Monthly Archives: October 2015
Darwin, ID, and wiggling ears
| October 31, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
A classic in the state of pop science writing today, from Yahoo News: Un-intelligent Design: No Purpose for Vestigial Ear-Wiggling Reflex Around the human ear are tiny, weak muscles that once would have let evolutionary ancestors pivot their ears to and fro. Today, the muscles aren’t capable of moving much — but their reflex action […]
Writing Biosemiosis.org
| October 31, 2015 | Posted by Upright BiPed under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
In September of 2009 I started a new document on my computer entitled “A System of Symbols”, where I was going to write about the part of design theory that interested me the most – that is, the representations that are required for self-replication (von Neumann, Pattee). My goal was to inventory all the […]
Tyrannosaur lunch: Another tyrannosaur
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
‘Twas ever thus: A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some of the best evidence yet that tyrannosaurs were not shy about eating their own kind. … Serrated […]
Scientists urge focus on microbiome
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Cell biology, News |
Microbiome = the microbes that mostly run things on our planet and in our bodies. (Or so they say. We’re just the back office.) From Carl Zimmer at New York Times: In two papers published simultaneously in the journals Science and Nature, the scientists called for a government-led effort akin to the Brain Initiative, a […]
The Skeptical Zone asks: What is a code?
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design |
Over at the Skeptical Zone, Petrushka has written a post arguing that “DNA is a template, not a code.” In today’s post, I’d like to briefly review the reasons why we claim that the genetic code is a literal reality, not a metaphor, and explain exactly what a code is. But before I do that, […]
Will humans evolve fast enough to beat AI?
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, News |
From How We Get to Next: If, many decades from now, some form of rogue artificial intelligence does manage to follow the playbook of a thousand science-fiction narratives and enslave the human race, I suspect the last remaining historians will look back to an obscure computer science experiment conducted at the turn of this century […]
Cosmos publisher thinks we are galaxy’s most advanced species
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
Some people offer the 15 best reasons to think aliens are real. Others say, no. But it’s not even clear how we would recognize alien life. From Cosmos, Alan Finkel questions whether the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is worth the effort. Let’s say there is an intelligent civilisation on Kepler-452b and […]
Can randomness produce music?
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Information, Intelligent Design |
Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say, The Wall Street Journal had an article today (28 Oct.) on a game called Compose Yourself created by a cellist named Philip Sheppard “who is passionate about showing people that they are fundamentally musical, and he wants to make learning about music, and composing in particular, more […]
Shocka! Needless complexity in academic writing?
| October 30, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, Peer review |
Please tell us it’s not true. From the Atlantic: In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent. The research garnered him the Ig Nobel Prize in literature—a […]
Nuclear Membrane Not Just a Bubble
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by PaV under Cell biology, Genomics |
Phys.Org has a new summary about a new finding regarding heterochromatin repair in the nucleus which involves the nuclear membrane. In their discussion, they make some interesting points: Previously, the nuclear membrane was thought to be mostly just a protective bubble around the nuclear material, with pores acting as channels to transport molecules in and […]
Rosetta finds primordial oxygen on comet
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News, Origin Of Life |
Rosetta’s most surprising discovery so far. From Phys.org: Stunned scientists announced Wednesday the unexpected discovery of large quantities of oxygen on a comet which streaked past the Sun in August with a European spacecraft in tow. The find came as a “big surprise”, and challenges mainstream theories on the formation of our Solar System, said […]
Brain is just a computer … ?
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Mind, Neuroscience, News |
So most neuroscientists are wrong about the brain? From Nautilus: Here’s Why Most Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain From a computational point of view, directions and distances are just numbers. And numbers, rendered in binary form, are just bit strings. It’s a profound truth of computer science that there is no such thing as […]
Reactions to Scientific Method Is a Myth
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, Philosophy, Science |
In case you wondered what would happen when postmodernism gets science by the throat: Myth? Yes, as in here. Discover Magazine thought they should make it clear: Now for the good news. The scientific method is nothing but a piece of rhetoric. Granted, that may not appear to be good news at first, but it […]
Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters is now available from Amazon
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, News |
Here: Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible. About The Author Suzan Mazur is the […]
Thoughts re johnnyb’s comments on ID and common descent
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Here: The issue is that most people understand common descent entirely from a Darwinian perspective. That is, they assume that the notion of natural selection and gradualism follow along closely to the notion of common descent. However, there is nothing that logically ties these together, especially if you allow for design. In Darwinism, each feature […]
The Relationship Between ID and Common Descent
| October 29, 2015 | Posted by johnnyb under Darwinism, ID Foundations, Intelligent Design |
Since this has popped up a lot in the last few weeks, I wanted to repost an old post of mine describing the relationship between ID and Common Descent. I think it is pretty much as relevant now as when I originally posted it almost 6 years ago.
Discover Magazine: The Scientific Method is a Myth
| October 28, 2015 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Here. It’s probably best to get the bad news out of the way first. The so-called scientific method is a myth. That is not to say that scientists don’t do things that can be described and are unique to their fields of study. But to squeeze a diverse set of practices that span cultural anthropology, […]
Andean mummy shows evidence of antibiotic resistance?
| October 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
Here: When performing the autopsy on the mummy, the team got a few hints as to what might have caused her untimely death. … Chagas disease, apparently. But When the researchers got to the gut of the body, they took every precaution to prevent contamination. Here they found that the gut was dominated by Clostridium […]
Does evolution have a predictable future?
| October 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, News |
Darwinians must technically say no, as life is not about anything and does not progress to any purpose. But here are some predictions offered by Michael Ruse, Joseph Graves, Briana Pobiner, Stephen Stearns, and Chris Stringer: The scientists we spoke to uniformly withheld from making specific predictions, but they were all agreed that evolution hasn’t […]
From bellow to moo is now testable?
| October 28, 2015 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genomics, News |
From ScienceDaily: Ancient wild ox genome reveals complex cow ancestry The ancestry of domesticated cattle proves more complex than previously thought, reports a paper published in the open access journal Genome Biology. … The team of researchers discovered clear evidence of breeding between wild British aurochs and early domesticated cattle. David MacHugh, senior author on […]
