Readers of these pages are familiar with the logical fallacy known as Miller’s Mendacity.  From our glossary: Miller’s Mendacity is a particular type of strawman fallacy frequently employed by Darwinists. It invariably consists of the following two steps: 1. Erect the strawman: The Darwinist falsely declares that intelligent design is based on the following assertion: If something is improbable it must have been designed. 2. Demolish the strawman: The Darwinist then demonstrates an improbable event that was obviously not designed (such as dealing a particular hand of cards from a randomized deck), and declares “ID is demolished because I have just demonstrated an extremely improbable event that was obviously not designed.” Miller’s Mendacity is named for Brown University biochemist Ken Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers recently discovered that alligators and related crocodilian species have a previously unknown second jaw joint that helps to distribute the extreme force of their bite, which is the most powerful of any living animal. The finding raises new questions about the evolution of our own meager-by-comparison jaws and could potentially lead to a better understanding of common jaw disorders. When we discovered that crocs had built this new jaw joint, it made us re-evaluate how mammals actually evolved our jaw joint and reinterpret what we thought we knew about where parts of our jaw joint came from,” said Casey Holliday, Ph.D., assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Missouri, who led the research. “It’s one of Read More ›

Commenting on recent theoretical physics debates in New York City, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit writes at Not even Wrong about what happens when multiverse theory is just assumed to be true: At 7 pm the American Museum of Natural History will host the 2016 Asimov Debate, with this year the topic Is the Universe a Simulation?. You can watch a livestream at that site. I confess that if this were a few days earlier, I would be convinced it was definitely a joke. But, it seems not, that instead this “has become a serious line of theoretical and experimental investigation among physicists, astrophysicists, and philosophers” and that it’s a “provocative and revolutionary idea”. One thing this is not is new. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, a series of Siberian volcanoes erupted and sent the Earth into the greatest mass extinction of all time. As a result of this mass extinction, known as the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction, billions of tons of carbon were propelled into the atmosphere, radically altering the Earth’s climate. Yet, some animals thrived in the aftermath and scientists now know why. In a new study published in Scientific Reports, a team of international paleontologists, including postdoctoral scholar Adam Huttenlocker of the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah, demonstrate that ancient mammal relatives known as therapsids were suited to the drastic climate change by having shorter life expectancies and would have Read More ›

From Nature: The original claim comes from the DAMA collaboration, whose detector sits in a laboratory deep under the Gran Sasso Massif, east of Rome. For more than a decade, it has reported overwhelming evidence1 for dark matter, an invisible substance thought to bind galaxies together through its gravitational attraction. The first of the new detectors to go online, in South Korea, is due to start taking data in a few weeks. The others will follow over the next few years in Spain, Australia and, again, Gran Sasso. All will use sodium iodide crystals to detect dark matter, which no full-scale experiment apart from DAMA’s has done previously. Scientists have substantial evidence that dark matter exists and is at least Read More ›

From Salk Institute: LA JOLLA—By adolescence, your brain already contains most of the neurons that you’ll have for the rest of your life. But a few regions continue to grow new nerve cells—and require the services of cellular sentinels, specialized immune cells that keep the brain safe by getting rid of dead or dysfunctional cells. Now, Salk scientists have uncovered the surprising extent to which both dying and dead neurons are cleared away, and have identified specific cellular switches that are key to this process. … “It appears as though a significant fraction of cell death in neurogenic regions is not due to intrinsic death of the cells but rather is a result of the microglia themselves, which are killing Read More ›

Here is the second preview session for the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism 2016 Online Conference. The actual conference will be held online on April 16th.

