Monthly Archives: April 2016
Are we alone in the universe? Probably, but…
| April 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, News |
For whom is that a problem? Escience News attempts to set some limits to our uniqueness Frank said that the third big question–how long civilizations might survive–is still completely unknown. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long or […]
Major human extinction more likely to kill you than traffic accident
| April 30, 2016 | Posted by News under extinction, Human evolution, News |
Yeh, the End of All Thing IS at hand. File yer tax return first, okay? The government needs the money. Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic channels the best of science: Nuclear war. Climate change. Pandemics that kill tens of millions. These are the most viable threats to globally organized civilization. They’re the stuff of nightmares and […]
Another naturalist slam at free will
| April 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Scientific American via Business Insider: In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously […]
Earth shatters at new physics find?
| April 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, News, Physics |
From CERN researcher Pauline Gagnon at Aeon: Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery The Higgs boson filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, but this model is itself clearly incomplete. None of its particles has the properties of dark matter, a mysterious entity that is five times as prevalent as […]
Evolution Arguments Are Not Holding Water
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Darwinism, Darwinist rhetorical tactics, Intelligent Design |
Being an evolutionist means never having to say you’re sorry. Just look at Richard Dawkins who will say pretty much anything at any time, no matter how much it contradicts science or just plain logic. If he ever gets into trouble he can always lapse back into a rant about those creationist rascals and the […]
Sell your stock in volcanic vents
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by News under News, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: The crucibles that bore out building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, not fiery cataclysms, but modest puddles. Researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding the evolutionary mystery of how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed. […]
Peer review: Troubled from the start
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, Peer review |
From Nature: Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What’s more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, […]
“Here we report a new cell”
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by Upright BiPed under Information, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
. Cells are the fundamental units of life. The genome sequence of a cell may be thought of as its operating system. It carries the code that specifies all of the genetic functions of the cell, which in turn determine the cellular chemistry, structure, replication, and other characteristics. Each genome contains instructions for universal functions […]
If math is not real, BS stats are okay. Right?
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Mathematics, News |
Why do people who think math is just something humans evolved to relate to our world (and has only an accidental relationship with correctness) think it is important if statistics are just made up? Clearly they do care (language warning), as is evident from an interview with stats critic Tim Harford More or Less at […]
Breaking: Carnivores ate humans 500k ago
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, News |
From ScienceDaily: Early humans may have been food for carnivores 500,000 years ago Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone found in a Moroccan cave indicate that it was consumed by large carnivores, likely hyenas, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Camille Daujeard from the Muséum […]
Climate Hustle: Armageddon-free look at climate change
| April 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Climate change, Global Warming, Intelligent Design, News |
From Paul Driessen at Townhall: I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh […]
New Scientist tells us what human gene traits conquered world
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, News, speciation |
Here: Dozens of genes found in humans today have been traced to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They made their way into the human species when some of our direct ancestors mated with ancient lineages that are now extinct. Interbreeding like this happened in Africa and in Eurasia, producing many human hybrids – you can read more […]
Denton: Vast majority of taxa defined without ancestral forms
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Evolution, News |
From Michael Denton, in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Incongruous thought it might seem (in the context of the evolutionary propaganda machine and especially to a reader outside of academia), it remains true, as I point out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), that the vast majority of all taxa are indeed […]
Science: The Victim of Ideology ‘Uber Alles’
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by PaV under academic freedom, Climate change, General interest, Intellectual freedom, Media |
Here’s a link to an article from American Thinker that details how, in Ohio, the Univ. of Cincinnati did a three year study on the effects of oil-well “fracking,” the results of which demonstrate no contamination of ground water had occurred because of “fracking.” And then the study was quashed.
Poached Egg’s common sense cosmology
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, News |
Take two of these: 4) We cannot appeal to the singularity as the cause of the universe. If the big bang singularity is precisely nothing, we are left with the question of how the universe then came into existence out of nothing. Others have argued that a big bang singularity would be a real physical […]
Horizontal gene transfer: Mapping antibiotic resistance
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding […]
Why AI won’t wipe out humanity?
| April 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Naturalism, News |
Possibly because naturalists will be there ahead of it: At CNBC, futurist Michio Kaku explains that we are still the cavemen of 100,000 years ago (his “caveman principle”), so we just aren’t comfortable with brain implants and machines as persons. He goes on to say, “I think the ‘Terminator’ idea is a reasonable one — […]
Insects have minds?
| April 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Animal minds, News |
From UK Independent: Insects have a form of consciousness, according to a new paper that might show us how our own began. Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentric behaviour, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience. … Clearly, the […]
Parallel development in crocodile eyes
| April 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution |
From ScienceDaily: Long-snouted crocodylians in South America, India evolved separately to adopt river-dwelling lifestyle, protruding eyes The 13-million-year-old fossils of an extinct crocodylian, named ‘the storyteller,’ suggest that South American and Indian species evolved separately to acquire protruding, ‘telescoped’ eyes for river-dwelling, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS […]
Whence Intelligence?
| April 27, 2016 | Posted by PaV under Intelligent Design |
Scientists have discovered that the tiny, single cells show the hallmarks of intelligence. At Phys.Org they report on a study conducted by a Belgian and French team. Here’s a snippet from Phys.Org: A slime made up of independent, single cells, they found, can “learn” to avoid irritants despite having no central nervous system. “Tantalizing results […]
