In a recent exchange with Seversky I summarized his view of the Holocaust as follows:  “I personally disagree with the slaughter of every single Jew and homosexual, but that is just my view and if someone has a different view I cannot say their view is objectively bad and mine is objectively good. The only thing that matters is who is stronger.”  Sev responded: Essentially right. I don’t believe there are any objective moral standards against which all other moralities can be measured. The moral code that will ultimately prevail will be the one that offers the broadest guarantees and protections to the greatest numbers of people. Extreme exclusivist ideologies or theologies are ultimately doomed in the same way that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Associate Professor Dr Joan Vaccaro, of Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, has solved an anomaly of conventional physics and shown that a mysterious effect called ‘T violation’ could be the origin of time evolution and conservation laws. “I begin by breaking the rules of physics, which is rather bold I have to admit, but I wanted to understand time better and conventional physics can’t do that,” Dr Vaccaro says. “I do get conventional physics in the end though. This means that the rules I break are not fundamental. It also means that I can see why the universe has those rules. And I can also see why the universe advances in time.” Paper. (public access) More. – Joan Read More ›

Zircons. From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: The oldest-known zircons, discovered in the Jack Hills of Western Australia, originally crystalized 4.4 billion years ago! It was within one of these zircons that geochemist Elizabeth Bell and her team discovered the carbon they think was produced by life. Life that old, whatever it was, would not have bones, or even a clearly-defined shape, so a true fossil find will probably never be unearthed. Instead, whatever carbon-based life existed back in the Hadean would simply leave traces of itself in the form of carbon itself. Bell’s co-author, Mark Harrison, referred to the stuff as “the gooey remains of biotic life.” More. See also: Earth’s crust cooled only 160 million years after solar system Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists use the fossil record to make judgments on the physiology and behavior of species. But are those interpretations correct? New research puts into question how we interpret the behavior of extinct organisms from their fossil remains, and the greater role of plasticity in determining evolution diversity.More. Paper. (paywall) – Matthew J. Ravosa, Rachel A. Menegaz, Jeremiah E. Scott, David J. Daegling, Kevin R. McAbee. Limitations of a morphological criterion of adaptive inference in the fossil record. Biological Reviews, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/brv.12199 See also: Alligators’ second jaw joint Follow UD News at Twitter!

You mean the same way that  ghosts in the barn loft are hard to find? From Evolution News & Views: Charles Darwin’s idea that an unguided natural process led to all the beauty and diversity of the world, including its Undeniable appearance of design, guides scientific thinking to this day. But what if his signature mechanism — natural selection — cannot be measured? Without measurement, a theory reduces to anecdote. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences threatens to do that, at least in regard to “the evolution of human body form.” The implications go far beyond human physiology. Consider limb length. Say you want to deduce how natural selection has affected the dimensions of Read More ›

From Fuz Rana at Poached Egg: Generally speaking, the reaction to my book The Cell’s Design has been positive. But there have been a few reviews that were less than stellar. Perhaps the most critical of all was a review written by microbiologist Frank Steiner for the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. After careful reflection, I have come to conclude that many of the issues Steiner has with The Cell’s Design are unsubstantial and largely unfounded. Nevertheless, one point he raised has some merit. Fortunately, a recent discovery by researchers from Germany about the structure of the enzyme F1-F0-ATPase helps address Steiner’s point—and in doing so, actually strengthens my argument for the intelligent design of biochemical systems. Read More ›

Over at WEIT, Professor Jerry Coyne has put up three interesting posts during the past few days, with questions for his readers relating to free will, the irrationality of belief in Divine revelation, and climate skepticism. I’d like to briefly respond to his questions. Free will In a post titled, Once again with free will: a question for readers (August 16, 2016), Professor Coyne laments the persistence of popular belief in libertarian free will – the view that whenever I make a choice, I could have chosen otherwise, otherwise my choice would not be free. Professor Coyne contrasts this view (which he calls view A) with the hard determinist view (called view B), which he espouses. On this view, the Read More ›

