From Evolution News & Views: The seminars are primarily designed for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students, but each year we try to reserve a few spaces for a special cohort of professors, scientists, teachers, pastors, and other professionals. If that sounds right for you, consider applying. … The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, cosmology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. Past seminars have included such speakers as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, Richard Sternberg, Robert Marks, Scott Minnich, and Bruce Gordon. This seminar is open to students who intend to pursue Read More ›

Over at her BackReAction blog, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, has written an article titled, Free will is dead, let’s bury it. However, her arguments against free will are both scientifically unsound and philosophically dated. She writes: There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it Read More ›

TPeeler brings this oldie but goody back to our attention: Darwin’s theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals. Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin’s theory has been Read More ›

Hmmm. Last circus that blew through town was hollering about the Right’s war on science. So far as we can see, there is no war. it’s more that some sciences are running out of feet to shoot themselves in. Not an easy job to recruit for even in hard times. 😉 Meanwhile, from the UK Spectator: The witch hunt against Napoleon Chagnon shows us what happens if scientists challenge the core beliefs of ‘progressives’ You don’t say. How much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of growing scientific evidence that many of its core beliefs are false? … Chagnon is a key figure in a new book by Alice Dreger, an American academic who has spent the Read More ›

From The Scientist: Of 441 randomly selected biomedical research papers analyzed in a new study, none provided access to all the authors’ data. And only one of these papers shared a complete protocol. The results of this analysis, which could shed light on science’s reproducibility problem, were published today (January 4) in PLOS Biology. “What was most surprising to me was the complete lack of data-sharing and protocol availability,” said study coauthor John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and health research and policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “That was worse than I would have predicted.” “This study confirms what most of us already know—that the current clinical research enterprise is set up in a way that researchers Read More ›

In 2010, Lynch and Abegg claimed in a widely cited journal article that neutral evolutionary processes could generate complex adaptations much more rapidly than was previously believed. Their article contained a mathematical flaw, which was pointed out by Dr. Douglas Axe, but Axe’s critique continues to be ignored by senior evolutionary biologists, including the article’s authors, Professor Joe Felsenstein and Professor Larry Moran. Want proof? Read on. For those readers who don’t know him, Michael Lynch is an eminent scientist: he is Distinguished Professor of Evolution, Population Genetics and Genomics at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. He has also written a two-volume textbook with Bruce Walsh, which is widely regarded as the “Bible” of quantitative genetics. In 2009, he was elected Read More ›

Recently, I (O’Leary) raised the question whether epigenetically triggered dominance behaviour in fish was rightly considered a struggle for “social status”: The concept of social status presupposes not only a society but a relationship to that society consciously recognized by most actors within it. It is not only the behaviour, but also the consciousness—evident in human affairs, as people strive for social status, even from something as apparently abstract as area codes and zip codes. Purely virtual territory. Some may argue that the term social status “shouldn’t” mean what human beings generally understand it to mean. But the term was invented by and for human beings, to describe a situation we experience. Part of that experience is knowing one’s status Read More ›

From Washington Post: Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everything Zounds. Most mishaps don’t change everything by introducing vast new realms of complexity. As in: Bill Gates stumbled in his garage one day, and behold, Windows! In a paper published in the open-access journal eLife this week, researchers say they have pinpointed what may well be one of evolution’s greatest copy mess-ups yet: the mutation that allowed our ancient protozoa predecessors to evolve into complex, multi-cellular organisms. Thanks to this mutation — which was not solely responsible for the leap out of single-cellular life, but without which you, your dog and every creature large enough to be seen without a microscope might not be around Read More ›

Further to: Falsifiability only gained traction as anti-creation move? philosopher (and photographer) Laszlo Bencze writes to say,   The passage you quote from “Newton’s Apple and Other Myths of Science” is terribly misguided: “Part of the appeal of the falsification axiom (if it could never be disproved, it can’t be science) was that it was simple enough for nonscientists to grasp. Yet, when we look at history, falsification simply does not work as a definition of science. As Gordin explains, most historians and scientists accept a sociological definition: Science is what the scientific community says it is (e.g., peer-reviewed work in reputable journals). It’s not a perfect definition, nor a stable one, but it has the virtue of being the Read More ›

(A friend advises, this ran a decade ago.  No one who matters in Canada would have the guts to say it today, not if they are boffins or part of legacy media. National Post was  freer then, as I remember. ) From a no-byline article in Canada’s National Post, 2005: … the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin’s idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected. Either life arose as the result of purely undirected material Read More ›

Commenting on a recent PLOS paper, Ann Gauger writes at Evolution News & Views, A recent paper in PLOS Genetics considers the origins of new “genes” in humans and chimps. By comparing RNA sequences, researchers identified over 600 transcriptionally active “genes” that appear to be present only in humans and not in chimps or the other mammal species tested. They claimed that these “genes” were the product of evolution from previously non-coding, untranscribed DNA. They argued that some of the “genes” are made into proteins and perhaps may be subject to selection, meaning that they are evolving. I put genes in quote because this is not what the term gene typically means. It used to be that a gene was Read More ›

Not smell? At Scientific American blogs, animal behaviour researcher Julie Hecht asks, Does a dog know, merely by sight, that an approaching being is a fellow dog? Before you answer, remember this: Canis familiaris is the least uniform species on the planet. Members of this species come in a wide range of body shapes and sizes from itty bitty teeny weeny to absolutely ginormos. Adult members of this species appear as tight little packages, huge weightlifters, lean ballerinas, elongated hotdogs and everything in between. Of course the obvious response is, “How do humans manage it?” The old canard about the gullible couple buying a chihuahua that turns out to be a yappy rat* is funny precisely because it is not likely Read More ›

Denyse’s recent post here on falsifiability tells me that we need more thought on this creature we call science and what it means for all of us, and especially the enterprise of knowledge.
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Odd, and it speaks very poorly of the science of the day. But one historian says that the historical data demonstrate that view. Further to the new science mythbuster book, Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science, a reader kindly notes that we also learn from the paywalled review in Science: Michael Gordin … [debunks] the widely accepted belief that science can be easily differentiated from pseudoscience simply by determining whether a particular theory is falsifiable. In addition to the philosophical shortcomings of this approach, he notes that if a negative result is sufficient to falsify a theory, then high-school science students manage to “falsify” most of Western science each week in their lab classes. Gordin goes on to analyze Read More ›