Closing our religion coverage for the day, from UTEP mathematician Granville Sewell’s Christianity for Doubters: The idea that a decomposed, dead body could be replaced by a new body someday, somewhere, seems impossible. But to me it seems equally impossible that an ugly caterpillar could enter a tomb and be resurrected as a beautiful new butterfly, and yet a butterfly with many entirely new organs is constructed out of the dissolved and recycled parts of a caterpillar every day in a chrysalis, as the film (p. 47) Metamorphosis documents so magnificently. This film includes photography (through magnetic resonance imaging) of the transformation as it happens within the chrysalis. If you find it impossible to believe in the miracle of resurrection, Read More ›

Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, notes this podcast he did: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God (July 22, 2016) More. Stand to Reason trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith and to make an even-handed, incisive, yet gracious defense for classical Christianity and classical Christian values in the public square. See also: Wayne Rossiter on teaching Darwin’s unquestionable truths Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: It is my opinion that the reality of the Creator, or the existence of God, is a truth that is quite accessible. Although the ideas that I will present may require careful analysis and contemplation, they are not particularly complicated or difficult. Most can be understood by an intelligent and inquisitive high school senior. This is not necessarily a reflection of an individual’s native intelligence; proper analysis of an abstract or philosophical concept is a skill he or she may never have acquired. Regarding this, I hope I have presented my ideas in a clear enough fashion that newcomers will be able to follow. There is a second Read More ›

From Joanna Masel at Big Questions Online: With the error rate in this example, that could be enough for natural selection to take notice. To see how, imagine you have a permanent, germline mutation that doesn’t affect how well your protein works in normal cases, when it’s transcribed and translated correctly. But the mutation does change the fraction of error-containing variants that work properly, say from 40 percent to 42 percent. That means slightly less work for your cells’ garbage-disposal system and more fitness for you — making you healthier and more likely to survive and reproduce. In other words, this mutation benefits you, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection doesn’t just judge how well a gene works when its proteins are Read More ›

So he tells the Guardian: Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share. If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world Read More ›

The claim that British moths “evolved” because of industrial pollution (microevolution) in recent centuries became an unquestionable truth of Darwin lobby textbooks in recent decades. But there are serious problems with that example (the peppered myth). From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, a note: Note that I do not deny that there are examples of microevolution in action (in fact, I affirm the existence of such examples). I simply point out that this “prized horse” in the evolutionist’s stable—an example that ranks with Darwin’s finches—has serious shortcomings that go unmentioned in the public or in the classroom. In [Darwin defender] JB’s attempt to rescue the sacred cow, he/she completely misses the Read More ›

From Nature: Metrics are intrinsically reductive and, as such, can be dangerous. Relying on them as a yardstick of performance, rather than as a pointer to underlying achievements and challenges, usually leads to pathological behaviour. The journal impact factor is just such a metric. See, for example, citation rings. During a talk just over a decade ago, its co-creator, Eugene Garfield, compared his invention to nuclear energy. “I expected it to be used constructively while recognizing that in the wrong hands it might be abused,” he said. “It did not occur to me that ‘impact’ would one day become so controversial.”More. It’s worth recalling that a key early reason for journal impact factors was to resolve competing claims about which Read More ›

From Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn at Frontiers in Medicine, reviewing The Logic of Madness: A New Theory of Mental Illness … It is rational behavior in response to a compound misunderstanding of various emotions. The starting point of Blakeway’s theory is a basic algorithm that converts an emotion into an action that optimizes biological fitness. Depending upon the circumstances, an action state is driven by the emotion having the highest calculated value. He divides emotions into four categories, basic survival (e.g., fear, hunger), reproductive (e.g., lust, jealousy), social (e.g., guilt, anger), and strategic (e.g., anxiety, regret). Most of these biologically derived emotions are shared with other animals, especially chimpanzees, although there is the question of whether other animals can perform tactical Read More ›

A friend writes to note changes atStanford Plato, a major 2016 revision from 2007: Since the 1950s, the concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in many parts of biology. This enthusiasm extends far beyond domains where the concept might seem to have an obvious application, such as the biological study of perception, cognition, and language, and now reaches into the most basic parts of biological theory. Hormones and other cellular products through which physiological systems are regulated are typically described as signals. Descriptions of how genes play their causal role in metabolic processes and development are routinely given in terms of “transcription”, “translation”, and “editing”. The most general term used for the processes by which genes exert Read More ›

I have previously remarked on the “Goldilocks” mindset that seems to pervade climate change alarmism.  When it comes to climate we can be certain about one thing — it has been changing constantly for all of history.  Sometimes it has been much warmer than it is now, and sometimes it has been much colder.  Yet central to the climate alarmist narrative is the notion that there was some Goldilocks “just right” moment from which we are currently diverging and our job is to make it stop. Robert Tracinski comments on this phenomenon here:   The problem is that drought is normal in California. It’s normal on a year-to-year basis:Most years are dry, and the state has always relied on the Read More ›

From Climate Audit: n 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is Read More ›

From his blog: I just noticed a few interesting stories about an announcement from Tanzania that a second set of australopith tracks has been discovered about 60 meters from the original Laetoli footprint trails. The Laetoli tracks were discovered in 1978 by a team led by Mary Leakey. The trackways are about 90 feet long with about 70 prints. The feet are small and the stride is short, and they are typically attributed to an australopith. The prints were made in volcanic ash, and have been dated to 3.6 million radiometric years. More. He adds, “I’m not so sure we can tell the difference between human and australopith just from their footprints.” Autralopiths: Australopithecus (genus Australopithecus), ( Latin: “southern ape”) Read More ›

As New Scientist tells it, “Red wolf may lose endangered status because it’s just a hybrid”: The red wolf, a critically endangered species living in the south-eastern US, may be nothing more than a hybrid between coyotes and the grey wolf, a new study suggests. If so, it may lose its conservation status and protection, given that US legislation does not protect hybrids. This could lead to loss of an important evolutionary lineage, because the red wolf is the only living repository of genes from the grey wolves that were driven near extinction in the south-eastern states by trapping and agricultural development. More. Shocka: Everyone knew that about the red wolf. There is usually  no critical reason to protect hybrids except Read More ›

Must be BBC. Must be summer. Last summer, chimpanzees were entering the stone age. This summer, from BBC: An orangutan copying sounds made by researchers offers new clues to how human speech evolved, scientists say. Rocky mimicked more than 500 vowel-like noises, suggesting an ability to control his voice and make new sounds. It had been thought these great apes were unable to do this and, since human speech is a learned behaviour, it could not have originated from them. Study lead Dr Adriano Lameira said this “notion” could now be thrown “into the trash can”. More. The reporter must have got something wrong somewhere. Who says humans learned speech from orangutans? It’s not reported that the orangutan started a Read More ›

From Nature: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, astronomer Sara Seager has begun to examine 14,000 compounds that are stable enough to exist in a planetary atmosphere. She and her colleagues are winnowing down their initial list of molecules using criteria such as whether there are geophysical ways to send the compound into the atmosphere. “We’re doing a triage process,” says Seager. “We don’t want to miss anything.” The Seattle meeting aims to compile a working list of biosignature gases and their chemical properties. The information will feed into how astronomers analyse data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The telescope will be able to look at only a handful of habitable planets, Read More ›