Asks Stat News, offering a roundup of notable views in support: Hanel, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, posted a manuscript recently calling for anonymity in science articles. More than that, Hanel suggests stripping identifiers from virtually all academic output: doing away with name-based citations, CVs on researchers’ web sites, author names on book chapters, titles on academic journals, and more. The immodest proposal — made available on arXiv, a preprint server, before peer review — is akin to destroying the academic village in order to rid it of pests. But while some of what Hanel recommends is impossible at best, and perhaps even counterproductive, his overarching point seems pretty solid. When it comes to protecting the Read More ›

  A friend writes to draw attention to research papers in the Biologic Institute’s journal (as opposed to review papers). This might provide a start for those interested:   At the very end of 2014, BIO-Complexity published a paper by Reeves, Gauger, and Axe, “Enzyme Families–Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family” which reported experimental results attempting convert various proteins to perform the function of a closely related proteins. They showed that this enzyme conversion would require more mutations than would be feasible over the history of life. Yesterday on ENV Ann Gauger reviewed their latest research paper in BIO-Complexity, co-published with Doug Axe, “Model and Laboratory Demonstrations That Evolutionary Optimization Works Well Only if Read More ›

From Pos-Darwinista “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology”. – Richard Dawkins, 1991, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 112. Pos-Darwinista adds, I think he got it wrong – if we want to understand life we should and must think about genetic information. Sure, but once it’s “technology,” it is not random or without intelligence. Darwinism cannot bear that weight. But who knows, with enough name recognition, ol’ Dawkins could end up getting credit for developing the idea. See also: Dawkins becomes theistic evolutionist? and The enigma of information Follow UD News at Twitter!

Celebrated SkepticTM Michael Shermer makes the case in Scientific American recently that the recently found Naledi fossils represent humans engaged in murder rather than burial after natural death: Finally, the ages of the 13 individuals so identified—three infants, three young juveniles, one old juvenile, one subadult, four young adults and one old adult—are unlike those of other cave deposits for which cause of death and deposition have been determined. It’s a riddle, wrapped in sediment, inside a grotto. I believe the authors are downplaying an all too common cause of death in our ancestors—homicide in the form of war, murder or sacrifice. Lawrence H. Keeley, in War Before Civilization (1996), and Steven A. LeBlanc, in Constant Battles (2003), review hundreds Read More ›

Alister McGrath is a well-known Christian theologian, priest, and author of many apologetic books. In one of them, “The Dawkins Delusion”, he fiercely opposes the pseudo intellectual arrogance of Dawkins’ atheism. In general I appreciate much McGrath’s work in defense of theism. For this reason I sincerely regret the need to criticize some of his opinions about theistic evolution (TE), as expressed in his interview with Nigel Bovey,”The universe is not an accident.” McGrath rightly supports the ontological and logical necessity of a Creator of the universe, who provides to it and to all of its beings all meaning and reality, and makes it something quite other than an “accident”, as the title of the interview makes clear. Bovey asks: Read More ›

Malthus was the original population bomb guy. A recent paper by Lemin Wu (June 2015) offers A Darwinian Explanation of the Malthusian Trap: Abstract: This paper shows that the Malthusian mechanism alone cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Improvement in luxury technology, if faster than improvement in subsistence technology, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. It is proven that a tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong growth tendency. The theory re-explains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient Read More ›

From Godless Spellchecker: PZ Myers has a habit of publicly disagreeing with the more successful figures in the ‘atheist movement’, which would be fine normally. Disagreement is healthy. It’s just that when PZ ‘disagrees’, he tends to reach for the worst possible smears available to make his point. This behaviour has been going on for years, but has recently been distilled in its most toxic form thanks to his interactions with Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland. I urge you read about that here. Anyhow, Myers was engaging in a bout of Hitchens bashing on Twitter: Godless Spellchecker: … Darwinian evolution at work: Descent of Man division, we would guess. See also: Anything by Bach, for relief. or Devolution: Getting back Read More ›