Evolutionists are going to need a bigger rug as Yale professor Andrew Xiao now has a new pile of stuff he is absurdly trying to ascribe to evolution. Xiao’s team has confirmed that in mammals the fundamental epigenetic signal—the methyl group—is sometimes attached to a second type of DNA base. DNA is made up of four types of bases (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] and thymine [T]) and, as in the lower species, methyl groups are sometimes attached to adenine in mammals as well.  Read more

From PNAS: Significance: A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis: the proposal that universal human behaviors are underpinned by strong, domain-specific, innate constraints on cognition. We use a general model of the processes that shape human behavior—learning, culture, and biological evolution—to test the evolutionary plausibility of this hypothesis. A series of analyses shows that culture radically alters the relationship between natural selection and cognition. Culture facilitates rapid biological adaptation yet rules out nativism: Behavioral universals arise that are underpinned by weak biases rather than strong innate constraints. We therefore expect culture to have dramatically shaped the evolution of the human mind, giving us innate predispositions that only weakly constrain our behavior. (public access) More. It’s sometimes hard Read More ›

Happens: From Amy Ellis Nutt at the Washington Post: While criminal cases against scientists are rare, they are increasing. Jail time is even rarer, but not unheard of. Last July, Dong-Pyou Han, a former biomedical scientist at Iowa State University, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of making false statements to obtain NIH research grants and was sentenced to more than four years in prison.More. The situation was pretty serious; he was claiming hopeful findings from AIDS research. Since 2000, the number of U.S. academic fraud cases in science has risen dramatically. Five years ago, the journal Nature tallied the number of retractions in the previous decade and revealed they had shot up 10-fold. About half of the retractions were Read More ›

Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic. has a new book out, The Death of Humanity. Here’s some info from Evolution News & Views: Although Weikart points out the many sources at work in diminishing the centrality humanity in our social and moral relations, one that recurs is Darwinism. This is for good reason. Darwin himself expressed the two foundational sources of the attack on anthropocentrism, an assault that unfortunately “is becoming mainstream in our ‘culture of death’” (4). First is the notion that regard for our special mental attributes is little more than self-centered arrogance. The second, related to the first, is that human beings are really not unique and are, in fact, just another Read More ›

Asks Andreas von Bubnoff at Nautilus: Susan M. Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine, quotes Adams’ “(deliciously) askew” story in a research paper on mutations in evolution as an example of how, according to standard neo-Darwinian theory, evolution does not work. Organisms, all good students know, do not generate rapid genetic mutations in response to their environment. There are exceptions, such as mutations spurred by certain chemicals or radiation. In general, though, mutations, the raw material for natural selection, accumulate slowly in dividing cells, as the result of accidental errors in the way cells copy or repair their genetic material. The environment plays a role only later, selecting the most viable mutants. But after more than two Read More ›

From The Scientist: A longtime consultant to NASA and a member of the scientific advisory committee for Biosphere 2 (the largest-ever enclosed ecosystem), Morowitz was a strong advocate for a theory of emergence of life from chemical and physical principles. In the 1983 McLean v. Arkansas case over teaching creationism in schools, he provided an expert opinion, testifying in front of the court that the creationist view of life’s origins has no basis in science. More. Also: New York Times: Once, when he received a birthday card that assessed a human body’s raw materials at only 97 cents, he recalculated the cost based on synthesized ingredients from a biochemical company catalog and re-evaluated his worth at more than $6 million. Read More ›

This is just to illustrate a point in further reply to MT: To put things into perspective, let us put in Jesus and Mohammed: As further context, and bearing in mind that the band Google trusts the most is 1800 – 2000, broad-brush trends since 1500 may be seen by adding God and the Bible: There is a live thread as linked, comment there please. END

This just in from David Snoke: University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science is also running a conference on design themes in biology April 15-16: If you are coming to the Annual meeting April 15-16, consider extending your stay to come a little earlier and depart a little later. The world-renowned Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy of Science is having a meeting that runs through the day on Friday and in the afternoon on Saturday. Details here. Some relevant ideas unpacked here. From David Snoke at the Christian Scientific Society: Annual Meeting is in two weeks; late registration fees apply starting next week The annual meeting is coming up soon, in less than two weeks! This year we are applying Read More ›