Matzke’s a long-time commenter here, on behalf of the Darwin lobby. His posts may now reflect a different time zone. UD News received this message from LinkedIn: Nicholas Matzke is now Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow at The Australian National University More here. On the one hand, we collect site visits, and he helps provide them. On the other hand, they better keep an eye on their library at U Down There. He may find Wrong Thoughts. See also: Nick Matzke – Book Burner? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From a friend in the business: NASA is proposing a “gene lab” for the space station and wants your opinions on what to look for. If NASA likes your idea, then of course you have a leg up on the competition of writing a winning proposal–the main reason people send their opinions in. Interested? Qualified? Find out more here. Due date February 5, 2016.

Anyone who can watch this February 2015 vid (“Astroturf and manipulation of media messages”) by news veteran Sharyl Atkisson and still have any respect for Wikipedia had better start figuring out what kind of idiot they are. For their own protection. Know thyself, and all that. (Wikipedia is only part of the astroturf story, but it’s a pretty sizeable part. And to think we thought pages on ID were a special bad case.) In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages. Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book Read More ›

In Did Michael Behe say that astrology was scientific in Kitzmiller v. Dover?  Moran actually excerpts the testimony and then concludes: I mostly agree with Behe. Astrology was an attempt to explain human behaviors by relating them to the position of the Earth on the day you were born. There is no connection. So today we think of astrology as bad science. It’s not true that the stars determine your behavior and whenever we make this claim to an astologist we make sure to point out that the evidence is against it. (footnote excluded) We compliment Dr. Moran on his analysis as well as on his often-expressed willingness to buck the conventional wisdom of his “side” of the debate.   Read More ›

Highlights: Methodological naturalism is widely regarded as a cardinal rule of scientific methodology. This methodological principle excludes all references to the supernatural from scientific discourse: it says that God-talk has no place in science. In Part One of this series, after carefully distinguishing methodological naturalism from six other principles, I argue that methodological naturalism is properly defined as an injunction: when doing science, we should assume that natural causes are sufficient to account for all observed phenomena, and for precisely this reason, all talk of the supernatural is banished from science. The Intelligent Design movement makes no pronouncements about who the Designer of Nature is, but deliberately leaves open the possibility that the Designer is a supernatural Being (i.e. God). Read More ›

Or physics problems unanswerable due to a math paradox? From Nature: In 1931, Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel shook the academic world when he announced that some statements are ‘undecidable’, meaning that it is impossible to prove them either true or false. Three researchers have now found that the same principle makes it impossible to calculate an important property of a material — the gaps between the lowest energy levels of its electrons — from an idealized model of its atoms. The result also raises the possibility that a related problem in particle physics — which has a US$1-million prize attached to it — could be similarly unsolvable, says Toby Cubitt, a quantum-information theorist at University College London and one of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How does our brain form creative and original ideas? If you have never been a writing coach, you will never know how often people ask that question, whether screaming in the night or crying on an editor’s shoulder. Have we found the answer via neuroscience? The researchers hypothesized that for a creative idea to be produced, the brain must activate a number of different — and perhaps even contradictory — networks. In the first part of the research, respondents were give half a minute to come up with a new, original and unexpected idea for the use of different objects. Answers which were provided infrequently received a high score for originality, while those given frequently received a low Read More ›

Evolutionists claim their theory is a fact and one way they support this claim is by construing the relationship between religion and science according to what is known as the Warfare Thesis, a mythological retelling of history where scientific skepticism is marginalized as anti intellectual. But the Warfare Thesis is more than merely a perversion of history. When Biologos appeals to the Galileo Affair, for example, to support its evolutionary beliefs it is propagating a false history, but the misrepresentations do not stop there. The Warfare Thesis also relies on a false witness of science.  Read more

Wants to shed “simple” schtick. Introducing C. elegans, the worm that survived the space shuttle blowup. Philosopher of Biology Paul Nelson describes the amazing process by which the worm C. elegans is constructed and how it points toward intelligent design. Also: Irreducibly complex behaviour in worms? and White space in evolutionary thinking (Where thought stops) See also: Information Enigma film online Follow UD News at Twitter!

Closing our “religion” coverage for the day: From Paul Bloom at Atlantic: Why Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith It is true that scientists take certain things on faith. It is also true that religious narratives might speak to human needs that scientific theories can’t hope to satisfy. And yet, scientific practices—observation and experiment; the development of falsifiable hypotheses; the relentless questioning of established views—have proven uniquely powerful in revealing the surprising, underlying structure of the world we live in, including subatomic particles, the role of germs in the spread of disease, and the neural basis of mental life. Religion has no equivalent record of discovering hidden truths. More. Or hidden falsehoods either? Now let’s get serious. In an age Read More ›

From Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, The discovery of digital code, hierarchically-organized information processing systems, and functionally-integrated complex circuits and nano-machinery would in any other realm of experience immediately and properly trigger an awareness of the prior activity of a designing intelligence — precisely because of what we know from experience about what it takes (i.e., what kind of cause is necessary) to produce such systems. But Bishop and O’Connor seem entirely unmoved by discoveries showing the existence of such informational and integrated complexity in living organisms, not because the existence of functional digital code or the nanotechnology in life is in any way in doubt, but because they have committed themselves to viewing the world as if it Read More ›

From Northwestern prof Laurie Zoloth at Cosmos: Independently verifying research can help science regain its credibility Wow. There’s hope. Zoloth is willing to talk in terms of regaining “credibility.” In short, all those frustrated people are not the “enemies of science.” Loss of credibility is an objective problem resulting from recent events: Even in physics, reports of the discovery of gravitational waves in March 2014 were later dismissed. Drug companies conducting clinical trials neglect to publish the entire data set, potentially hiding unfavourable results. But drug companies are also victims. In 2011, drug company Bayer reported it could replicate only 25% of published findings related to drug targets for cancer, women’s health and cardiovascular medicine. In 2012 the company Amgen Read More ›

From New Scientist: Evolution has built bias into our brains – here are the best ways to overrule your instincts and make better decisions about everything … Understanding the often irrational factors that affect how we make decisions has been a key aim of psychologists over the past few decades – and we’re just getting to the stage where we can begin to apply their insights. More. We’d have to pay to read more. But why? If “evolution” causes us to have an irrational brain, what causes us to gain control of it? An unevolved entity? Maybe, but that’s hardly what one would expect to hear from New Scientist in a “subscription drive” feature’s blurb. One might just as well Read More ›

Movements need converts and evolutionists are now revealingyet another ex young Earth creationist who has seen the light. Growing up he was an enthusiastic apologist for creationism. As a teenager he spread the word on the radio and made trips to Kentucky to work with Ken Ham’s young-earth creationism (YEC) organization. He believed YEC was the only acceptable interpretation of the Bible. Without it he would lose his faith.  Read more

From Atlantic: So far, most of the interspecies relationships researchers have observed have happened in captivity—possibly because the probability of seeing one among zoo or household is just higher than happening upon it in the wild, but also because animals living in the world of humans are just more likely to interact with other species from a young age. There’s a reason so much of the Internet’s interspecies-friendship porn focuses on baby animals: The strongest bonds form early. Studies have shown that geese and ducks raised together will view each other as members of the same family; kittens raised with baby rats would never harm them. If a relationship takes root early enough in an animal’s social development, it can Read More ›