2015

I was reading an exchange of emails that took place between noted physcist (and skeptical warmer) Freeman Dyson and his interlocutor, Steve Conner, of the Independent of London. To my eye, Dyson is spot on in his critical thinking. But what most caught my eye was his analysis between the ‘experts’ and the general public that seems to have occurred. I think it serves as a good understanding of where Darwinism/neo-Darwinism now stands in academia. When I was in high-school in England in the 1930s, we learned that continents had been drifting according to the evidence collected by Wegener. It was a great mystery to understand how this happened, but not much doubt that it happened. So it came as Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has responded to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s recent article arguing that materialism cannot account for our ability to form abstract concepts, such as the concept of “good” (Free Will is Real and Materialism is Wrong, Evolution News and Views, January 15, 2015). As Professor Egnor puts it: Intellect and will are immaterial powers, and obviously so. Here’s why. Let us imagine, as a counterfactual, that the intellect is a material power of the mind. As such, the judgment that a course of action is good, which is the basis on which an act of the will would be done, would entail “Good” having a material representation in the brain. But how exactly Read More ›

Sorry if this post is a bit for computer programmers, anyway I trust that also the others can grasp the overall picture. Evolutionists claim that what it takes to evolution to work is simply “a populations of replicators, random variations on them, and a competition for survival or resources”. Today we will try to partially layout how to simulate on computer such process. First off, we need the replicators, i.e. digital programs able to self-reproduce. In informatics jargon, a computer program able to self-reproduce, i.e. to produce as output a copy of its source code is called a “quine”. Therefore in a sense a quine is a little, minimal digital “bio-cell”. You can write the code of a quine in Read More ›

Those who doubt global warming alarmism sometimes point to the global cooling alarmism of the 70s.  The idea is that alarmists will latch onto whatever happens to be at hand to clang their bell, cooling then, warming in the 90s; explaining away the plateau now. Mark Frank has made the risible assertion that  “the global cooling thing was a non-event” in the 70s.  StephenB has offered Mark a service by setting him straight:* 1970 – Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age – Scientists See Ice Age In the Future (The Washington Post, January 11, 1970) 1970 – Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself? (L.A. Times, January 15, 1970) 1970 – New Ice Age May Descend Read More ›