2015

Further to: Life continues to ignore what evolution experts say (Hmm. Maybe the experts should just fire all the current life forms and get themselves different ones?): The other week, I was buying a sack of dry cat food at the feed mill. At the checkout, I noticed a really, really big cat sitting on the counter. He was about three times as big as a typical Ottawa kitty. Could stand up to a police dog. A helpful individual explained to me that he is the only registered Savannah cat in the area. The Savannah is a hybrid of the African serval and the European shorthair— our local rescue kitties). I was also told not to worry about him: He Read More ›

Evidence here: — Hybridization We’ve already seen that cross-breeding blind cavefish from different caves can restore devolved sight in at least some offspring (because the mutations that result in loss of sight differ from group to group, and some hybrids end up with all the necessary equipment). But natural hybridization can produce such changes too. Characteristics that are not evidenced in a given generation may remain as potentials. Ferns separated 60 million years have interbred. The wolf and dog populations of North America are so heavily hybridized that it is a challenge to make sense of them at all in the face of “all the contradictory claims.” Researchers have also identified at least three potential hybridization events (interspecific mating) in Read More ›

And why does he think he can break the mold of Christian notables puffing Darwin? The exploded but still tax-funded theories* of naturalist atheists? Dunno but get this: One of the biggest problems for neo-Darwinists is the origin of complex structures that appear suddenly in nature or the fossil record. My friend Dr. Stephen Meyer talks about this in his wonderful book, “Darwin’s Doubt.” He points out how, in the so-called “Cambrian Explosion,” the majority of animal phyla on earth appeared suddenly, and without obvious ancestry—almost as if they “exploded” onto the scene out of nowhere. Oh, so we’re allowed to know that now? As opposed to: Christians for Darwin will actually review Darwin’s Doubt, if anyone cares. Of course, Read More ›

What? From The Conversation: The universes predicted by string theory and inflation live in the same physical space (unlike the many universes of quantum mechanics which live in a mathematical space), they can overlap or collide. Indeed, they inevitably must collide, leaving possible signatures in the cosmic sky which we can try to search for. The exact details of the signatures depends intimately on the models – ranging from cold or hot spots in the cosmic microwave background to anomalous voids in the distribution of galaxies. Nevertheless, since collisions with other universes must occur in a particular direction, a general expectation is that any signatures will break the uniformity of our observable universe. These signatures are actively being pursued by Read More ›

Sean Samis is one of our most inveterate opponents here at UD.  It is gratifying, therefore, to lean that he has no use for all of those ID opponents who say that ID theory is invalid because it does not identify the designer.  Sean’s exact words: There’s no problem here. If scientists investigating phenomena X theorize that and as-yet unverified cause Y explains X, then all scientists need to do is to verify (or falsify) Y. The question of Y’s cause or origin will eventually need to be investigated, but if Y can be empirically confirmed then that is enough. To be fair, Sean was speaking in the OOL context, but I’m sure he will agree that the principle is Read More ›

Along with anyone who buys into it. Someone brown-bagged me the Canadian Christians in Science publication, Perspectives’s review of William Dembski’s Being as Communion. That took me back a ways. To the days when I used to listen to those clever people, and their immense betrayal of basic principles: Like it matters whether human beings can think or not. This is what it seems like: They wanted jobs in a system run by materialist atheists. And meeting the system most of the way was the only way to get them. That was their right. Christians for Darwin are mostly decent people, but have no idea that they do not need to grovel anymore. Raise your heads. To say nothing of Read More ›

As has come up as pivotal in recent discussions here at UD, we must recognise that logic and first principles underlie any serious discussion, including origins science, and in sciences  — especially those addressing origins — the issue of chains of cause will be pivotal. The two are connected, as can be seen by first examining chains of warrant: Now, Peter D. Klein, in the Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, highlights: The epistemic regress problem is considered the most crucial in the entire theory of knowledge and it is a major concern for many contemporary epistemologists. However, only two of the three alternative solutions have been developed in any detail, foundationalism and coherentism. Infinitism was not seriously considered as a solution Read More ›

