In a recent interview with David Klinghoffer and Michael Denton over at Evolution News and Views, author David Berlinski revealed the big question he’d like to ask Darwinists about the transition from a land-dwelling mammal to a sea-dwelling whale: “How many changes would I need?” Biochemist Larry Moran answers: “Evolutionary biologists who have spent their entire careers studying evolution, genetics, and developmental biology are comfortable with a few thousand mutations causing the transformation from land animals to whales.” And that’s not all. A mere 340 beneficial mutations would have been sufficient to transform the common ancestor of man and chimp into a human being, according to biologist Ian Musgrave of Panda’s Thumb. (That’s 240 mutations in protein-coding genes and 100 Read More ›

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos must be lovin’ every minute. Recently physicist Lee Spetner has been back-and-forthing with David Levin over Spetner’s book, The Evolution Revolution. Well, it’s become quite the discussion now because, as Spetner explains here at Evolution News & Views: David E. Levin, who teaches in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine, wrote an emotional negative review of my latest book, The Evolution Revolution, for the online journal Reports of the National Center for Science Education. He also posted it on my book’s Amazon page. Spetner replied (See Lee Spetner defends non-random evolution from Darwin lobby) Then Levin replied on the pages of the venerable journal Amazon, dialoguing with commenter Read More ›

  Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016) placed at #5 in both Biology and Evolution, 1:00 EST Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,753 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Evolution #49 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution   Oh, and here’s Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,039 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Paleontology #4 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks Read More ›

From Scientific American: Understanding how brains work is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our times, but despite the impression sometimes given in the popular press, researchers are still a long way from some basic levels of understanding. A project recently funded by the Obama administration’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative is one of several approaches promising to deliver novel insights by developing new tools that involves a marriage of nanotechnology and optics. … We also lack knowledge regarding the “code” large numbers of cells use to communicate and interact. This is crucial, because mental phenomena likely emerge from the simultaneous activity of many thousands, or millions, of interacting neurons. In other words, neuroscientists have yet Read More ›

Aw, maybe it keeps social scientists off the streets. From Protein Wisdom: Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology. Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to Read More ›

It’s scarce, and they’re not making any more of it. From Bruce Dorminey at Forbes: As Robert Wittenmyer, an astronomer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and the paper’s lead author told me, NASA ’s Kepler space telescope has shown us that small planets appear to be ubiquitous. But he says very few observers are looking at what he terms the other half of the question, the long-period gas giants. The findings are important because conventional theories of planet formation have usually dictated that gas giants like Jupiter parked in a stable, rather distant, orbit from its parent star were thought to be key to the onset of life on closer-in Earth-like planets. … “You could certainly Read More ›

From Jena University: The human brain works with division of labour. Although our thinking organ excels in displaying amazing flexibility and plasticity, typically different areas of the brain take over different tasks. While words and language are mainly being processed in the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is responsible for numerical reasoning. According to previous findings, this division of labour originates from the fact that the first steps in the processing of letters and numbers are also located individually in the different hemispheres. But this is not the case, at least not when it comes to the visual processing of numbers. Neuroscientists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and of the Jena University Hospital discovered that the visual processing of Read More ›

If so, big problem for starter physicists From Nature: The site – where physicists, mathematicians and other researchers routinely post their articles before peer review — has previously been accused of bias for filtering out some of the wilder ideas it receives. But in a December blogpost that is now provoking debate, Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that arXiv moderators wrongly blacklisted two of his students from posting their work. Gisin notes that being unable to post to arXiv has a detrimental effect on young researchers’ careers, because it is so influential — the preprint server holds more than 1.1 million papers and receives well over 9,000 submissions each month. He is concerned Read More ›

In recent posts, I have been discussing some important points about the reasonable meaning of homologies and differences in the proteome in the course of natural history. For the following discussion, just to be clear, I will accept a scenario of Common Descent (as explained in many recent posts) in the context of an ID approach. I will also accept the very reasonable concept that neutral or quasi-neutral random variation happens in time, and that negative (purifying) selection is the main principle which limits random variation in functional sequences. My main points are the following: Given those premises, homologies through natural history are certainly an indicator of functional constraints, because they mean that some sequence cannot be significantly transformed by random variation. Another way Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the weekend (now that the weekend is leftover cold burnt toast), here’s a leftist attack on new atheism – and like we said of a previous instance (2014), “If they’ve lost The Nation, they’ve lost everyone.” In a roundup review of various books on the subject by David Hoelscher at Counterpunch: New Atheism, Worse Than You Think there is a frank discussion of the authoritarian scientism it embodies: What is not in doubt is that the New Atheists are, as the philosopher Michael Ruse has lamented “a bloody disaster.” As the scholar Jeffrey Nall asserts “Thinkers such as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens create a religion that amounts to a monstrous straw-man which they then Read More ›

Before I put the issue with the United Methodist Church and Discovery Institute to rest, I want to make one last comment on the UMC’s Statement on Science and Technology, which I wrote about the other day. One of the most significant assertions in the statement is “We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues.” If that sounds vaguely familiar to readers here at Uncommon Descent, it should. It is little more than a restatement of the late Stephen J. Gould’s principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (or NOMA). In essence, NOMA is the idea that Science and Religion occupy different spheres of knowledge and influence and as such are subject Read More ›

Religion news running a bit late this “weekend,” but better late than never: From biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, (not a fanmag for Christian Darwinism], an account of his dealings with BioLogos (reclaiming the Christian world for Darwin) here: Recently, a higher-up in the BioLogos organization contacted me via email, in an attempt to open up private dialogue (rather than public conversation). I replied in like fashion, dealing with several of the objections. Now clearly, I did not expect the BioLogos crowd to be happy about my book. If it had not registered on their Richter scale, I would’ve been disappointed. But, one might have anticipated a response of some sort to my reply. Apparently, Read More ›