After spending the last few years pretending to be an ID proponent, all the while bashing every other ID proponent and disparaging most ID ideas, Salvador Cordova has finally come clean and formally withdrawn from the ID movement.  Here.  He did it over at The Skeptical Zone, of course, where he has found a home with more like-minded folks.

Please see the note and apology at the end of this post. —– Over on a recent thread Alicia Cartelli responded to my request that if she had “an idea how abiogenesis works” I would post it as a head post for discussion. I have not yet had time to parse through all this, other than to note that most of what Alicia discusses below was already granted for discussion purposes in my Abiogenesis Challenge. Thus, even if we were to grant the very questionable and optimistic claims, it still does not address the central issues needed for the origin of life, including the issue of information content. That said, I appreciate Alicia taking time to put together the below Read More ›

What our dogs and cats feel like when we don’t understand them. From Evolution News & Views: … Continuities can be merely apparent, not actual. Consider, for example, the laptop computer vs. the typewriter. Both feature the QWERTYUIOP keyboard. That might suggest a physical continuity between the two machines. The story would run thus: Computer developers added more and more parts to the typewriter, and subtracted some, until they had transformed the typewrter into a laptop. But of course, they didn’t. They adapted a widely recognized keyboard layout to an entirely new type of machine. Continuities are created by history, not laws. If we don’t know the history, we don’t know whether a similarity reflects continuity or not. Bolhuis and Read More ›

Has recently retired from being “vestige of evolution” … From Jordan Rosenfeld at Mental Floss: While the appendix is not required for digestive functions in humans, Belz tells mental_floss, “It does house symbiotic bacteria proposed by Randal Bollinger and Bill Parker at Duke University to be important for overall gut health, but particularly when we get a gut infection resulting in diarrhea.” Infections of this kind clear the gut not only of fluids and nutrients but also good bacteria. Their research suggests that those ILCs [innate lymphoid cells] housed in the appendix may be there as a reserve to repopulate the gut with good bacteria after a gut infection. ILCs are hardier than other immune cells, and thus vital to Read More ›

Wouldn’t that make information reality? From Rachel Thomas’ evaluation of the work of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at PlusMaths: Wheeler categorised his long and productive life in physics into three periods: “Everything is Particles”, “Everything is Fields”, and “Everything is Information”. (You can read more about his life and work in his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam.) The driving idea behind the third period was spurred by his contemplation of the age-old question: “How come existence?” And his answer, first published in a brilliantly written (and very entertaining) paper in 1989, was it from bit: “It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in Read More ›

From Science News: New calculations suggest roughly equal populations, not 10-to-1 ratio A “standard man” weighing 70 kilograms has roughly the same number of bacteria and human cells in his body, researchers report online January 6 at bioRxiv.org. This average guy would be composed of about 40 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, calculate researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That’s a ratio of 1.3 bacteria to every one human cell. More. In case anyone wondered why they didn’t just take over… See also: Evolution: Cells “hiring” functions they can’t do (endosymbiosis) Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Nature: Dogic’s team created a new kind of liquid crystal. Unlike the molecules in standard liquid-crystal displays, which passively form patterns in response to electric fields, Dogic’s components were active. They propelled themselves, taking energy from their environment — in this case, from ATP. And they formed patterns spontaneously, thanks to the collective behaviour of thousands of units moving independently. These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world — among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. Based on laboratory work, Experimentalists are only beginning to gain control of Read More ›

Yes, in certain ways, says mathematician at the University of Adelaide. From Science Daily: The old adage that says ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’ has finally been put to the test — mathematically. A team of researchers has found that overwhelming evidence without a dissenting opinion can in fact weaken the credibility of a case, or point to a failure of the system. … The team put three different scenarios to the test based on mathematical probability: the use of witnesses to confirm the identity of a criminal suspect; the accurate identification of an archaeological find; and the reliability of a cryptographic system. They found in each case that there was a point at Read More ›

