From one Twitter feed, via a tipster: Kinesin (a motor protein) pulling a vesicle along cytoskeletal filament – the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time! The accompanying commentary from people for whom design in nature is a shocking idea is revealing. Once the profanities, incoherence, and irrelevancies are deleted, it is typically along the lines of: “To think that natural selection just somehow does this over billions of years is just so [deleted] neat!” and, of course, “Don’t be deceived by illusions of design. The actual process isn’t that simple… “ Right, kiddos. And so where is my Boltzmann brain then? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Ending our religion coverage for the week, from John Farrell at Forbes: It’s Time To Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’ His basic point is that it is all just evolution, and any talk of “theistic” is superfluous. And it’s well past its sell-by date. More. Farrell makes quite clear that there is no essential difference between “theistic” evolution and metaphysical  naturalism (nature is all there is). Of course there isn’t ny difference, except for sponsorship. To say that God created absolutely everything equally and that no design is especially evident anywhere means that an elemental atom is just the same as a human life or a human mind, or for that matter a religious revelation. Catholic chemist Stacy “Science in the Light Read More ›

Philosophers call it incommensurability—when the language and underlying concepts are so different, theorists cannot even have meaningful communication. Anyone who doubts the reality of incommensurability need look no farther than this weekend’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe” debate, where Stephen Meyer explained the random nature of evolution and the limits of natural selection, and evolutionists Lawrence Krauss and Denis Lamoureux denied any such thing, insisting that evolution is not random because, after all, natural selection provides the direction and creates new designs. The funny thing about this particular instance of incommensurability is that the evolutionist’s argument, which is a standard line, is, itself, incommensurate with evolutionary theory.  Read more

At Greg West’s follow-worthy blog, The Poached Egg, Wintery Knight summarized cosmologist Alan Lightman on the multiverse (in Harper’s 2015, but worth repeating): If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or Read More ›

Organisms have remarkable adaptation capabilities and evolutionists, ever since Darwin, have insisted that is powerful evidence of evolution. This is a blatant misrepresentation of science—when a heater turns on to warm the room do you think it must have therefore evolved?—and it is being revealed in the findings of epigenetics and directed adaptation. As I recently explained (The New Epigenetic Lie), rather than acknowledge and reckon with these findings, evolutionists have resorted to a two-prong canard: (i) claim that evolution knew it all along and (ii) claim that directed adaptation is simply a mode of evolutionary change. In other words, after resisting and rejecting directed adaptation for a century—and holding back science in the process—evolutionists are now claiming it as Read More ›

  That is, are our brains shaped for fitness, not for truth? From a review in Catholic World Report: We began…by noting that our view of consciousness is the new field upon which the academic and cultural battle between materialism, panpsychism, and transcendentalism is being waged. We now see that the outcome of this battle will not only affect our personal view of life’s purpose, the world, human dignity, and human value, but also the culture’s outlook on these important ideas and ideals. Jesus’ proclamation that ‘the truth will make you free’ (Jn. 8:32) is particularly important here—for if we and the culture falsely underestimate our purpose, dignity, value, and destiny, we will also unnecessarily restrict our freedom and potential Read More ›

From Aeon: Nigel Warburton, author of A Little History of Philosophy (2011) vs. Jules Evans, Policy Director, Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary U London: NW: I suppose this all turns on what you think philosophy is. I see philosophy as an activity of thinking critically about what we are and where we stand in relation to the world, an activity with a long and rich history. Philosophy is concerned with how things are, the limits of what we can know, and how we should live. It is anti-dogmatic and thrives on questioning assumptions. No serious philosophy is likely to leave the philosopher unchanged, but that doesn’t mean that the change will be for the better or Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our empathetic impulses — and temporarily disabling other regions that oppose those impulses — two UCLA neuroscientists are coming down on the optimistic side of human nature. “Our altruism may be more hard-wired than previously thought,” said Leonardo Christov-Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior. The findings, reported in two recent studies, also point to a possible way to make people behave in less selfish and more altruistic ways, said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a UCLA psychiatry professor. “This is potentially groundbreaking,” he said. (Abstract, paywall) More. Presumably, citizens would be force-fed AltrientsTM instead of nutrients. Otherwise, it’s hard to think of a Read More ›

