2015

From ScienceDaily: Neanderthals from the French region of Poitou-Charentes cut, beat and fractured the bones of their recently deceased companions, as revealed by the fossil remains of two adults and a child found at the Marillac site. These manipulations have been observed at other Neanderthal sites, but scientists still do not know whether they did this for food or ceremony. Since the Marillac site in France was unearthed, the discovery of fossil remains of animals (90% belonging to reindeer), humans and Mousterian tools has enabled the site to be identified as a hunting area for Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). But the most surprising thing about the site is the presence of a large quantity of bone remains of these hominids, many Read More ›

Finally, an honest materialist. In comment 93 to my last post a materialist finally admits the obvious. Why is that so hard for the rest of them? I don’t agree with everything Seversky says, but the general thrust of his comment is spot on from a materialist perspective. @ Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on Read More ›

In the context, “evolution” typically means Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Anyway here: President David Alexander of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) sent a letter to the campus over the weekend, defending the decision to lay off tenured theology professor Thomas Jay Oord. Alexander said budget cuts necessitated the move. A professor in the school’s counseling department was also affected by the layoffs. Oord was notified of his firing by email while on break, which Alexander said lacked compassion. “I want to publicly apologize to Dr. Tom Oord for the way in which he learned of the change,” said Alexander in his email. “Discussions occurred via mail and email due to spring break and the March 31st notification deadline. That was Read More ›

Here: Evolutionary Science ‘Stuck’ on Wrong Track, Situation ‘Out of Control’ … František Baluška, a native of Slovakia, is founder and editor-in-chief of two scientific journals, Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative & Integrative Biology (Landes Bioscience, publisher) where more of his provocative thinking can be found. Freedom in science is crucial, he says, and we need “open-minded” journals. A decade ago Baluška began organizing international conferences on plant neurobiology as well. His thinking about “plant intelligence” has been partly inspired by Lynn Margulis, specifically her paper “The Conscious Cell.” The theme of plant intelligence was more recently explored in a magazine article by Michael Pollan in which Baluška is cited as well as Darwin’s 1880 observation that the plant Read More ›

I sometimes despair of even the possibility of rational discourse with the ID opponents who post regularly on these pages. In this post I will try to give you a template for rational, logical discourse using my last post as an example. Before I do that, I will give you a couple of hints about the basics. All arguments rest on premises. Here is the classic: 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Socrates is mortal. In order to refute an argument you must do one of two things: Show that it is invalid or show that is unsound. “Invalid” means the conclusion does not logically flow from the premises. In other words, an invalid argument Read More ›

From Eurekalert: The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic “beacons” to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness. “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances — and thus when the universe was younger,” said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA’s Department of Astronomy and Steward Read More ›

And Mae-Wan Ho: Ho’s lucubrations on evolutionary biology, as revealed in an interview she gave to Suzan Mazur at PuffHo, are just as bad. The piece, “Mae-Wan Ho: No boundary really between epigenetic and genetic”, is replete with misstatements, errors, and distortions on the part of both interviewer and subject. Mazur, as you may recall, is a gonzo journalist driven by one Big Obsession: modern evolutionary biology is wrong and she’s going to show how rotten it really is. Mazur tried to win renown by reporting on the infamous “Altenburg 16,” a group of biologists who convened a meeting in Austria, originally intending to debunk the Modern Synthesis, but later retracted their claws and claimed only to “extend” the synthesis. Read More ›

New York Times commentator David Brooks, who wrote one of the worst novels imaginable, based on evolutionary psychology (PZ Myers seems to agree with me on this), allows us to know that he is paid to be a narcissistic blowhard. He has one thing down right: He made sure they paid him. Yes, okay, okay, otherwise a narcissistic blowhard. But why must the world keep getting bulletins about it? From the Guardian review of his book length lecture, The Road to Character: The Road to Character feels like an abrupt plunge that goes far deeper. Though not explicitly religious, Brooks’s language evokes theology: for example, he doesn’t shirk from using the word “sin”, not in a scolding sense, but to refer Read More ›

Here: As Scruton notes: “Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace.” But this isn’t just about the handful of protests the student clubs get up to. The problem has leaked into all of the humanities – the once sacred home for all forms of inquiry. It’s about dismantling anything connected to the past, anything that suggests we can learn from the people who came before us: “The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of Read More ›

A sendup of science journals How’s That Again? From the Los Angeles Times: In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, scientists have found ancient communities of bacteria that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years. Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen. They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. ? JPD At least some authors are suspected of ID links No problem. The Dumbdown police will be there shortly. Wherever is “there” these days… Follow UD News at Twitter!

In my last post I challenged materialists to answer the following challenge: Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on materialist premises are not in fact compelled by those premises. RDFish responded with a comment you can read for yourself (comment 23), the gist of which was “normal people agree that evil things are evil.” RDFish’s response Read More ›

History prof Richard Weikart reviews Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: “While I was reading Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Finding Truth, a professor at the state university where I teach circulated a news item about a politician seeking to alter the university’s goals. Instead of facilitating “the search for truth,” the university under this plan would commit itself to meeting “the state’s work-force needs.” I remarked to this professor and other colleagues that many academics had already eliminated “the search for truth.” In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent. … The fourth principle involves examining the worldview for Read More ›

Saves time. Here: As a physics professor working in a secular university in Australia, and publishing in scientific journals, and knowing the importance of communicating one’s science to the wider community, I have had many opportunities to see how the system works. Outside of the experts in your field the details do not matter, but a good story does. As an illustration of this let me relate a story from early 2013. At that time I published a cosmology paper,3 which included an interesting concept. I found that using an alternative cosmology in a finite bounded expanding universe, with a unique centre and an edge, one could get the same physical description of the large-scale structure of the universe, which Read More ›

Had to happen: The theory of “intelligent design” holds that the universe and living beings are so complex that they must have been created by an “intelligent” force typically identified as a deity. Conservative Christian opponents of teaching evolution have advocated that “intelligent design” be taught as an alternative. Perzanoski in a phone interview Tuesday dismissed the basis for the complaint. “We categorically deny we were teaching anything about creationism,” he said, adding that many of the allegations “transpired from a discussion [Sullivan] had with the kids” during which they asked him about his personal beliefs. Also: Superintendent Paul Perzanoski denied the ACLU’s allegation and said the 26-year veteran teacher was just responding to a question from a student who Read More ›

Mark Frank apparently no longer wants to play. So I will throw the question I asked him open to any of the other materialists who post here. Imagine the following exchange: Barry: Mr. Materialist, is it possible to imagine a universe in which torturing an infant to death for personal pleasure is actually an affirmatively good thing? Mr. Materialist: The answer to your question is that my metaphysics compel me to say that the phrase “affirmatively good thing” is all but meaningless in the sense you are using it. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal Read More ›