From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: There are countless people who use the following rationale to justify why there was no need for an intelligent creator behind life – evolution has had a near-infinite number of trials in which to create the full diversity of life, including its molecular machines, molecular computers, and digitally encoded genomes. Here, we will take an opportunity to examine these points more closely. In other scientific disciplines, the first step one must take before figuring out a solution, is to establish the boundary conditions within which a problem must be solved. Since we should require the same standard of scientific rigour from evolutionary biology, let us calculate an extreme upper limit for the total number of Read More ›

Were we talking nearly $9 million? From beneficiary Evolution Institute: My interest in the EES arose in the aftermath of the Altenberg meeting. It was clear that the notion of an extended synthesis divided the evolutionary biology community, generating both enormous excitement and strong negative responses. However, I held the view that the negativity arose primarily from the absence of a clear rationale for an EES, and the mistaken perception that the EES was a rejection of neo-Darwinism. If it were possible to harness the enthusiasm and new ideas, whilst at the same time circumventing the concerns of more orthodox evolutionists, then the EES could prove a stimulant to the field. Love it! “Mistaken perception that the EES was a Read More ›

From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science: For many evolutionary biologists, nothing gets their dander up faster than suggesting evolution is anything other than the process of natural selection, acting on random mutations. So some are uneasy that the John Templeton Foundation has awarded $8.7 million to U.K., Swedish, and U.S. researchers for experimental and theoretical work intended to put a revisionist view of evolution, the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis, on a sounder footing. Using a variety of plants, animals, and microbes, the researchers will study the possibility that organisms can influence their own evolution and that inheritance can take place through routes other than the genetic material. Critics are against evolutionary biologists accepting this money and argue that evolutionary theory already Read More ›

From Adam Marcus at Stat News: What do Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese have in common? Fun fact: Both evidently review scientific manuscripts for money. … The EditPub site (which seemed on Thursday to be no longer up and running), is almost entirely in Chinese, but its homepage bills it as a “service center for scientific research.” Its existence came to light earlier this month after the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted a 2015 article by a group from Dalian University in China. According to the journal, EditPub had “compromised” the peer review process in a way that the journal has so far refused to make public. The retraction is but the latest in some 300 similar instances of Read More ›

Note to self: Toss out dictionary Recently, we looked at the way Richard Dawkins made Darwinian evolution sound so easy that people who don’t want to do much thinking—but do want to feel up-to-date—embraced it. And it has been easy for them to persecute dissenters with a good conscience because, in fairness, most of them never had enough real grasp of the issues to understand why there could be any dissent. Or sufficient curiosity to wonder. A great package, if you like, for union science teachers, especially “aren’t I good?” girls. Much of that has to do with Dawkins’ skill with language, which is not at all the same thing as having correct information or great ideas. But it usually Read More ›

It was Henri Bergson’s fault, and the issue was time, says Jimena Canales at Nautilus: According to Einstein, philosophy had been used to explain the relation between psychology and physics. “The time of the philosopher, I believe, is a psychological and physical time at the same time,” he explained in Paris. But relativity, by focusing on very fast phenomena, had shown just how off-the-mark psychological perceptions of time really were. Psychological conceptions of time, Einstein insisted, were not only simply in error, they just did not correspond to anything concrete. “These are nothing more than mental constructs, logical entities.” Because of the enormous speed of light, humans had “instinctively” generalized their conception of simultaneity and mistakenly applied it to the Read More ›

Start your day with pasta: Further to Pastafarians not giving up their claim to be a religion, we hear lawyers seeking clients are asking: Do You Have To Accommodate An Employee Who Worships The Flying Spaghetti Monster? JD Supra: Employers are generally aware of their duty to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs. Whether that means rearranging work schedules, permitting modifications to dress codes, permitting prayer breaks, or any number of other alterations, you know that the law requires you to be flexible when it comes to religion. But what if your employee claims he is a “Pastafarian” who worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster? A recent case from Nebraska might shed some light on your religious accommodation obligations. We didn’t say “asking Read More ›

Yes, even First Things. From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a Read More ›

Open access paper, too, from PLOS: A universal Tree of Life (TOL) has long been a goal of molecular phylogeneticists, but reticulation at the level of genes and possibly at the levels of cells and species renders any simple interpretation of such a TOL, especially as applied to prokaryotes, problematic. … So, even a tree of cellular lineages is not an unproblematic concept. Students of animals and plants have long accepted that incomplete lineage sorting, introgression, and full-species hybridization pose difficulties for the sorts of trees that Darwin might have had us draw. But it is microbes, with their promiscuous willingness to exchange genes between widely separated branches of any “tree,” that have most seriously jeopardized the neo-Darwinian synthesis, in Read More ›

A thought re Barry Arrington’s thread, MIT Atmospheric Physicist Explains What Everyone Should Know about Climate Alarmism: Maybe we are missing the real problem: In itself, global warming is just the latest a-crock-alypse by which green daycare moms compete in the middle class virtue stakes. And swindlers get rich. But what’s new there? We can be glad when the swindlers are not also murderers. They sometimes are. But readers, do consider the readiness with which Heat Doom morphs into a state religion, giving proponents the right to persecute dissenters. With so much money and power at stake, too. Cf Bill Nye open to jail time for climate change skeptics It’s most likely that the problem will be exported to other Read More ›

The dinosaurs, we are now told, were dying out before the asteroid hit. From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Manabu Sakamoto from the University of Reading has shown that dinosaur species were going extinct faster than new ones were appearing, for at least 40 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The dinosaur opera had already been going through a long diminuendo well before the asteroid ushered in its final coda. Many other researchers had looked at the fates of the dinosaurs before that infamous extinction event and suggested that they were already declining. But most of these studies had simply tabulated raw numbers of species from different blocks of time. This approach has problems: the rocks from certain Read More ›

Physicist Geoffrey West in an Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: Do zoologists own the evolution discussion? Geoffrey West: To a large extent the answer is yes they do own it, and they have to some extent cornered the market. They believe, perhaps rightly so, that they have all of the expertise. But clearly, other areas of biology, and also other sciences such as physics, chemistry and computer science should be an integral part of the conversation. The upcoming Royal Society meeting on evolution that you’ve been writing about, which has eminent biologists and philosophers represented, basically has almost no scientists from the hard sciences, which is where some of the important answers and insights are potentially going to Read More ›

Word is, in the “mystery function” fraction of the minimal cell Syn 3.0 genome—149 genes of the 473 essential set do not have any known associated functions, but they are demonstrably needed for Syn 3.0’s viability. That’s nearly a third of the essential hardware. From Geekwire: Because the functions of the genes are unknown, the researchers didn’t know they were needed until they were gone. That shows how far geneticists still have to go in understanding how life works. “We know about two-thirds of essential biology. We’re missing a third,” Venter said. Project leader Clyde Hutchison, a researcher at the J. Craig Venter Institute, said some of the genes appear to play a role in transporting small molecules around the Read More ›

Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change. Here.  

It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. And so it is with epigenetics which evolutionists opposed and blackballed for a century before finally appropriating it as just another mode of evolutionary change. (see here, here, andhere for more discussion of this history of misdirections regarding Lamarckism and epigenetics). Here is an example of evolutionists, after a century of denial and rejection, claiming epigenetics as their own.  Read more