the term “epigenetics.” A paper on epigenetics that Saunders and his wife, geneticist Mae-Wan Ho co-authored decades ago was cited earlier this year by Denis Noble as inspiring, in part, his JEB paper about replacing the Modern Synthesis. I reached Peter Saunders recently Read More ›

A friend writes re a 2014 Johns Hopkins book, Creationism in Europe, “It’s nice to know you’re wanted:” For decades, the creationist movement was primarily fixed in the United States. Then, in the 1970s, American creationists found their ideas welcomed abroad, first in Australia and New Zealand, then in Korea, India, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere—including Europe, where creationism plays an expanding role in public debates about science policy and school curricula. In this, the first comprehensive history of creationism in Europe, leading historians, philosophers, and scientists narrate the rise of—and response to—scientific creationism, creation science, intelligent design, and organized anti-evolutionism in countries and religions throughout Europe. The book provides a unique map of creationism in Europe, plotting the surprising Read More ›

So says the New Horizons flyby: A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100 million years ago — mere youngsters in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about one percent of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today. “This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,” said Jeff Moore of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Unlike Read More ›

In the age of on-line entertainment and instant information it was, perhaps, possible to live without knowing about the carnage going on around us, but the video of evolutionist Deborah Nucatola casually and callously explaining the crushing of innocent babies and harvesting their young bodies leaves us forever without excuse. Between gulps of red wine and bites of salad we learn that “a lot of people want liver” and that “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver …” We are also told how to play games with the law so the harvesting of human body parts can proceed efficiently:  Read more

… here, I (O’Leary for News) would have just hit Delete except for one thing: I’d heard from the Dark Enlightenment* before when they were promoting science writer Nicholas Wade’s apparent defense of Darwinian evolution-based racial theories in Troublesome Inheritance Well, their latest is The cuckservative is often fanatically in favor of transracial adoption. He sees it as some divine calling. In a sense, this is cuckoldry at its essence, since these whites are usually forgoing their own inclusive fitness to adopt someone from another race. As Heartiste notes, they’re race-cucking their own families. Although the cuckservative is eager to show his PC bona fides by openness to other races, he really doesn’t want to know about other races. Human biodiversity Read More ›

Evolutionary thought’s insistence that the world arose spontaneously is our modern-day version of Epicureanism. The idea was then, and continues to be today, motivated by metaphysics, not science. From a scientific perspective the idea is clearly false. That was understood by philosophers of antiquity, but it is understood all the more clearly today. Simply put, modern science has demolished Epicureanism. But ideas die hard, especially ideas that are driven by metaphysical ideas we believe must be true. Overturning Epicureanism and modern day evolutionary thought requires overturning the foundational metaphysics—and that is much more difficult than solving a scientific problem. And so in spite of the science, evolution continues to be a very popular and influential idea. In fact evolution has Read More ›

From Science: The human hand is a marvel of dexterity. It can thread a needle, coax intricate melodies from the keys of a piano, and create lasting works of art with a pen or a paintbrush. Many scientists have assumed that our hands evolved their distinctive proportions over millions of years of recent evolution. But a new study suggests a radically different conclusion: Some aspects of the human hand are actually anatomically primitive—more so even than that of many other apes, including our evolutionary cousin the chimpanzee. The findings have important implications for the origins of human toolmaking, as well as for what the ancestor of both humans and chimps might have looked like. More. Funny that. I remember meeting Read More ›

New Scientist advises, “Bonobos use a range of tools like stone-age humans.” Indeed, they “demonstrate caveman skills.” The study shows that bonobos are capable of a wide range of tool use that puts them at least on a par with chimps, says Roffman. Their foraging techniques resemble those used by the earliest Stone-Age humans of the Oldowan culture. “When you give them the raw materials, they use them in correct and context-specific strategies,” Roffman says. However, captive bonobos, unlike their wild cousins, have plenty of time to experiment, says Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France. The captive animals’ actions may bear little resemblance to what happens in the wild. Still, says d’Errico, it shows the potential is Read More ›

Says new BBC feature: We once viewed ourselves as the only creatures with emotions, morality, and culture. But the more we investigate the animal kingdom, the more we discover that is simply not true. Many scientists are now convinced that all these traits, once considered the hallmarks of humanity, are also found in animals. If they are right, our species is not as unique as we like to think. In a rare, special tribute to common-sense, Brit Tax TV offers a look at the counter-argument as well. Not an especially insightful one. Which is probably what they wanted. But there is really no argument. It apparently never occurs to the people who write this sort of thing that, were it Read More ›

Ken Miller is a feted Catholic scientist, friend of Darwinism, and foe of design in nature: From his 1994 textbook: Hundreds of pseudogenes have been discovered in the 1 or 2% of human DNA that has been explored to date, and more are added every month. In fact, the human genome is littered with pseudogenes, gene fragments, “orphaned” genes, “junk” DNA, and so many repeated copies of pointless DNA sequences that it cannot be attributed to anything that resembles intelligent design. If the DNA of a human being or any other organism resembled a carefully constructed computer program, with neatly arranged and logically structured modules each written to fulfill a specific function, the evidence of intelligent design would be overwhelming. Read More ›

That guy who was almost lynched by Darwin’s “punks, bullies, and hangers-on” for (… well, did he like some book by Steve Meyer or was he maybe just behind in his protection money? Honestly, even we can’t keep up any more.) Apparently, it wasn’t career suicide. Which could testify either to his durability or the waning of the power of the punks, bullies, and hangers on, or both. Anyway, This from The Hedgehog: The philosopher Thomas Nagel drew popular attention to the Hard Problem four decades ago in an influential essay titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Frustrated with the “recent wave of reductionist euphoria,”1 Nagel challenged the reductive conception of mind—the idea that consciousness resides as Read More ›