There has been a great deal of controversy recently regarding the theory of structuralism, which has been defended by Dr. Michael Denton in his new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis and attacked by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog (see here, here, here and here). Evolution News and Views has several articles defending Dr. Denton’s views (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Let me say at the outset that I have not yet read Dr. Denton’s latest book, which has been reviewed by Barry Arrington here. Rather than reviewing Dr. Denton’s work, my aim in today’s post is to summarize its central thesis, discuss its significance for how scientists should do biology, Read More ›

From LiveScience: Neuroscientists and many philosophers have typically planted themselves firmly on the materialist side. But a growing number of scientists now believe that materialism cannot wholly explain the sense of “I am” that undergirds consciousness, Kuhn told the audience. One of those scientists is Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. At the event, he described a relatively recent formulation of consciousness called the integrated information theory. The idea, put forward by University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, argues that consciousness resides in an as-yet-unknown space in the universe. Integrated information theory measures consciousness by a metric, called phi, which essentially translates to how much power over Read More ›

Recently a criticism was leveled against Dembski’s 2005 paper Specification: the pattern that signifies intelligence. As is often the case, if you read the criticism carefully, you will realize that, even though he says Dembski is wrong, it turns out that the more exacting answer would favor Dembski’s conclusion more strongly, not less.
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From Phys.org: The study, presented at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., surveyed nearly 500 astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists and earth scientists to identify the core traits of exemplary scientists. “If you’re not curious, you’re probably not a real scientist,” he said. “The goal that you have is to find out something true about the world, regardless of what your preferred hypothesis might be. Your real drive is to find what is revealed by the data. This is absolutely essential in being a scientist.” Actually, if you’re not curious, you’re not a real thinker of any kind or for that matter a real science news writer. Far too much science news today Read More ›

From the blurb for Intelligent Evolution: An Alternate Theory of Evolution: Intelligent design is often depicted as science versus religion but this is not always the case. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, don’t follow any specific religion, and have come to the conclusion that the complexity of life suggests intelligent design. I believe microbes were designed by an intelligent entity and then released into the cold, vastness of space. Some haphazardly landed on our warm, wet planet and went on to evolve into everything we see here today, including us. This is ‘Intelligent Evolution’ because we evolved from intelligently designed microbes. Evidence of this and how these microbes took our planet from a barren, wet rock to a Read More ›

University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke reviews Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016) for the Christian Scientific Society here: The Discovery Institute has a long history of sponsoring and collaborating with a large number of highly intelligent, fascinating scientists who stand outside traditional Christian belief as well as outside the mainstream of evolutionary science. In keeping with this tradition, they have recently published Evolution: A Theory Still in Crisis, by Michael Denton, a followup to his famous book thirty years ago, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which influenced a whole generation of scientists to question the standard paradigm of evolution. In this book, Denton is not mainly just updating his previous arguments with data from the past Read More ›

From The Scientist: Neanderthals diverged from modern humans at least 430,000 years ago. Research in the last decade has estimated that the two hominid groups interbred multiple times in the last 60,000 years, during encounters in the Middle East and, later, in Eastern Europe. But a study published in Nature on Wednesday (February 17) has provided evidence that humans also interbred with Neanderthals 40 millennia previously. … “There is this joke in the population genetics community—there’s always one more interbreeding event,” Castellano told Nature. “As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding.” Along with emerging evidence of 100,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains in caves in Israel and southern Read More ›

Further to Intelligent design “horrifying” Because extinctions occur in the course of nature, philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say: The article quotes the letter writer as saying: The earth has experienced five mass extinctions. What kind of designer makes a system that periodically wipes out species for no apparent reason? Are these extinctions simply an “oops” moment on the part of the creator? This boils down to the statement, “No god I can conceive of would do such a thing,” with the emphasis on “I”. It never seems to enter the minds of the many people who make such statements that god might be completely other than the “I” making the statement. Any god who was limited to Read More ›

Starting our day’s coverage off right, we note a letter to the editor of the Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), warning a disbelieving world: In his Feb. 12 letter to the Argus Leader asserting “intelligent design is evidence-based and is science,” Bill Harris tells us he is a “Ph.D., professor of medicine, Sanford School of Medicine, University of South Dakota and president of OmegaQuant Analytics.” Apparently, we mere mortals are supposed to be impressed. Goodness. Some of us would think the doc did right to tell us other mere mortals where he is coming from. As in, Hi, I’m Denyse O’Leary, a news hack from Ottawa… So we’d expect him to know something about medicine the way you’d expect Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference’s logo contest just finished taking submissions. Vote for your favorite design!
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It’s no surprise that Coyne’s book is getting hostile reviews outside the new atheist community.  Closing off our religion coverage for the week, we note that prominent Darwinian evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible is, unsurprisingly, receiving hostile reviews outside the new atheist community. But what’s curious is their focus. From Austin L. Hughes at New Atlantis: Coyne’s basic strategy is to contrast two monolithic entities that he calls “religion” and “science.” But he constructs his two monoliths in diametrically opposite ways. The “religion” monolith consists of everything that has ever been said by any person belonging to any religion whatever, lumping together official dogma, theological speculation, and popular belief… Coyne’s procedure for describing Read More ›

Well, two decades have come and gone since Tom Wolfe announced that the soul had just died, and from the Guardian, a mixed review from Vaughn Bell: But Wolfe’s political biases may have served him well when considering one of the most contentious debates of the day: the role of biology in understanding violence. He mentions the Violence Initiative, a US government project to study the genetics of violent behaviour in inner cities. Already controversial, it was abandoned after the lead researcher gave a jaw-dropping speech that referred to the evolutionary basis of violence in monkeys and compared inner cities to a “jungle”. Wolfe rightly described this as being “the stupidest single word uttered by an American public official in Read More ›

As long as they are delusions caused by brain glitches: Further investigation revealed that damage to a specific area of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was linked to markedly increased mysticism. Previous research found that this brain region, located in the frontal lobes, is key to imposing inhibitions. “The frontal lobes are the most evolved areas of the human brain, and help control and make sense of the perceptual input we get from the world,” Grafman said. “When the frontal lobes’ inhibitory functions are suppressed, a door of perception can open, increasing the chances of mystical experiences.” Of course they do not mean a “door of perception” at all, as they make clear: The researchers suggested that Read More ›

From UCambridge: The claim is the central proposition of a new book by Tim Whitmarsh, Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. In it, he suggests that atheism – which is typically seen as a modern phenomenon – was not just common in ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, but probably flourished more in those societies than in most civilisations since. As a result, the study challenges two assumptions that prop up current debates between atheists and believers: Firstly, the idea that atheism is a modern point of view, and second, the idea of “religious universalism” – that humans are naturally predisposed, or “wired”, to believe in gods. The book argues that disbelief is Read More ›

From “This is how science lost God: Atheism, evolution and the long road to Richard Dawkins’ latest Twitter controversy,” a book excerpt from A Brief History of Creation at Salon: Voltaire’s views on religion, like his views on nearly everything else, were sometimes arbitrary and often contradictory. They were united in their hatred of superstition, and beyond that, little else. At times, his argument for God could appear utilitarian. He worried about whether morality could exist in a world devoid of a supreme being, a world in which good and evil were all relative. “If God did not exist,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to invent him.” Voltaire had a habit of quoting himself, a backhanded way of elevating Read More ›