From Business Insider: Director of the Hayden Planetarium and StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson recently appeared on “The Nightly Show” with Larry Wilmore for a discussion with Pastor Carl Lentz about god and intelligent design. “I think of, like, the human body, and I look at what’s going on between our legs,” Tyson said. “There’s like a sewage system and entertainment complex intermingling. No engineer of any intelligence would have designed it that way.” So the way input/output in a forward-moving body works, how would Tyson have designed it? Astrophysicist Tyson not only isn’t a biologist; what’s much more relevant these days is that he isn’t much of an engineer. He is used to thinking about the problems as Read More ›

Larry Moran is desperate.  He said I do not understand Darwinism.  I called him out and challenged him to demonstrate his claim.  He has now put up two posts in response, and they both fail miserably. In the first post he flails about over the term “Darwinism” and says I mistakenly equate that term with “Neo-Darwinism” and the “Modern Synthesis.”  As evidence of my confusion he points to the UD glossary.  But that very glossary entry states that on this site we use the term “Darwinism” as shorthand for Neo-Darwinism or the modern synthesis, and then goes on to define those terms. Note that Larry does not say UD’s definition of Neo-Darwinism or the modern synthesis is wrong.*  He says Read More ›

M. Anthony Mills tells us at RealClearScience that “Science Is Neither ‘Settled’ Nor ‘Skeptical’”: The problem is that science is both dogmatic and skeptical—or rather, neither fully dogmatic nor fully skeptical—a bewildering characteristic that allows science to advance. But the disfiguring lenses of popular journalism and political debate transform this healthy tension into an untenable disjunction. On the one hand, we are told: “The science is settled!” Question not. On the other: “Science is never settled!” Question all. Depending on the issue, say, climate change or GMOs, politicians and pundits on the left or right will opportunistically appeal to one or the other. Around here, we’ve noticed a lot of instances of dogmatic and few of skeptical. At least, if Read More ›

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry offers an example, using Larry Krauss as a springboard: Metaphysical claims are claims based on a certain type of logic — metaphysical logic. For example, the claim that a universe of finite causes cannot explain its own existence and so must find its source in some infinite ground of existence, an uncaused cause, is a logical claim, which can be debated using a specific set of logical tools, just like mathematical claims. Maybe it’s wrong. But it’s a logical claim, not a scientific claim. I point this out because, circling back to Krauss, this sort of confusion is endemic. Krauss in fact wrote a whole book-length non-sequitur about this: a book titled A Universe from Nothing, which became Read More ›

Here: But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In Making “Nature,” Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature’s story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of “scientific community.” Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist. “Changes in scientific communication” now include staying friends with the entire Twittersphere. See: Scientific American may be owned by Nature but it is now run by Twitter Follow UD News at Twitter!

They’re calling it Diogenes. Here: Research Integrity and Peer Review is an international, peer reviewed Open Access journal that encompasses all aspects of integrity in research publication, including peer review, study reporting, and research and publication ethics. Particular consideration is given to submissions that address current controversies and limitations in the field and offer potential solutions. Note: They are not calling it Diogenes. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Blogger Tim O’Neill, who has a Master of Arts degree in medieval literature and who describes himself as a “Wry, dry, rather sarcastic, eccentric, occasionally arrogant Irish-Australian atheist bastard,” has created a blog site dedicated to educating New Atheists about some basic facts of history. His latest article, Scientists and “Rationalists” Getting the Historical Jesus Completely Wrong, is a highly entertaining read. In his first blog article, Why “History for Atheists”?, O’Neill explains his motives for creating his new blog (green bolding mine – VJT): Does the world need yet another blog?  Perhaps not, but it seems I do.  Back in 2009 I began Armarium Magnum, focused on history book reviews; mostly of books on ancient and medieval history.  Occasionally I’ve Read More ›

Over at Sandwalk Larry Moran writes: Turn off your irony meters. Really … I’m not kidding. They will never survive if you leave them on and follow the link to this post by Barry Arrington onUncommon Descent. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! You Should Know the Basics of a Theory Before You Attack It The answer, of course, is “nothing.” Having studied Darwinism for over 20 years, I can tell you what it posits. Therefore, when I attack it, I am attacking the actual thing, not some distortion of the thing that exists nowhere but my own mind.     OK, Larry.  I assume you mean to say that I do not understand the basics of Darwinism.  I challenge Read More ›

