2015

From the BBC: Few people have saved more lives than Louis Pasteur. The vaccines he developed have protected millions. His insight that germs cause disease revolutionised healthcare. He found new ways to make our food safe to eat. Pasteur was the chemist who fundamentally changed our understanding of biology. By looking closely at the building blocks of life, he was at the forefront of a new branch of science: microbiology. Here, from a letter to an atheist: Science brings men nearer to God. Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work Read More ›

That is called cherrypicking patterns. A common argument against design in nature is that humans randomly evolved to see patterns where there are none. Many a Darwinian airhead advances such received wisdom at the usual bongfests. He can be fairly sure that few bong-ees are going to point out the obvious: We evolved to see patterns that are there, for our own best interests. We are sometimes mistaken, but disparaging the seeking of patterns supported by evidence is hardly a solution. Most often the patterns we see are there. Indeed, more people come to grief by not noticing than by noticing them. (“But I thought this would be an exception, you see…” or “But I never thought it would happen Read More ›

Is this a fair assessment? From City Journal: Shortly after the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was consecrated Pope Francis in 2013, news stories reported that the new pontiff wanted to build a stronger relationship between the Catholic Church and science—one that saw science not in opposition to, but compatible with, religious belief. Some months later, the pope declared that evolution and the Big Bang theory of creation are real and don’t conflict with belief in God. Now, in the wake of the pope’s encyclical on climate change and the environment, Laudato Si (or, Be Praised), the press has exulted in the pope’s apparent effort to find even more “common ground” with science. Nothing could be further from the truth. Read More ›

Celebrating Charles Darwin’s genius as the undetected and unsung father of modern science fiction. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Readers may remember Misshelver and her new man, who take it upon themselves to move design-related science books to the “religion” section, inconveniencing staff and customers alike. Well. At Barnes and Noble, where misshelving Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt is corporate policy (amid a continuing financial slump), a friend write to complain, I was at a Barnes & Noble in my neighborhood today and noticed that they are still shelving Meyer’s book in the Christian section of the store. It wouldn’t be so bad except when we consider all the ideological rubbish that inhabits the science section, turning it into some kind of naturalist fantasyland. Have a look at today’s Top 10 in evolution. At this point, when we are learning Read More ›

What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives, is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. C.S. Lewis The “it” to which Lewis was referring was evolution. Today, “it” could well be climate alarmists. According to this paper the climate alarmists are undermining science itself: Scientists don’t like this lèse majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind Read More ›

From Quanta Magazine: Several years ago, Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, even resurrected a 700-million-year-old protein from E. coli. Now, in a new twist on paleogenomics, Kacar has engineered that ancient protein into modern E. coli and tracked how the microbe adapted to it. The new approach, which Kacar presented yesterday at NASA’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago, provides a more integrated view of the mechanisms of evolution — for example, how a protein’s position in a broader network influences its rate of change or how protein networks evolve as a whole. They seem to have a mind of their own. Kacar then synthesized that gene and inserted it into E. coli in Read More ›

From Mars. According to a paywalled review in New York Review of Books: Today, driven by ongoing technological innovations, the exploration of the “nanoverse,” as the realm of the minuscule is often termed, continues to gather pace. One of the field’s greatest pioneers is Paul Falkowski, a biological oceanographer who has spent much of his scientific career working at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. His book Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable focuses on one of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century-that our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated “little engines” or nanomachines that carry out life’s vital functions. It is a work full of surprises, arguing for example that all of Read More ›

An interesting listicle features ten topics you’d think we’d know the answer to, but don’t. Here’s one: Here’s #8: Often when we are about to fall asleep, we experience a kind of a falling sensation which causes us to wake up with a start. It happens to almost everybody, and the sensation is known as a hypnic jerk. It also sometimes happens when you tilt the chair you’re sitting on too far—somehow you can sense when you’re about to fall, and you wake up with a hypnic jerk. We really have no idea what causes them or whether they serve any modern purpose, but science has come up with some interesting theories.One hypothesis suggests that our bodies developed this mechanism Read More ›

See here. It seems to me that that a news organization’s reputation for veracity is its most critical asset, without which it is literally nothing. And it is not as if there isn’t an oversupply of pretty boys who can read the news. It’s as if they don’t care that they are throwing away what little credibility they had left. Can someone please help me make sense of this seemingly senseless decision?

I have been spending the past few hours reading Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato si’, alongside a document called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (sympathetically reviewed here), which was written by a group of prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, many of whom are affiliated with a think-tank called The Breakthrough Institute. Both documents make for fascinating reading. I had expected the encyclical to be written in that very high-flown, profound but impenetrable style that some wags have dubbed “Vaticanese” – which is the main reason by most Catholics never read papal encyclicals: they just can’t get through them. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pope’s encyclical actually reads quite well. I Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s Chasing shadows: How long can we keep looking for dark matter?, curiously, New Scientist has been asking the same question: We’ve known we need dark matter since the 1930s, but still haven’t found it. The search can’t go on forever Even CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, our best and by far most expensive tool for finding it, has so far drawn a blank. How much longer can we keep looking? … Perhaps we have simply been looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps dark matter particles are very massive, rather than fairly light, as many assume. The first experiments are now under way to detect any such “superheavy” dark matter that might have been created when the universe Read More ›

Chicken Little must be on vacay. From New Scientist: While greater bleaching is undoubtedly on the list of things that are threatening coral reefs (see “Reefs at risk”), this is a rare instance of where the climate pudding may have been over-egged. New research is painting a very different portrait of corals, one that casts them in the light … [of buy a subscription] Over-egging the pudding is not rare, it is the usual practice in Acrockalypse Kitchens, Inc. Indeed, if there is truly a worldwide shortage of eggs, consider that source of overeggage first. Life forms that have lasted as long as corals (500 mya) probably have many built-in mechanisms for resisting unfavourable changes, as they must surely have Read More ›

From Jewish World Review: Jewish guilt’ may be inherited … “We certainly know that human experiences affect how our genes are expressed,” says Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who has performed epigenetic studies on Holocaust survivors. “But we don’t know for sure how this process works and how strong a contributor epigenetics really is compared to other things like genes.” Life experience capable of shaping perceptions and reactions even without touching DNA. In studies published over the past decade, Yehuda has found that children of Holocaust survivors have altered stress response systems and differences in methylation on the gene that regulates the number of Read More ›

Here: Science, Now Under Scrutiny Itself* The crimes and misdemeanors of science used to be handled mostly in-house, with a private word at the faculty club, barbed questions at a conference, maybe a quiet dismissal. On the rare occasion when a journal publicly retracted a study, it typically did so in a cryptic footnote. Few were the wiser; many retracted studies have been cited as legitimate evidence by others years after the fact. But that gentlemen’s world has all but evaporated, as a remarkable series of events last month demonstrated. In mid-May, after two graduate students raised questions about a widely reported study on how political canvassing affects opinions of same-sex marriage, editors at the journal Science, where the study Read More ›