In a recent article in the Guardian, Nick Cohen defends “the freedom to argue for your own ideas without being forced to comply by authoritarians,” but goes on to argue (incorrectly) that this freedom owes everything to Enlightenment skeptics, and nothing to Judaism and Christianity. For him, ISIS and the Judaeo-Christian tradition are morally equivalent: Cultural conservatives do not want to be reminded that there is no Islamist crime so great the Judaeo-Christian tradition did not once authorise it. The Iranian judiciary murders gays and Islamic State throws them from tall buildings to delight the faithful. The Book of Leviticus would approve. It says that men who have sex with each other “shall surely be put to death”. Assad, Iran Read More ›

From Lee Spetner at Evolution News & Views: Reviewing The Evolution Revolution, the NCSE Offers Uninformed Criticism that Misses the Point No surprise, the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby (NCSE) did a hit job on physicist Spetner’s book, and did not acknowledge his request for an opportunity to reply in their publication (last we heard). No matter, here’s his response: Unfortunately, the points Levin raises are the results of his misunderstandings or distortions of what I wrote, or his failure to read the relevant portion of the text he was commenting on. Indeed, he missed the most important point of the book. I show that current evolutionary theory, and any derivative of it that relies on random mutations, is invalid. A scientific theory Read More ›

Bad news for scuba shops: To adapt to a ‘water world’, Dr Skinner expects humans would develop webbed hands and eyes like those of cats to help us see in the poor lighting conditions underwater. We would also retain a layer of baby fat into adulthood as an insulator for spending long periods submerged. Regular foraging in shallow waters could lead us to develop artificial ‘gills’ to help us breathe, extracting oxygen from the water and delivering it to the bloodstream. This would also lead to our lung capacity becoming greatly reduced, and our rib cages shrinking. An additional layer in the retina – like cat’s eyes – could develop to help us see in poor light under water. We Read More ›

A student kindly writes to comment on the textbook, Evolutionary Analysis, by Jon C. Herron and Scott Freeman of which, he says, I was suprised to find “ID creationism” mentioned in my evolutionary analysis textbook. While talking about biochemical designs, the book states “creationist Michael Behe believes he has found a profusion of cases”. They mention the cilium is not irreducibly complex in an evolutionary or a mechanical sense and that IC systems can evolve by natural selection. Also, “we predict that in the coming decades, all of Behe’s examples of IC will yield to evolutionary analysis”. Have they yielded any? Also, the objections they cite that ID makes are: violation of the 2nd law and speciation has never been Read More ›

From Nature: Gravitational-wave rumours in overdrive … What is the gossip? Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves? The rumours suggest that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a US laboratory with detectors in Washington and Louisiana, has spotted a signal of gravitational waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space-time that, according to Einstein’s theory, are produced by cataclysmic events such as the merging of two black holes or two neutron stars. Whispers of a possible detection were first tweeted in September by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, at Arizona State University in Tempe. The most specific rumour now comes in a blog post by theoretical physicist Luboš Motl: it’s speculated that the two detectors, which began to collect Read More ›

Ran across this clip at Christian Post: Atheist author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says the best argument for God he’s ever hard has to do with a deistic God as the fine-tuner of the universe . . . . Dawkins prefaced his answer by making it clear that he is not “in any sense admitting that there is a good argument,” and insisted that “there is no decent argument for the existence of deities.” . . . . “It’s still a very, very bad argument, but it’s the best one going,” he added, noting that a major problem with the argument is that it leaves unexplained where the fine tuner came from. As for evolution, however, he said there Read More ›

From an interview in The Atlantic on why people fall for frauds: Can You Spot a Liar? Khazan: You talk about how it’s hard to spot a fraudster or liar in person, but also that microexpressions might be a clue. Why is it so hard to detect lying, and is there anything you can do to make yourself better at rooting it out? Konnikova: It’s really difficult to do it because it’s actually not evolutionarily adaptive. We are better placed if we trust people than if we don’t trust anyone. I talk about infants and young children who need to trust that adults are going to take care of them. It makes us feel better when we accept people’s little Read More ›