The recent finding that the DNA packaging technology and structure, known as chromatin, is not limited to eukaryotes but is also present in archaea, and so from an evolutionary perspective must have “evolved before archaea and eukaryotes split apart—more than 2 billion years ago,” is merely the latest in a string of misadventures evolutionists have incurred ever since they stole the histones.  Read more

Start the day right with something lite: From New Scientist: The signal – known as the “Wow! signal” after a note scribbled by astronomer Jerry Ehman, who detected it – came through at 1420 megahertz, corresponding to a wavelength of 21 centimetres. Searchers for extraterrestrial transmissions have long considered it an auspicious place to look, as it is one of the main frequencies at which atoms of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, absorb and emit energy. What’s more, this frequency easily penetrates the atmosphere. But in the 40 years since, we’ve never heard anything like it again. Analysis of the signal ruled out a satellite, and a reflected signal from the Earth’s surface is unlikely because regulations Read More ›

That’s a good question to ponder overnight. From science writer George Musser: Let’s Rethink Space … And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.” To make sense of nonlocality, the first step is to invert Read More ›

From New Scientist: Impulsive people may have less free will than the rest of us … A person who kills someone while driving drunk might tell the jury this: People who were deemed impulsive did indeed have shorter time intervals between their conscious awareness of the intention to act and the moment of action. The more impulsive they were, the shorter the interval. “It might suggest that maybe impulsive individuals have less time to inhibit or control their actions,” says Caspar. Maybe skip this: Aaron Schurger at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, who has worked on understanding the implications of the Libet experiment, cautions that any conclusions depend on how you interpret the various signals. His own Read More ›

Further to Consciousness? No hard problem! Your brain only tells itself it is conscious, and that is why you believe it. There, that’s settled: From Charite: Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point – the ‘point of no return’. The results of this study have been published in the journal PNAS*. … “The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that Read More ›

Well, depending on your religious convictions, they did it once … From Zaria Gorvett at BBC: The last man on Earth is a common trope in fiction – but what if it actually happened? How many people would it take to save our species? … So how much variety do you need? It’s a debate that goes right back to the 80s, says Stephens, when an Australian scientist proposed a universal rule of thumb. “Basically you need 50 breeding individuals to avoid inbreeding depression and 500 in order to adapt,” he says. It’s a rule still used today – though it’s been upped to 500-5,000 to account for random losses when genes are passed from one generation to the next – Read More ›

Over at his blog at coldcasechristianity.com, homicide detective, ex-atheist and Christian apologist Jim Warner Wallace has written an interesting post (July 30, 2015) in which he identifies no less than eight attributes of an object which point to its being a product of intelligent design: I believe there are eight attributes of design we employ when reasonably inferring the existence of a Designer. To make them easier to remember, I’ve assembled them in an acronym (DESIGNED): D- Dubious Probability (Given Chance) Is random chance an insufficient explanation for the formation and assembly of the object we are examining?E -Echoes of Familiarity Does the object resemble other structures we know (with certainty) were designed by intelligent designers? S- Sophistication and Intricacy Read More ›

From Financial Express: Evolution is a touchy subject. Unveil a new discovery pointing towards what triggered life on Earth and a whole contingent of evolutionists, the proponents of Intelligent design (ID) and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), spiritualists and those who believe in one “Supreme Being” will rush to reinforce that what they say is true. Yes, and hundreds of them will die, trampled by naturalists, converging on a single straw that supports them… But one thing becomes clear if examined from a purely scientific point of view: we are close yet still far from knowing when a single-cell organism stopped behaving like a single-cell entity and decided to explode into a multi-cellular being and – millions and millions of Read More ›

  April 16, 2016 online From Blyth Institute: We are pleased to announce the 2016 Conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism, which aims to explore new methodologies that can be employed in a variety of disciplines that are not based on methodological naturalism. E-mail proposed abstracts to info@blythinstitute.org (200-500 words) More. E-conference is available. Blyth previously hosted the Engineering and Metaphysics conference, with proceedings. From News: Methodological naturalism is Darwin’s sucker punch: Science is coterminous with naturalism. The purpose of science, therefore, is to come up with theories that are in line with and support naturalist (nature is all there is) explanations. If those explanations seem weak (cf crackpot cosmology and evolutionary psychology) , we must wait for better naturalist explanations. No other Read More ›

From scientist and novelist Michael Grazziano at the Atlantic: It’s just the brain describing itself—to itself. but … Wait … Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. Well, that one’s been tried before. As here, it involves speculations about human evolution based on one or two slender skeins of evidence. The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, Read More ›

HeKS raises a sobering point: >>Darwinists . . . don’t seem to understand that people are capable of, for example, making ‘statements against interest’, or simply acknowledging facts and data that generally are inconsistent with evolutionary expectations, or with the popular notions of evolutionary theory, or with popular misconceptions regarding the evidence supporting the theory (or theories). Instead, they think – quite ridiculously – that it is inappropriate to quote anyone in support of a premise used in an anti-evolutionary argument unless the person being quoted agrees with a conclusion along the lines of “evolutionary theory is nonsense”. This creates a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ scenario, because if an ID proponent quotes an evolutionary biologist (or any other Read More ›

Let the door hit both of you on the way out? Well, how else to understand this, from a review of new book, The Society of Genes (Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Harvard U Press)? From New Scientist: FORTY years ago, Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene popularised the notion that the gene, rather than the individual, was the true unit of evolution. That view has dominated evolutionary genetics ever since. But in The Society of Genes, biologists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher say that it’s time to replace the selfish-gene metaphor with a new one that focuses on relationships. “We are not the simple sum of our genes,” they write. “The members of the society of genes do not Read More ›

Darn right. The simpler emotions, anyway. And what would we make of a study that claimed they didn’t? Well, anyway, … from ScienceDaily: Dogs can recognize emotions in humans by combining information from different senses — an ability that has never previously been observed outside of humans, a new study published today reveals. … The researchers advance a claim that the dogs are forming abstract representations of mental states in order to do that. It’s not clear why they would need to. “Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPo, offering the “unofficial list” for the the meeting scheduled for the public November 7-9 meet, co-sponsored by the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences: Prime movers of the event are: Oxford physiologist and Royal Society Fellow, Denis Noble — who has already made his case on this page for replacing the modern synthesis; Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 for his service to biology and currently serves as president of the Zoological Society of London; Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, a University of Durham/University of California-San Diego philosopher of science and Fellow of the British Academy; John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter whose Read More ›

I used to make a joke here that quote mining, to a Darwinist, was any time an IDist or Creationist quoted a mainstream evolutionary biologist.  A recent thread at TSZ  has sadly revealed that my joke wasn’t a joke. That’s what they actually think. After looking over the site petrushka (the author of the thread) referred to, I realized that the people at that site presented no evidence for quote-mining, and one of the site authors attempting to characterize why a quote was “quote-mined” said this: So we see that Gould et al. don’t reject evolution, but claim that phyletic evolution takes a second seat to speciation. Did anyone actually try to paint Gould as “rejecting evolution”? That hardly seems Read More ›