Daniel King refuses to follow the evidence regarding the implications of biological semiotics, so Upright Biped asks him: Are you suggesting we dig up Alan Turing and test the need for a symbol system expressive enough to describe an interpreter for itself? Are you wanting to test von Neumann’s mathematical structure of self-replication, or the validity of Crick’s adapter hypothesis? Are you uncertain whether or not the anticodon-to-amino acid association is isolated from the codon-to-anticodon association? Are you wanting to test Pattee’s epistemic cut between rate-independent control and rate-based dynamics? Are you wondering if amino acids can be derived from the spatial orientation of nucleobases? Are you wanting to know if Nirenberg had to demonstrate the code in order to Read More ›

A clip from Flight: The genius of birds “Avian flight requires a cause that’s able to visualize a distant endpoint and bring together everything necessary to achieve that endpoint. Only intelligence is capable of that kind of causal process.” Paul Nelson, Philosopher of Biology More. At dusk on a winter evening in southern England a flock of 200,000 European starlings congregate to soar in breathtaking formations before roosting for the night. These incredible displays of aerial precision and biological engineering are captured in this memorable sequence from Flight: the Genius of Birds. See also: Genius of Birds: Embryonic development Follow UD News at Twitter!

From a review of Steve and Hillary Rose’s Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? in Times Higher by Louise Whiteley, Whether or not you end up cheerleading for the book’s political agenda, its deconstruction of faulty claims about how neuroscience translates into the classroom is relevant to anyone interested in education. The authors tear apart the scientific logic of policy documents, interrogate brain-based interventions and dismantle prevalent neuro-myths. … The Roses’ descriptions of how experimental set-ups are extrapolated to real-world contexts add a seam of humour to the serious business of myth-busting. I smiled to learn that statements about the negative effects of poor environment on the learning brain often refer to studies that compare rats raised in empty cages with Read More ›

In the next installment of videos from the AM-Nat conference, Jim LeMaster discusses Francis Bacon and David Hume, and shows their issues with teleological thinking in science, and why the arguments against analogies don’t measure up. We have a conference coming up in November focused on biology, and another in February focused on business and technology, so be sure to check out the AM-Nat website for more information on conference registrations and abstract submissions.

At Phys.Org there is an article describing the work of some scientists with the “chordate” Oikopleura dioica which does not have the genes for Retinoic Acid (RA), which all other chordates have. RA is a form of Vitamin A and is needed in the development of the heart. In this organism, the heart develops but without the presence of RA. How can this happen? Answer: “Regressive Evolution.” All the genes for RA have been lost, and lost in a non-random fashion. You would be hard-pressed to identify the above organism (a planktonic organism) as a “chordate,” but developmentally, it is one—you know, the chordate “body-plan” allows it to be identified as one. Now, this O. dioica cannot be the LCA Read More ›

It seems there is now a talking-point agenda to dismiss the fine tuning issue as an illusion. So, in the current thread on the big bang and fine tuning, I have clipped and commented on a recent article by Luke Barnes. However, comments cannot put up images [save through extraordinary steps], so it is first worth showing Barnes’ key illustration, as showing where fine tuning comes in, updating Hoyle’s remark about the C-O balance first key fine tuning issue put on the table in 1953: Let me also headline my comment, no. 77 in the thread: >>Luke Barnes has a useful semi-pop summary: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/…..tures-laws Today, our deepest understanding of the laws of nature is summarized in a set of equations. Read More ›

This coming Saturday (July 16th), I am going to be hosting my weekly Apologetics Academy webinar session. This week, we are blessed to have German pro-ID paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly presenting to us on the implications of the fossil record for neo-Darwinian evolution. The session begins at 8pm GMT (9pm Central Europe / 3pm EST / 2pm Central America / 12noon Pacific). To join, click the following URL at or shortly before the meeting’s start time: https://zoom.us/j/457736238 Doing so will prompt you to download the Zoom webinar platform that we use. This should only take a minute or two. Once downloaded, you will be automatically connected with our room. I hope to see many of you there!

