June 2016

From Retraction Watch: Pro-life activists have asked JAMA to retract a 2005 paper that suggested fetuses can’t feel pain before the third trimester. Critics are arguing that newer findings have shown pain sensation appears earlier in gestation, yet the 2005 data continue to be cited in the discussion around abortion. What’s more, they note, some of the authors failed to mention their ties to the abortion industry. The 2005 paper has been cited 191 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science. We spoke with Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief at JAMA and The JAMA Network, who told us something similar to what he said last week, when PETA asked to retract a paper they claim could be harmful to Read More ›

The same way naturalism builds rubble. From Kathleen McAuliffe at Aeon: Our ancestors reacted to parasites with overwhelming revulsion, wiring the brain for morals, manners, politics and laws There’s a clear pattern to these findings, as an investigation by Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, psychologists at the University of British Columbia, reveals. People who are reminded of the threat of infectious disease are more inclined to espouse conventional values and express greater disdain for anyone who violates societal norms. Disease cues might even make us more favourably disposed toward religion. In one study, participants exposed to a noxious odour were subsequently more likely to endorse biblical truth than those not subjected to the polluted air. When we’re worried about disease, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: If ‘Lucy’ wasn’t alone, who else was in her neighborhood? Key fossil discoveries over the last few decades in Africa indicate that multiple early human ancestor species lived at the same time more than 3 million years ago. A new review of fossil evidence from the last few decades examines four identified hominin species that co-existed between 3.8 and 3.3 million years ago during the middle Pliocene. More. Paper. – Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Stephanie M. Melillo, and Denise F. Su. The Pliocene hominin diversity conundrum: Do more fossils mean less clarity? PNAS, June 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521266113 … aleoanthropologists face the challenges and debates that arise from small sample sizes, poorly preserved prehistoric specimens and lack of evidence for Read More ›

Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism Never Read More ›

Yes, that’s just what it sounds like. Every morning, the alarm clock rings, and there is a new theory of consciousness. Today’s contender is from Michael Graziano at Atlantic: Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory Read More ›

From Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): The grand river of life that has flowed on earth over the past four billion years has clearly not meandered slowly and steadily across some flat and featureless landscape, but tumbled constantly through a rugged landscape over endless cataracts and rapids. No matter how unfashionable, no matter how at odds with current thinking in evolutionary biology, there is no empirical evidence for believing that organic nature is any less discontinuous than the inorganic realm. There is not the slightest reason for believing that the major homologs were achieved gradually via functional continuums. It is only the a priori demands of Darwinian causation that have imposed continuity on a basically discontinuous Read More ›

An intriguing idea is introduced by Neel S. Patel at Inverse: The strangest thing about a black hole is that its edge, known as the event horizon, can’t be observed on account of light not being able to escape the gravitational pull. Physicists don’t really understand how an object just falls into the black hole there’s really no “in.” Everything just gets trapped in the dense gravitational flux of the surface. German physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical Physics have now created a new estimate of the amount entropy contained with a black hole — and that value suggests black holes are indeed two dimensions and not three. “We were able to use a more complete and richer Read More ›

Remarkably, the recent spate of articles over at Evolution News and Views (see here, here and here) attacking the claim that vitellogenin pseudogenes in humans provide scientific evidence for common descent, all missed the point that Professor Dennis Venema was making, which was not about the existence of pseudogenes, but about the spatial pattern in the genes. The pattern is strikingly clear if we compare chickens with opossums. And since humans belong to the same class as opossums (namely, mammals), any scientific evidence that chickens and opossums have a common ancestor also counts as strong prima facie evidence that chickens and humans have one. I’d like to acknowledge at the outset the kind assistance given to me by Professor S. Read More ›

In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’s Denis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended: The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. IN other words, to exclude any form of inheritance that was non-Mendelian, that was Lamarckian-like, was an essential part of the modern synthesis. What we are now discovering is that there are mechanisms by which some acquired characteristics can be inherited, and inherited robustly. So it;s a bit odd to describe adding something like that Read More ›

While we all sleep, our betters have plans for us. From Digital Journal: Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness. She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals. She told The Times of London: “One Read More ›

In the past few weeks at UD, we have seen abundant indicators on how: a –> we are in a time of obvious, deeply polarised ideological confrontation in our civilisation [in material part, driven by cultural marxist agendas and stratagems], b –> we are forced to give unwelcome counsel in the face of an obvious march of folly, c –> in which march, lab coat clad evolutionary materialistic scientism rules the roost, d –> such that, logic/ rationality is at a steep discount (especially first principles of right reason), e –> through the dominance of evo mat scientism, inherent falsity and linked amorality have too often been built into yardsticks for truth and right, and f –> manifestly evident core Read More ›

From New Scientist: No disease, no natural conception, no mind of your own. Excited? Imagine a world without sex and disease, and where all of our brains are networked. It sounds wonderful, but it will bring a new set of moral questions More. There’s also a special feature on the nature of nothingness. Party seriously? See also: New Scientist astounds: Information is physical Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have compared genetic data with existing archaeological evidence and show that man’s best friend may have emerged independently from two separate (possibly now extinct) wolf populations that lived on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. This means that dogs may have been domesticated not once, as widely believed, but twice. … Combined, these new findings suggest that dogs were first domesticated from geographically separated wolf populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. At some point after their domestication, the eastern dogs dispersed with migrating humans into Europe where they mixed with and mostly replaced the earliest European dogs. Most dogs today are a mixture of both Eastern and Western dogs — one reason why previous genetic Read More ›

At: This is a case study in Darwinism beyond ridiculous, I noted “Monogamy” and “sibling co-operation” among humans are terms that are meaningful only among humans. They depend on the recognition of abstractions like “marriage” and “family.” Humans often do things, in recognition of relationships, that are not in their survival interests. It is not the same as in beetles and birds. commenter goodusername writes in response: I don’t think they’re claiming that the terms “monogamy” and “sibling co-operation” has any meaning to beetles. And I think people would care for their partners, and siblings would care for each other, even without “recognition of abstractions like ‘marriage’ and ‘family.’” No. First, when people make inferences about human relationships by referencing Read More ›

Because there is something fundamentally wrong with its typical view of life. Life forms are not merely matter in motion. From Jonathan Wells at Evolution News & Views on Third Way (for evolution) thinker Stephen L. Talbott: According to his profile at The Third Way of Evolution, Talbott spent many years working in the engineering organizations of computer manufacturers before he joined the Nature Institute in 1998 (the same year I joined Discovery Institute). He “attempts to show how our understanding of the organism and its evolution is transformed once we recognize and take seriously the organism as an intelligent agent meaningfully (though not necessarily consciously) pursuing its own way of life.” In his most recent article (the first in Read More ›