Monthly Archives: March 2016
ID-friendly Brazilian prof wins medal
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News |
A friend writes to draw attention to this. Skinny: Marcos Eberlin of the University of Campinas, Brazil, has received the 2016 Thomson Medal for outstanding achievement in mass spectrometry. This prize is awarded biennially by the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation, and will be presented at their upcoming meeting in Toronto. Eberlin is said to be […]
An open letter to Archbishop Jerome Listecki
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by vjtorley under academic freedom, Culture, Intelligent Design |
Your Excellency, I humbly ask you to strike a blow for academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom, by publicly forbidding Marquette University from calling itself a Catholic university henceforth, and by revoking the mandate of theology teachers at Marquette University to teach theology. In this letter, I’d like to explain why I believe these […]
Fish mouth filters have complex design
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Evolution, News |
People looking for easy-evolve simplicity missed this: From Nature Communications: Suspension-feeding fishes had been assumed to use dead-end mechanical sieving, in which fluid passes perpendicularly through the filter, whereas particles that are too large to exit through the pores are retained by sieving on the filter surface7. In contrast, crossflow filtration in suspension-feeding fish species […]
Low performance kids? Don’t blame the kid’s genes
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, News |
Says psychologist Oliver James at the Guardian: Low intelligence and high rates of mental illness are more common in poor people. Geneticists maintain that genes play a major role in causing both. But if they were right there would be an inexorable logic that suggests inferior DNA caused poor people to sink to the bottom […]
Humans in Germany 1 mya?
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Mind, News |
From Popular Archaeology: Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple ‘Mode 1’ stone tools. The […]
Mechanism for passing on epigenetic memories identified?
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, News |
From ScienceDaily: Dr. Rechavi and his team had previously identified a “small RNA inheritance” mechanism through which RNA molecules produced a response to the needs of specific cells and how they were regulated between generations. “We previously showed that worms inherited small RNAs following the starvation and viral infections of their parents. These small RNAs […]
Prehoda and Thornton Find New Levels of Serendipity
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Cell biology, Intelligent Design |
A recent study out of the University of Oregon purports to show the evolutionary pathway of a key protein that helps to control the mitotic spindle, a structure inside the dividing cell that distributes the chromosomes to the daughter cells. In fact the research adds to a growing line of evidence destructive of evolutionary theory. […]
Oldest known multicellulars are Ediacaran seaweed 555 mya
| March 31, 2016 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, News, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: Their age is estimated to be more than 555 million years old, placing the fossils in the last part of Precambrian times, called the Ediacaran Period. They provide a crucial view of Earth’s earliest evolution of multicellular life, which scientists now think started millions of years earlier than previously thought. … Scientists think […]
The metallome: New origin of life hopeful
| March 30, 2016 | Posted by News under News, Origin Of Life |
From Nautilus: A collection of metal atoms called the “metallome” helped drive evolution. The metallome is even changing how we think about life on other planets. The energy required to drive cyclic chemical reactions that are self-replicating—what we might call “life”—could come from reactions of the metallic elements. Our search for extraterrestrial life shouldn’t be […]
Flores man died out sooner than thought
| March 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, News |
Current humans killed them researchers say: From ScienceDaily: An ancient species of pint-sized humans discovered in the tropics of Indonesia may have met their demise earlier than once believed, according to scientists who reinvestigated the original finding. The group challenges reports that these inhabitants of remote Flores island co-existed with modern humans for tens of […]
Physicist admits hypocrisy about journal failings
| March 30, 2016 | Posted by News under News, Peer review, Physics |
From physics prof Philip Moriarity at Symptoms of the Universe: I’m going to put this as bluntly as I can; it’s been niggling and nagging at me for quite a while and it’s about time I got it off my chest. When it comes to publishing research, I have to come clean: I’m a hypocrite. […]
Darwin’s naturalist catechism
| March 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Culture, Darwinism, News |
Indoctrination provided painlessly through media and schools: From Salvo: Just as a fish doesn’t “notice” water unless the creek dries up, we often do not notice the catechism underlying the news stories, which forestalls our asking critical questions. Consider the story from late last summer that announced that chimpanzees and monkeys “have entered” the Stone […]
Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference Preview Completed
| March 29, 2016 | Posted by johnnyb under Intelligent Design |
UPDATE – updated title to reflect that the conference has already occurred now.
A Tunable Mechanism Determines the Duration of the Transgenerational Adaptations
| March 28, 2016 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Organisms adapt to environmental challenges. In fact, many different organisms adapt in non-homologous ways to many different, unforeseen, environments. This contradicts evolution. For we are not talking about random changes occurring by chance, occasionally getting luck enough to confer an adaptation, and then propagating throughout the population. We’re not talking about an evolutionary process of […]
AM-Nat Free Conference Preview Today!
| March 28, 2016 | Posted by johnnyb under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, News |
For those interested in attending the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference, we are doing a free preview session Tuesday (March 29th – today!) at 7:30 PM Central Time. Check back here tomorrow for more details. All you need is your web browser to join.
But why subscribe to New Scientist if they don’t know either?
| March 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
New Scientist keeps wanting me (O’Leary for News) to pay to read an article advertised as follows: Our last common ancestors It’s the original “missing link”: the extinct ape that is the common ancestor of chimps and humans. But we still don’t know what it looked like, or indeed, whether we can be sure there […]
Hugh Ross: ET blocks Carl Sagan’s calls
| March 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, News |
From Hugh Ross at Salvo: During my graduate school days at the University of Toronto (late 1960s) I took a short summer course, Advances in Planetary Physics, taught by astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan was a rising star then and well on his way to becoming the science popularizer and communicator for which he later became […]
Neurosurgeon: Apes are not fuzzy us
| March 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Animal minds, News |
From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Salvo: It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material, I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to […]
Not minding The Mind Club
| March 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience, News |
From the publisher’s copy for The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M.Wegner and Kurt Gray The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such […]
