2015

The way it jump starts the government-tab business at good hotels. Your climate or mine may or may not be changing, but the hotel’s guests climate will improve a notch. 😉 Anyway, from New Scientist: The specific role of the climate shift in these events is unclear, but it would have changed what foods were available. Carbon isotope data from fossil hominid tooth enamel show that Paranthropus‘s diet was mostly derived from grasses, while the doomed Australopithecus almost exclusively ate plants that weren’t so well adapted to hot temperatures. Early Homo species seem to have eaten a mixture of grasses and non-grasses. Whenever one hears that the “specific role of [insert item] is unclear” and that it “would have” this Read More ›

Discussed as a design but believed, by dogma, not to be a design. From the Atlantic: Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters-As, Gs, Cs, and Ts-that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They are made of molecules. They are physical objects that take up space-a lot of space. Consider that the human genome is longer than the average human. It consists of around two meters of DNA, which must somehow fit into cells, whose nuclei are about 200,000 times narrower. So it folds. And it folds in such a way that any given stretch can be easily unfolded, so the genes within it can be read Read More ›

Entirely at random, or so the theory runs… From ScienceDaily: While study has long been conducted on vertebrates with sight-sensory systems involving a lens, retina and nervous system, new research reported by the University of Cincinnati and supported by the National Science Foundation is the first to examine how the complex eye system of an invertebrate – the Sunburst Diving Beetle – coordinates the development of its components. Despite the complexity of their eyes, including a bifocal lens, extremely rapid eye growth of the Sunburst Diving Beetle occurs during the transitions between larval stages. In addition, they temporarily go blind as the eye is quickly redeveloped. The findings by Shannon Werner, a recent University of Cincinnati master’s degree graduate in Read More ›

From New York Times: Stonehenge has captivated generation after generation. Archaeologists have over the years cataloged the rocks, divined meaning from their placement — lined up for midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset — and studied animal and human bones buried there. They have also long known about the other monuments — burial chambers, a 130-foot-tall mound of chalk known as Silbury Hill and many other circular structures. An aerial survey in 1925 revealed circles of timbers, now called Woodhenge, two miles from Stonehenge. … After the end of the grand construction phase of Stonehenge, around 2400 B.C., the monument was altered, but the era of megamonument building was over. “That’s basically when their world changed,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. New Read More ›

Remember anthropologist Jonathan Marks? Author of the recent Tales of the Ex-Apes, he took issue with evolutionary psychology in an op-ed recently, at some “Darwin the future” site, where he said “And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.” No, of course not. Darwinism is only science when it produces results Darwin followers can use. Most of the time, it’s just the racket they enforce on Science Street. It’s becoming entertaining to watch who, helplessly, just pays up. Usually, the toffs with taxpayers’ money to waste. Anyway, anthropologist Barbara J. King opines, That term – ex-apes – get emphasized in the book a Read More ›

A terrorist attack in progress, Sky News live feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg Heads up. END

Here’s the abstract: To unveil the still-elusive nature of metazoan replication origins, we identified them genome-wide and at unprecedented high-resolution in mouse ES cells. This allowed initiation sites (IS) and initiation zones (IZ) to be differentiated. We then characterized their genetic signatures and organization and integrated these data with 43 chromatin marks and factors. Our results reveal that replication origins can be grouped into three main classes with distinct organization, chromatin environment, and sequence motifs. Class 1 contains relatively isolated, low-efficiency origins that are poor in epigenetic marks and are enriched in an asymmetric AC repeat at the initiation site. Late origins are mainly found in this class. Class 2 origins are particularly rich in enhancer elements. Class 3 origins Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post Larry Moran writes: Craig Venter and his colleagues constructed a synthetic genome and inserted it into a cell. The DNA determined the structure and properties of the organism that grew and after many subsequent generations we have a new species that behaves exactly like it was supposed to based on the genes that the scientists built. Now Dr. Moran, suppose that new species escaped the lab and was captured by a researcher who had no idea about Venter’s work.  Suppose further that researcher concluded that the genome of the creature had been intelligently designed.  Would that researcher’s design inference be the true and best explanation of the creature’s genome’s provenance?    

