From the Guardian: Richard Dawkins stroke forces delay of Australia and New Zealand tour … Management for the 74-year-old author of The God Delusion said he had suffered a “minor stroke” in the UK last Saturday but had already returned home from hospital. The health scare has caused him to postpone his tour, his management said in a message passed on to ticket holders on Friday. … The events were to be centred around his recently published second memoir and 13th book, Brief Candle in the Dark. His first book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, has sold more than 1m copies. The God Delusion, the 2006 book for which he is best known, has sold more than 3m copies. Read More ›

From TENURE: Fact or Fallacy?: In the last 18 of my 27 years of practice I have focused on representing faculty, staff and students at state and private universities. I have discovered and confirmed that tenure at state universities only protects what needs no protection. Tenure in essence only protects professors who the administration does not want to fire. It does not protect tenured faculty who the administration has decided to terminate. How so? … Actually, the final step of the process is normally a decision by the Board of Regents to either support or reject the President’s recommendation or a faculty committee’s recommendation. My experience has shown that with a recommendation to terminate from the top administrators, a Board Read More ›

As UD readers know, Charles Darwin changed history when he argued that naturalistic processes, acting alone, can drive the macro-evolutionary process from beginning to end. His earth-shattering message was that nature’s pseudo-creative mechanism can mimic the work of a designing Creator. That he could not support his claim with empirical evidence did not seem to bother him very much. From then until now, the texture of the argument has not changed. Neo-Darwinists, without a shred of evidence, and in the name of disinterested science, declare that nature can produce biodiversity all by itself, which means, without God’s help. Incredibly, some well-meaning Christians try to argue the God “used” this aimless mechanism to achieve his specific goal of creating man. “What’s Read More ›

Paper. (open access) From MIT: LIGO signal reveals first observation of two massive black holes colliding, proves Einstein right. Now for the first time, scientists in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration — with a prominent role played by researchers at MIT and Caltech — have directly observed the ripples of gravitational waves in an instrument on Earth. In so doing, they have again dramatically confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity and opened up a new way in which to view the universe. But there’s more: The scientists have also decoded the gravitational wave signal and determined its source. According to their calculations, the gravitational wave is the product of a collision between two massive black holes, 1.3 billion light years away Read More ›

The Darwinian begins to sound like an overconfident historian. From ScienceDaily: All it took was one mutation more than 600 million years ago. With that random act, a new protein function was born that helped our single-celled ancestor transition into an organized multicellular organism. This release features Prehoda’s lab’s work on choranoflagellates (featured here and here already). But then notice how it all gets qualified: Prehoda and colleagues then used ancestral protein reconstruction, a technique devised at the UO by co-author Joseph W. Thornton, a biologist now at the University of Chicago. By using gene sequencing and computational methods to move backward in the evolutionary tree, researchers can see molecular changes and infer how proteins performed in the deep past. Read More ›

From Jo Marchant in Nature: Study suggests how dummy pills might reduce drug doses in routine care. For some conditions — such as pain and immune disorders — trials have shown2 that it is possible to train people to respond to placebos, although this practice hasn’t made its way into clinical care. Benedetti and his colleagues wondered whether the same effect might be possible for neurological disorders. They studied 42 people with advanced Parkinson’s disease who were having electrodes implanted into their brains for a therapy called deep brain stimulation, which eases symptoms by stimulating affected brain areas directly. That surgery gave Benedetti’s team a rare opportunity to measure the activity of individual neurons in the thalamus, a brain region Read More ›

Last week, I launched my new website, AdvancedApologetics.net. The website contains information on my upcoming speaking engagements and debates, as well as upcoming online meetings of my Advanced Apologetics mentoring group. It also features a blog, and links to the collection of videos available at my YouTube Channel. My interests that are covered on the website include intelligent design, as well as other areas relating to worldview and philosophy. Check it out here.