Discussion here. Kicked off here: Well, this has been an interesting discussion! Much thanks to BA77 for useful background info. Recommended. Some respondents also attempted to interject the claim that ID does not have a valid research program (RDFish?) First, whether any intellectual enterprise has a “valid” research program isn’t a reasonable question unless the public is being asked to buy in (public funding, legislation, curricula, etc.). Private parties should be free to spend their money on any not-obviously criminal enterprise they wish. Is it valid to spend (waste?) money on the search for ET? Origin of life? In the absence of useful answers, that must remain an open question. My own view (O’Leary for News) favors spending a certain Read More ›

Darwinian evolution is not a valid research program I do not have a cat entered in the fight, so I don’t really care that much. But look at this post, and the ensuing comments, and ask yourself, why should any of Darwin’s followers’ rubbish be publicly funded? If you were an investor, would you invest? Note: Your money, not the government’s (= other people’s) Follow UD News at Twitter!

In two comments attached to his latest post over at Sandwalk, Professor Larry Moran argues that even a very unlikely naturalistic scenario would be a better explanation of irreducible complexity than a vague Intelligent Design hypothesis. Taken to its logical conclusion, Moran’s argument implies a paradoxical result (which I’ll refer to as Torley’s paradox): that for any specified pattern which we find in Nature, no matter how complex it may turn out to be, any naturalistic explanation of that pattern which appeals to specific processes – even astronomically unlikely ones – will always be superior to an explanation which invokes Intelligent Design in purely general terms (“Some intelligent being produced this pattern”). As we’ll see, the reason why Moran’s argument Read More ›

If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask. (As the rest of us face the road ahead. Yes, it is all as out of touch as it sounds.) Meanwhile: BEACON Researchers at Work: The Origin of a Species? [D]espite all the fantastic work done since Darwin’s day, speciation is still mysterious. Speciation is complex, multifaceted, tricky to study, and, most importantly, hard to “catch in the act.” It would help if we had a model system in which we could study speciation in fine detail as it occurs, examine and manipulate the processes involved, and to do so over a humanly reasonable time scale. More. In short, no one knows. But courts and governments demand public funding for Read More ›

In his The Evolution Revolution, Lee Spetner has collected a number of Dawkins squawks in favour of natural selection (the fittest at any given time survive) as a mystical explanation for everything that happens on the only planet we know of that has life, for sure: One cannot honestly say evolution in the sense of Common Descent is a scientific theory, despite the Darwinists’ hyperbolic statements about evolution — the kinds of statements no scientist would think of making in another field. RichardDawkins wrote about evolution (Dawkins 2009) It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur Read More ›

A friend kindly linked us to a Reason feature on the alternative medicine “racket:” Behind the dubious medical claims of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Deepak Chopra is a decades-long strategy to promote alternative medicine to the American public. Twenty-three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to investigate a wide variety of unconventional medical practices from around the world. Five-and-a-half billion dollars later, the NIH has found no cures for disease. But it has succeeded in bringing every kind of quackery—from faith healing to homeopathy—out of the shadows and into the heart of the American medical establishment. … The OAM’s stated mission was to investigate the medical value of alternative therapies. Despite its minuscule budget, its mandate was Read More ›

From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty: How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology? Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect. There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information. The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do. Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals. When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up. Let’s Read More ›

A series of articles by philosopher of biology James Barham on key new thinkers, collected together on his blog.: His first reflection concerns The gradual crumbling of the Darwinian consensus, and the rise of a new theoretical outlook in biology is one of the most significant but under-reported news stories of our time. It’s a scandal that science journalists have been so slow to pick up on this story. For, make no mistake about it, the story is huge. In science, they don’t come any bigger. Aw, in that case, the typical pom pom-wavings pop science writer would be the last to know. The story is this: The official explanation of the nature of living things—and therefore of human beings—that Read More ›