Over at ENV David Klinghoffer highlights the fascism problem in the Democratic party:  The question posed [in the Rasmussen survey] was: “Should the government investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” . . . “In response, 27% of Democrats called for prosecuting global warming realists. (Remarkably, 11% of Republicans did, too.)” The modern progressive movement (which is housed largely in the Democratic party in the US) was planted in the soil of fascism, as Jonah Goldberg has ably demonstrated in his Liberal Fascism. It seems that the fascist impulse is never far from the center of Democratic politics. Yes, one in ten Republicans said the same thing, which just shows that some people are Read More ›

That doesn’t mean we will get somewhere; it means we could possibly get somewhere. From the Atlantic, on an OOL meeting in Japan: “To kick off the meeting, I’m going to do the only thing I can reasonably do, which is ask the dumbest scientific questions I can think of: Did life originate more than once 4 billion years ago? Do we know for sure that origins of life events aren’t happening today, on the Earth? If life’s origin was a process that took tens of millions of years, how can we hope to repeat that process in an experiment? And what do we even mean when we say that something is “alive”? Not only are these all good questions, Read More ›

My discussion with Larry Moran over the last few days ranged over several topics, including the current debate among neutral theory advocates like Dr. Moran, and those who believe natural selection remains the primary driving force.  The discussion put me in mind of a post I put up several months ago in which I said: Is there any “core” proposition on which all proponents of modern evolutionary theory agree. By “core” proposition, I do not mean basic facts of biology that pretty much everyone from YECs to Richard Dawkins agrees are true. I mean a proposition upon which the theory stands or falls, and, as I said above, sets it apart from other theories and accounts for its unique purported Read More ›

Neutral theory is a relative newcomer in evolution theory.  Nevertheless, prior to neutral theory proponents of materialist evolutionary theory still got red in the face, stamped their feet, and yelled that evolution is a “fact, fact, fact” as spittle flew from their lips. This highlights the fallacy of the “fact, fact, fact” mantra.  If neutral theory is true, then those who were shouting that their particular version of materialist evolutionary theory is a fact, fact, fact prior to neutral theory were wrong. In other words, when they chant that mantra materialist evolutionists want you to believe that their particular version of the mechanism driving evolution is a fact. But that is obviously false if that mechanism changes. Apples fall to Read More ›

  Biochemist Michael Denton has a new book in the works, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. His 1985 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis first brought before a general public the reasons Darwinism might not be the single greatest idea anyone ever had, which of course earned the agnostic biochemist (who did not doubt that evolution occurs) a mass of abuse from tenured Darwin drones and their then-exploding troll nursery. No surprise that; anyone who is focused on hegemony is not focused on evidence. In the thirty years that followed, masses of evidence supporting Denton’s doubt began to accumulate, and the trolls’ job has been to beat it back into the shadows. We can listen to some of them Read More ›

One of the challenges commonly met with in re-thinking origins science from a perspective open to design, is that the evolutionary materialist narrative is too often presented as fact (not explanation), and there is also a typical failure to recognise that materialist ideology cannot be properly imposed on science. Likewise, there is a pattern of failing to address the issue of the self-falsifying self-referential incoherence of such materialism. It is appropriate to highlight these issues through this basics series. In this case, we have a live case in point, here: GD, 173: >>There are some parts of evolutionary theory that are so well supported that they can be considered facts. Widespread (if not necessarily universal) common ancestry. Mutation, selection, and Read More ›

Mike1962 reminds me of this from Lewis: Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. CS Lewis, Miracles And that reminded me of Lee Smolin’s thesis in his book, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: 1) There is only one universe at a time. Our universe is not one of many worlds. It has no copy or complete model, even in mathematics. The current interest in multiverse cosmologies is based on fallacious reasoning. 2) Time is real, and indeed the only aspect of Read More ›