Climatologist Judith Curry, mainly controversial for letting research findings determine her views rather than the needs of Big Climate, draws attention to a recent article in Nature, Don’t let transparency damage science, Stephan Lewandowsky & Dorothy Bishop, essentially arguing for censorship in science in order to protect Big Agendas. We can all think of a few besides the GlobalWarming Apocalypse, apparent successor to The Population Bomb. She quotes from it, with responses: Many organized attacks call for more data, often with the aim of finding an analysis method that makes undesirable results go away [JC note: most would call that ‘skepticism’]. Even when data availability is described in papers, tension may still arise if researchers do not trust the good Read More ›

Precise claims for the size of a bottleneck might be meaningless. From Heredity: On the importance of being structured: instantaneous coalescence rates and human evolution-lessons for ancestral population size inference? Abstract: Most species are structured and influenced by processes that either increased or reduced gene flow between populations. However, most population genetic inference methods assume panmixia and reconstruct a history characterized by population size changes. This is potentially problematic as population structure can generate spurious signals of population size change through time. Moreover, when the model assumed for demographic inference is misspecified, genomic data will likely increase the precision of misleading if not meaningless parameters. For instance, if data were generated under an n-island model (characterized by the number of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: By poring over the fossilized skulls of ancient wildebeest-like animals (Rusingoryx atopocranion) unearthed on Kenya’s Rusinga Island, researchers have discovered that the little-known hoofed mammals had a very unusual, trumpet-like nasal passage similar only to the nasal crests of lambeosaurine hadrosaur dinosaurs. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 4 offer “a spectacular example” of convergent evolution between two very distantly related taxa and across tens of millions of years, the researchers say. “The nasal dome is a completely new structure for mammals– it doesn’t look like anything you could see in an animal that’s alive today,” says Haley O’Brien of Ohio University, Athens. “The closest example would be hadrosaur dinosaurs with half-circle Read More ›

From Hawking’s second Reith lecture: The tranny From BBC: It was therefore very important to determine whether information really was lost in black holes, or whether in principle, it could be recovered. Many scientists felt that information should not be lost, but no one could suggest a mechanism by which it could be preserved. The arguments went on for years. Finally, I found what I think is the answer. It depends on the idea of Richard Feynman, that there isn’t a single history, but many different possible histories, each with their own probability. In this case, there are two kinds of history. In one, there is a black hole, into which particles can fall, but in the other kind there Read More ›

Prof asks. From ScienceDaily: In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Associate Professor Joan Vaccaro challenges the long-held presumption that time evolution — the incessant unfolding of the universe over time — is an elemental part of Nature. In the paper, entitled “Quantum asymmetry between time and space,” she suggests there may be a deeper origin due to a difference between the two directions of time: to the future and to the past. … According to the paper, an asymmetry exists between time and space in the sense that physical systems inevitably evolve over time whereas there is no corresponding ubiquitous translation over space. This asymmetry, long presumed to be elemental, is represented by Read More ›

Readers, I haven’t heard a single wherewherewheredoeshstandonevolution? from a deeply concerned blonde since before Wisconsin prez hopeful Scott Walker dropped out, some while back. I am agog! Am aghast! Has Bimbo read a book at last? Aw, you know the sort of thing I mean: Here, from Matt Vespa: Time magazine found Walker’s old science teacher–Ann Serpe–from high school to solve the evolution puzzle surrounding him. He was said to be accepting of all the lessons taught to him, according to Serpe (via Time): Huh? There is no evolution puzzle surrounding Walker. He has no more information than the average well-read person, and in the age of ISIS, evolution is really only of interest to those of us who were Read More ›

I had intended to write a post on whales as products of Intelligent Design. But the whales will have to wait. In the space of just three hours, Professor Larry Moran has put up two remarkably silly posts. And in both cases, Professor Moran could have spared himself the embarrassment if he had done just a little more reading. The first post, titled, Can theology produce true knowledge?, critiques Dr. Denis Alexander’s claim that there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing besides science. Professor Moran thinks this is flawed on three counts: first, natural theology is question-begging because “you have to assume the existence of a creator god before you would even think of interpreting the natural world as Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Closed Minds, Closed Doors: United Methodist Church Commission Is Censor of the Year It is unclear who on the Commission participated in deciding to exclude Discovery Institute from the church’s upcoming General Conference, and thereby censor discussion of intelligent design. When we inquired, we were told only that the “leadership” of the Commission made the decision. The UMC — with its motto of “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” — refuses to disclose who made up this shadowy “leadership” group. So the best we can do is bestow COTY on the Commission. Certainly, we mean no criticism of United Methodists as a whole, many of whom support ID and free speech, and have vigorously objected Read More ›