Further to two stories that just whistled past, Epigenetics: Altering ant behavior and Epigenetics: Mouse diet affects sperm RNA, a thought occurred to me: For many years, I’ve seen and heard people who were raised by adoptive parents obsessing about their “real” parents. They seem to believe that their DNA parents conferred on them a magic key of same kind, and they must find it in order to even know who they really are. Is that true? Why isn’t what they have been doing most of their life who they really are? Unless one has some basis for actively rejecting everything one has learned growing up, most likely, one’s “real” parents are whoever has acted as a parent over the Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Two new studies in mice demonstrate how a father’s diet affects levels of specific small RNAs in his sperm, which in turn can affect gene regulation in offspring. These results add to the growing list of ways in which a male’s lifestyle can influence his offspring, including through the sperm epigenome, microbiome transfer and seminal fluid signaling. (American Association for the Advancement of Science) More. Another reason to treat your breeding mice right. See also: Epigenetics: Altering ant behavior and Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted in the conference room! Follow UD News at Twitter!

From New York Times: Among Florida carpenter ants there are the so-called majors, brawny soldiers that guard the colony, and the smaller minors that act as foragers. But membership in these castes is not set in stone, a new study found. By treating ants with chemical compounds, researchers were able to make young majors behave like minors. The compound manipulates the ants’ epigenetic makeup, which governs which genes are turned on and off but does not alter their DNA. “These are long-term, permanent changes that occur when we inject the brain with these chemicals,” said Shelley Berger, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors. More. See also: Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: #6 of Our Top Stories of 2015: Peer-Reviewed Paper Reveals Darwin’s Unavoidable Catch-22 Problem A new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Complexity presents a computational model of evolution which shows that evolving new biological structures may be deterred by an unavoidable catch-22 problem. The article by physicists David Snoke, Jeffery Cox, and Donald Petcher begins by observing that in order to produce a new system, evolution first needs to try lots of new things. It must generate many, many variations upon which natural selection can act in order to “find” something useful to retain. But that comes with a potentially fatal cost. In the scenario proposed by Darwinian theory, you’d end up with an organism Read More ›

From theology professor Paul-Louis Metzger at Patheos: Science, Metaphysics and Metaphorical Ladders: When Science is Theology For those who think that metaphysics and theology are antiquated disciplines that have no place in our scientific age, please think again. Take one prominent contemporary example—Richard Dawkins. Like Freud, he is an anti-theology theologian in disguise. The anti-theological Dawkins presents theological or metaphysical claims. His fundamental thesis that the gene is selfish and that it governs all reality is not a hypotheses that Dawkins could readily jettison on the basis of empirical observations. Rather, it serves as a ruling construct that governs his approach to the data. This is how theology and metaphysics function. In other words, theology and metaphysics function as overarching Read More ›

Okay, we are just passing on what philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze heard from a bearded turtleneck at the local Ice Ball, wrapping up the New Year’s festivities: Turtleneck: Yes, it finally happened—but not like we’d expected. Move a little to the side, okay; you’re blocking my line of sight on the vodka… … Oh, look, … here … He then shoved a crumpled piece of paper into Bencze’s hand and rushed out to wait in the Horton’s for the last westbound bus. The paper read, [FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1/2/2016] WHY I AM NOW A THEISTIC EVOLUTIONIST—Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL Those of you who have read my many books and articles may find it strange that I have modified my stance Read More ›

In a new 9-minute video, physicist Sean Carroll eviscerates the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. Or does he? Apart from its science-of-the-gaps optimism, the video’s main flaws are that it fails to state the fine-tuning hypothesis correctly, and employs poor Bayesian reasoning. But first, let’s have a look at the video, which was posted on Youtube by a user named bdwilson1000: The text of Dr. Sean Carroll’s video can be found in the opening speech of his debate with Professor William Lane Craig on the topic, “God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology” in March 2014. Professor Jerry Coyne has provided a handy summary of Dr. Carroll’s five main points in a post Read More ›

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