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 Read More…
Month: February 2016
Lawyer for profs on tenure fact and fallacy
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 Read More…
God and Darwin: Why they simply cannot co-exist
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 Read More…
Gravitational waves reliably detected – Updated IV
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 Read More…
One random mutation powers multicellular life?
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 Read More…
Parkinson’s patients learn to use placebos?
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 Read More…
New Website: Advanced Apologetics
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 Read More…
On not letting transparency damage science…
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 Read More…
Past human population sizes questioned
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 Read More…
“Spectacular” convergence between ancient mammal and dinosaur
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 Read More…
Hawking: “Supertranslations” could save information from black hole?
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 Read More…
Is time an elemental part of nature?
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 Read More…
US election features fewer media airheads this time out?
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 Read More…
Larry Moran needs to do some more reading
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 Read More…
Censor of the Year: United Methodist Church Commission on the General Conference
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” Read More…