2015

It has just got to be a Coffee!! Post at Uncommon Descent. Courtesy New Scientist, we learn: Semen has controlling power over female genes and behaviour It’s not clear whether any components of human semen get into the bloodstream, but it could be possible, particularly for small molecules like hormones, says Robertson. She has shown that seminal fluid induces expression of a range of genes in the cervix, including ones that affect the immune system, ovulation, the receptivity of the uterus lining to an embryo, and even the growth of the embryo itself. … Whatever the mechanism, both Chapman and Robertson say it’s plausible that semen could have effects on women well beyond their reproductive tract. More Zillions of guys worldwide Read More ›

Deborah Haarsma was professor and chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College and is currently the President of BioLogos. Both of these Christian organizations promote evolutionary theory (Calvin statement, BioLogos statement). That is not surprising since evolution derives, at least in modern times, from theologians and philosophers in the church. To be sure, evolutionary thinking is obvious in ancient Epicureanism, but its resurgence in the seventeenth century was almost exclusively the work of Christian thinkers. Descartes, Malebranche, Cudworth, Ray, Burnett, Leibniz and Wolfe are good examples of how widespread was the movement within Christian thought, and of how varied were the arguments for a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. These Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans agreed that Read More ›

How academia resembles a drug gang: In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics. The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated $3.30 as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why Read More ›

Further to: A prof has resigned from Bethel College. Can’t affirm Adam created directly by God: This from (formerly Bethel’s, currently BioLogos’) Jim Stump’s review of An Introduction to Design Arguments, by Virginia Tech’s Benjamin C. Jantzen: in a magazine for churches no one goes to any more (As if anyone cares*). Anyway, here: The idea of irreducible complexity has had remarkable intuitive staying power among ID followers, but when the intuition is converted into an argument, it has considerably less persuasive force. First, almost all biologists think Behe is wrong about the specific examples of structures that he says are unexplainable by evolution. But most people’s intuition is guided by a caricature of how evolution works. They think that each Read More ›

At the Daily Beast, Karl Giberson tells us, In a story becoming all too familiar, another pro-evolution faculty member has been forced to leave his evangelical institution. Jim Stump, longtime professor of philosophy, productive scholar, and popular, award-winning teacher at Bethel College in Indiana, resigned his position in June because of pressures put on the college by its sponsoring denomination, the Missionary Church. The issue, once again, was evolution. Most members of the Missionary Church reject Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of a literal interpretation of the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But many faculty members at Bethel College accept evolution and consider it part of their “teaching ministry” to help their students do the same, within the Read More ›

Regular readers will of course be familiar with Vincent Torley’s insightful posts. It is a pleasure to report that he has made three lists of his 380 articles: one ordered by date, one indexed by subject, and one indexed by subject’s name. Make your writing assignments fun! Okay, okay, can we settle for better and faster?

We wouldn’t have believed it possible. Trust a celebrated Darwinian atheist to bring it off. And so now here (Huffpo): Outspoken atheist writer Richard Dawkins took to Twitter this week to air concerns about the status of women in Islam. Needless to say, his unsolicited advice to a religion of 1.6 billion people didn’t sit well with many. It shouldn’t sit well. The status of women in Islamic regions is a disgrace in the eyes of the world and everyone knows it, including all decent Muslims. So why do we need an outspoken atheist to point it out? Dawkins pointed to child marriage, female genital mutilation and other atrocities in some countries as evidence of Islam’s inherent bias against women. Read More ›

Here: Nasa scientists have announced the discovery of Kepler 452b, also known as ‘Earth 2.0’, an earth-like planet in our galaxy. Over the course of years of data-gathering by the Kepler space telescope and even more analysis and work here on Earth, scientists confirmed the existence of the distant exoplanet, which is the most earth-like planet ever discovered. Although the planet is far too far away to photograph, advanced Nasa technology means we know a surprising amount about this ‘New Earth’. Earlier this year, there were eight of them. We shall see. The new planet is slightly larger than Earth, and is estimated to have twice the gravitational pull of our own planet. However, according to the scientists on the Read More ›

From their earliest cinematic appearance in Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902, our conception of life beyond Earth has changed to reflect our hopes and fears, the technology we’ve mastered, and our growing knowledge of the universe. Watch our depictions of extraterrestrial life change over nearly 100 films and 112 years. Good chance the vid below is as good as it’ll get re space aliens. Follow UD News at Twitter! B

One of the standard defenses of evolution—the Epicurean idea that the world arose spontaneously—is that science is a self-correcting, feedback process and, as such, will always lead to the truth. This is such an ignorant claim it is difficult to know where to begin in rebutting it. First of all, at its best science is a process that takes as input a set of observations and produces as output some generalizations, sometimes called models or hypotheses or theories or laws, about how nature works. A scientist might observe the planetary motions in the sky and hypothesize that the planets travel in elliptical orbits about the Sun. Or a scientist might observe the movement of objects and theorize that the product Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain’s unique abilities has been around for decades. But a paper published1 in Current Biology, which directly compares activity in human and macaque monkey brains as they listen to simple auditory patterns, provides the first physical evidence that a specific area for such integration may exist in humans. Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists. “This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we Read More ›

Here. The life forms are not abundant, and their metabolisms run at very low levels. Still, they are alive and well, surviving on powdered coal and hydrogen and pumping out methane, the signature molecule leftover by life in extreme environments. They belong to the less commonly known domain of life called Archaea, home also to the extremophiles living in volcanic hot springs and deep sea hydrothermal vents. “They’re kind of just really cool bugs,” Huber said. “They are very successful organisms.” There are still a number of questions left to answer. Have these new microbes changed over the course of time? Have they adapted or branched off into new species? Or have they always been the same critter just barely Read More ›

Small pre-Cambrian oxygen jump in atmosphere helped enable animals take first breaths Not big ones? Can someone just make a list of pop science media assumptions? Would save trouble. Maybe we could mechanize it. Here is one: We must always be looking for a “small” event that kickstarted life or some advance in life. ScienceDaily: If oxygen was a driver of the early evolution of animals, only a slight bump in oxygen levels facilitated it, according to a multi-institutional research team that includes a Virginia Tech geoscientist. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, calls into question the long held theory that a dramatic change in oxygen levels might have been responsible for the appearance of complicated life forms like Read More ›

Carpathian, sadly but predictably, in the face of remonstrance has continued his attempts to support ghettoising, stigmatising and silencing the voice of the Christian in public; making himself a poster-child of a clear and present danger to liberty in our time. For example: >>Religious activities should all be private. Any prospects for religious conversion should be invited to listen to the message from that faith but the message itself should be a private affair. There are parents who may not want their children exposed to certain religions or religious teachings and that barrier to religion should be considered a fundamental right and honored by all faiths.>> Of course, conveniently (by redefining faith into an imagined projected blind fideism) such implicitly Read More ›

Here. John Horgan is one of the most colorful and thought-provoking science writers of the last several decades. He defies pigeonholing and enjoys challenging conventional wisdom. In the best Socratic tradition, he has been a gadfly to the scientific community, constantly urging it to be more self-reflective and to strive for sober understanding of the scientific enterprise—its prospects, possibilities, and pitfalls. Excerpt. John Horgan: I still stand by the thesis of The End of Science, that the era of truly monumental, paradigmatic discoveries has ended. In fact, the argument seems even more compelling today than it did 20 years ago when the book was first published. My guess is that some of the great remaining mysteries—How, exactly, did the universe Read More ›