From BBC: Meat and tools, not the advent of cooking, was the trigger that freed early humans to develop a smaller chewing apparatus, a study suggests. This in turn may have allowed other changes, such as improved speech and even shifts in the size of the brain. The authors note that cooking became commonplace much later. They argue that it was the stone tools, not cooking, that made the difference. One of the possible reasons for these changes, cooking, did not become commonplace until 500,000 years ago, the researchers found. This means that it probably did not play a significant role in the evolution of smaller chewing muscles and teeth. They tested their idea on human subjects. The findings suggest Read More ›

In tonight’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe,” debate, the topic of protein evolution induced a long sequence of blunders. Lawrence Krauss attempted to compare a protein to a snowflake. If snowflakes spontaneously arise, then why not protein-coding genes? When Stephen Meyer called him on his absurdity, Krauss doubled down, making the ludicrous claim that there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake, and that Shannon’s information theorem would tell you that.  Read more

Lawrence Krauss just finished his opening statement in the “What’s Behind It All? God, Science,and the Universe,” and he once demonstrated what drives evolutionary thought. His arguments from dysteleology said it all. The universe, the physicist from Arizona State University explained, is inhospitable. It is not user-friendly, and in most places, would kill you instantly. And we all know that a Creator would never do such a thing.  Read more

Pro ID Steve Meyer. No ID Larry Krauss. As noted here, and live streamed: A discussion of Evolution, Intelligent Design and Creation, featuring Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer and Denis Lamoureux. Live at Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto. Sponsored by Wycliffe College in partnership with Faith Today, Power to Change, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and the Network of Christian Scholars. Questions like these will be posed to the panel: How did the universe originate? Does God play any role in the cosmos? What is the relationship between science and religion? Readers have probably heard of Steve Meyer and Larry Krauss. More. Lamoureux is a Canadian U Alberta religion and science prof, and this story gives some sense of his Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London have found the oldest fossils of the familiar pine tree that dominates Northern Hemisphere forests today. The 140-million-year-old fossils (dating from the Cretaceous ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’) are exquisitely preserved as charcoal, the result of burning in wildfires. The fossils suggest that pines co-evolved with fire at a time when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher and forests were especially flammable. More. From Dispatch Tribunal: The 7mm long fossil pushes back the date of pine tree origin by 11 million years as a previous fossil was dated 129 million years old, making the fossils discovered from Windsor as the oldest known fossils of Read More ›

Worrying on behalf of the Sixth Great Extinction, Patrick Monahan at Science: … That’s why Roy Plotnick, a paleontologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and lead author of the study, thinks about far-flung scenarios involving future paleontologists. “We really need to look at modern day extinctions as if they were in the fossil record already, in order to make a comparison,” he says. So he and his colleagues searched fossil databases for modern mammal species—both those threatened by extinction and those that aren’t—to see how many modern extinctions would be detectable by relying only on fossils. Humans have recorded fossils for just 9% of the world’s threatened modern mammal species, the team reports this month in Ecology Letters. Nonthreatened Read More ›

So far known: “rope-like structure similar to that of some modern-day fungi” Cambridge Research News: This early pioneer, known as Tortotubus, displays a structure similar to one found in some modern fungi, which likely enabled it to store and transport nutrients through the process of decomposition. Although it cannot be said to be the first organism to have lived on land, it is the oldest fossil of a terrestrial organism yet found. The results are published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. Here (public access). From BBC: Most scientists agree that life moved from the sea to the land between 500 and 450 million years ago. But in order for plants and animals to gain a foothold on terra Read More ›