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers (who is a cladist) has written an entertaining but misguided post titled, Yes, you are a fish. In today’s post, I’ll argue that the key to classifying organisms correctly isn’t phylogeny, anatomy or genetics; it’s embryology. Only embryology can tell us something specific about an organism’s past and present characteristics, as well as resolving disputes about taxonomic categories. The importance of taxonomy to biology cannot be overstated. To put it bluntly: you cannot hope to understand organisms properly unless you know how to classify them. During the past few decades, there has been a move away from the traditional approach (favored by Linnaeus and later by Richard Owen) of classifying living creatures on the basis Read More ›

BioLogos exists to reconcile Christians to evolution, which today seems to mainly mean Darwinism (“modern science” ). From their prez Deborah Haarsma: When people accept the AiG narrative that these scientific conclusions are essential to Christianity, then their faith is often shaken when they encounter the incredible explanatory power of modern science. In fact, we hear from individuals on a daily basis who have experienced a deep crisis of faith when their young-earth creationist beliefs were exposed as scientifically (and biblically) weak. While we are grateful that BioLogos has helped recover and strengthen the faith of these Christians, we mourn the fact that countless others have drifted away from the faith. Young-earth creationist teaching is causing unnecessary harm to the Read More ›

From Richard Chirgwin at the Register: This is what your brain looks like on bad data A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” fMRI-based science has been potentially invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data. The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters. When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software. Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the Read More ›

Remember Bill Nye, who wants global warming skeptics prosecuted for the sake of his peace of mind? Well now, Nye went to visit Ken Ham at Ark Encounter in rural Kentucky: Ark Encounter features a full-size Noah’s Ark, built according to the dimensions given in the Bible. Spanning 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high, this modern engineering marvel amazes visitors young and old. Ark Encounter is situated in the beautiful Williamstown, Kentucky, halfway between Cincinnati and Lexington on I-75. From the moment you turn the corner and the towering Ark comes into view, to the friendly animals in the zoo, to the jaw-dropping exhibits inside the Ark, you’ll experience the pages of the Bible like never before. Read More ›

From Sophie Saint Thomas at Death and Taxes: Pastafarian lodges complaint with ACLU over right to wear pasta strainer A Pastafarian woman is fighting for her right to wear a pasta strainer on her head, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Rachel Hoover, 21, wore a colander atop her dome for her driver’s license photo as a symbol of her religious beliefs when she renewed her license on June 27. The Chicago Northern Illinois University student is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a religion that promotes chuckles, meatballs and pirates, but opposes intelligent design and creationism taught in schools. In an attempt to mock organized religions, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has birthed what appears Read More ›

Here is the next video from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference. In this video, Jonathan Bartlett describes how, at least in principle, one can model non-naturalistic causes mathematically.
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Recently, one of our star commenters, Sandwalk’s Larry Moran, mooted that the Royal Society meeting on assessing where we are with evolution maybe should be cancelled. Then he said he doesn’t want it to be cancelled but “they may cancel the meeting because the IDiots and the kooks are gloating about destroying evolution.” We hadn’t heard much from people who are gloating about destroying evolution but we’ve heard plenty from people who can do without the Darwin lobby running the field into the ground. Some of the episodes we’ve noted are pretty crazy. The University of Kentucky had to settle with astronomer Martin Gaskell for $125,000 because one of his colleagues was obsessing with a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist about his possible support Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It turns out that forests in the Andean and western Amazonian regions of South America break long-understood rules about how ecosystems are put together, according to new research. … They discovered that the leaf economics of forests are not as straightforward as scientists once believed. “We found that Andean and Amazonian forests have evolved into diverse communities that break simple ecological ‘rules’ previously developed through field-based studies. These forests are actually much more interesting and functionally diverse than previously thought, and have sorted themselves out across a variety of environmental templates like geology, elevation and temperature,” Asner added. It turns out the forests aren’t so simply split between high-rollers and prudent investors either. Rather the authors found a Read More ›