From Nautilus: As nature scales, complexity gives way to universal law. Why shouldn’t an ecosystem be just as beautifully perfect as an ideal gas, and why can’t ecologists have as much predicting power as a physicist? The answers to these questions just might be “it is,” and “they can.” But only when viewed from a particular perspective. … When we plotted average evolutionary distance against species number, we found the power law lurking in yet another dimension of ecology: The distance increased rapidly at first, then began to slow in the same manner as the species-area curve.3 The reasons for this behavior are not clear at the moment. One possibility is that both spatial and temporal scaling behaviors are affected Read More ›

A friend wonders how SETI would know if a signal comes from an intelligent source. Can’t nature just produce intelligence via natural selection acting on random mutations? Well, don’t they use the same criteria for detecting intelligence as ID? From SETI@home, criteria such as narrow-band, pulsed radio patterns, that intelligent intention easily explains but natural causes would not: If our stellar friends are trying to put actual information on their signal (very likely), the signal will almost certainly be pulsed. We’ll be looking for this too. He also found us this, from Evolution News & Views, answering a reader’s query about “methodological naturalism”*: Epistemology — how we know — and ontology — what exists — are both affected by methodological Read More ›

The commenter who goes by the name Carpathian has been posting on this site for a long time.  Yet today he writes: Since the ID designer pre-dates life, he cannot be alive . . . *Sigh*  Carpathian, why does it seem to satisfy you so much to erect a distorted caricature of the ID position and knock it down?  If you are so certain you are correct and that ID is wrong, why don’t you attack what ID actually posits? I believe the Darwinian account of origins is wrong.  But what have I accomplished if I spout off some nonsense that Darwinism does not actually posit, refute it, and then say, “thus I have proven Darwinism wrong”? The answer, of Read More ›

By hybridization, if at all. Here: Interbreeding between animal species usually leads to offspring less vigorous than either parent—if they survive at all. But the combination of wolf, coyote and dog DNA that resulted from this reproductive necessity generated an exception. The consequence has been booming numbers of an extraordinarily fit new animal (see picture) spreading through the eastern part of North America. Some call this creature the eastern coyote. Others, though, have dubbed it the “coywolf”. Whatever name it goes by, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, reckons it now numbers in the millions. This has been going on for thousands of years. The different groups, wolves, dogs, and coyotes, each have differing advantages that usually Read More ›

There’s been a lot of ink lately around mass extinctions (maybe it’s the upcoming climate talks?) Further to the recent call for a rethink of the mass extinction 250 million years ago and the hypothesis that they happen regularly due to catastrophic extraterrestrial events, we now encounter researchers who think that most of them wree caused by mineral deficiencies. From New Scientist: A new theory suggests most of Earth’s mass extinction events could have been caused by a lack of essential trace elements in the world’s oceans, causing fatal deficiencies in marine animals, from plankton to reptiles. “It’s a complex scenario,” says John Long from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He says there are probably a lot of causes conspiring Read More ›

From World News Daily: While none of the three Nobel Prize recipients nor the Nobel Committee credits intelligent design, the fruitful results of investigating molecular mechanisms from an inference of design over an assumption of random mutation and natural selection is inescapable. The Discovery Institute minimizes the need to use the phrase “intelligent design” to see it at work: “Nor is it necessary to know the personal beliefs of the Nobel laureates. They made a design inference; that’s what counts. Quality control, information monitoring, error correction systems—these are phrases rich with design concepts.” Well, if they had credited design, they just wouldn’t have won the prize, right? Wouldn’t matter if they saved millions of lives. (They may not believe it Read More ›

Following hard on: Alternate parallel universe found. Maybe, we learn from New Scientist: Light given off by hydrogen shortly after the big bang has left some unexplained bright patches in space. Are they evidence of bumping into another universe? Well, of course. What else could they be? This is New Scientist’s take on the Chary thesis above: Once it starts, inflation never quite stops, so a multitude of universes becomes nearly inevitable. “I would say most versions of inflation in fact lead to eternal inflation, producing a number of pocket universes,” says Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an architect of the theory. Energy hidden in empty space drives inflation, and the amount that’s around could vary from place Read More ›