From Kelsey Houston-Edwards at PBS: The difference between Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 might not seem like much, but it is poking holes in our understanding of how atoms formed during the Big Bang. … Fortunately, there’s one possible explanation for the discrepancy that hasn’t been ruled out yet—lithium is created and destroyed inside stars. It’s possible that scientists accurately predicted how much 6Li was produced during the Big Bang, and the rest was created later in stars. But for now, lithium is challenging our understanding of the Big Bang, big time. More: See also: National Geographic on the Big Bang “lithium shortage” Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Penny Sarchet at New Scientist: Rather than springing into existence just once in some chemically blessed primordial pond, life may have had many origins. It could have got going over and over again in many different forms for hundreds of thousands of years, only becoming what we see today when everything else was wiped out it in Earth’s first ever mass extinction. In its earliest days on the planet, life as we know it might not have been alone. More. And it is not happening all around us now because … Oh wait! That is a Boltzmann brain floating above the inkjet printer… Is the Boltzmann brain a protected species? I better find out. Note: One could subscribe to Read More ›

The question of whether methodological naturalism is an idea worth holding onto in science has been one that the ID camp, as a whole, is not unified on. Some think that methodological naturalism is a perfectly valid way to define science, and that ID fits nicely within that scope. Others think that methodological naturalism is just philosophical baggage hitching a free ride and should be discarded.
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From ScienceDaily: “Our study suggests that high-frequency hearing may have preceded the emergence of echolocation,” says Morgan Churchill of New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York. Churchill and his colleagues made their discovery in studies of a new fossil whale species (Echovenator sandersi) found in a drainage ditch in South Carolina. The researchers CT scanned the ancient whale’s remarkably complete fossilized ear and compared it to those of two hippos and 23 fossil and living whales. Those analyses uncovered many features found today in dolphins, which can hear at ultrasonic frequencies.More. Paper. (paywall) – Churchill et al. The Origin of High-Frequency Hearing in Whales. Current Biology, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.06.004 File under: It all just suddenly happened for Read More ›

From Kirk Durston, in response to Ethan Siegel at Forbes, “Humanity May Be Alone In The Universe” (an unusual commonsensical approach to the question of extraterrestrial civilizations) at Contemplations: From a materialistic, evolutionary perspective, our technologically advanced civilization is almost certainly unique in the universe. Indeed, if the origin of life is so improbable that we should not even be here, then it seems we are faced with an interesting choice. The first option is to grant Koonin’s theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life. It Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and its reduced rates of producing offspring. A new study may help explain why-comparing genetic information of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution.… “Our findings suggest that schizophrenia vulnerability rose after the divergence of modern humans from Neanderthals,” said Andreassen, “and thus support the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a by-product of the complex evolution of the human brain.” More. Paper. (public access) – Saurabh Srinivasan, Francesco Bettella, Morten Mattingsdal, Yunpeng Wang, Aree Witoelar, Andrew J. Schork, Wesley K. Thompson, Verena Read More ›

Seversky wrote: The psychopath may decide that he is morally justified in satisfying his appetite for rape and murder but all his potential victims are equally justified in deciding that they don’t want to be actual victims. Given that the potential victims greatly outnumber the psychopaths the will of the majority is likely to prevail. What’s wrong with that? The Nazis may have believed that they were morally justified in believing that the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and mentally disabled were corrupting society and should be exterminated. If they had been asked, those groups would almost certainly have disagreed, as would at least part of the German people. As did much of the rest of the world. The Nazi regime was Read More ›

From : Nori Satoh, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, has identified what he sees as the moment the notochord, and hence the chordate lineage, was born. “I have proposed that the occurrence of tadpole-like larvae is a key event that caused the evolution of chordates,” he explains. Early in life, many deuterostomes pass through a larval stage. But while acorn worm or sea urchin larvae might swim about by rhythmically moving tiny hair-like structures – cilia – on their bodies, chordate larvae have a tail that they beat. “The notochord is the supporting organ of the beating tail,” says Satoh.More. Yeah, just happened. How? August. See also: The highly engineered transition to vertebrates: Read More ›