From Wintery Knight: Atheist Luke Muehlhauser interviews well-respect cosmologist Luke Barnes about the fine-tuning argument, and the naturalistic response to it. … In one of my funniest and most useful episodes yet, I interview astronomer Luke Barnes about the plausibility of 11 responses to the fine-tuning of the universe. Frankly, once you listen to this episode you will be better equipped to discuss fine-tuning than 90% of the people who discuss it on the internet. This episode will help clarify the thinking of anyone – including and perhaps especially professional philosophers – about the fine-tuning of the universe.More. It is a podcast with useful outline notes. Here are some of Barnes’s other articles on the subject. See also: Our solar Read More ›

For, on that day, Poland — personally led by its king — rode to the rescue of our Civilisation at the gates of Vienna. (Details — and movie, here; also see on Complacency Day, here.) Be it solemnly moved that from this day forward, we shall remember: Complacency Day, Sept 10; 9/11-01, Sept 11; Sobieski Day, Sept 12. Seconds? I close with a paraphrase from Santayana and others: those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed by that folly to repeat its worst chapters. END PS: Summary video on the charge: [youtube aL0GieO5Rj8] This gives broader background: [youtube pc-RWtovrqg]

This is a great video, and all those with interest in biological evolution should watch it.
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From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: One of the main goals of the foundation is to bring together science and religion. Among the many things they are funding to accomplish this is a $871,000 grant to Arizona State University to fund Think Write Publish Fellowships in Science and Religion. If you’re a hard-up writer, these people will give you the opportunity to get $10,000 to write “creative nonfiction stories about harmonies between science and religion” and help you get them published. Sure. The world needs more flatulence. If you tried to show that the universe shows evidence of design, chances are, you’d get nowhere. These people a interested in the warm, the fuzzy, the deniable.) Over the Read More ›

Just a reminder to those wanting to present at the AM-Nat (Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism) Biology conference, abstracts are due October 28th.

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From the conclusion of Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: That the deepest questions in biology have not yet been answered means they are still asking to be answered. Anyone who cares to examine the facts carefully will see that the old answers were wrong. They have now been erased, in our minds anyway, and we must sit down to take the test again, with new minds and new resolve. Having learned much since Darwin’s day, we have every reason for optimism this time. Speaking as a scientist, I can’t think of a more attractive message to convey to young people of technical ability. Speaking as a human, though, I see something even more beautiful. Yes, the deepest questions in the scientific study Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was Read More ›

From Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello at Scientific American: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that Read More ›

Here: Science has made great strides in modeling space, time, mass and energy. Yet little attention has been paid to the precise representation of the information ubiquitous in nature. Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics fuses results from complexity modeling and information theory that allow both meaning and design difficulty in nature to be measured in bits. Built on the foundation of a series of peer-reviewed papers published by the authors, the book is written at a level easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math. Those seeking a quick first read or those not interested in mathematical detail can skip marked sections in the monograph and still experience the impact of this new and exciting model of nature’s Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo: In 2008, Robert Perlman, who taught courses in evolutionary medicine at the University of Chicago, complained in the Review, “This spring, under the chairmanship of Edmund Pellegrino, the Council [President’s Council on Bioethics] published a reader, ‘Human Dignity and Bioethics’, to expand and clarify the concept of human dignity. The neglect or dismissal of evolution in this volume is striking.”5 Striking? Why? No non-human ancestor is on the examining table. Of course, writers and editors for publications like the Review might not think that matters. When one is sufficiently steeped in Darwinian evolution, bodies of scientific fact gain value principally by their association with it. More. See also:  Neurosurgeon explains why Darwinian medicine is a Read More ›

Here. Fire-Maker Book: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet (The Privileged Species Series) Paperback – July 18, 2016 From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire and remake their world. This book is a companion to the documentary of the same name, available at www.privilegedspecies.com. See also: The whole vid online: Follow UD News at Twitter!

I briefly discuss here. Notice the 100-year global subjugation map I first found online on an IslamIST site on the following day: And also, this sketch of history from the 630’s on (i.e. the last IslamIST 100-year expansion): Sky News coverage on that fateful following day: [youtube fswg0uEbzC0] Note, too, this outline of global geostrategic challenges c 2016: (Relevance to our time, fifteen years later, should not be under-estimated. We need to ask ourselves some sobering questions and look at questions on straight and sound thinking and response to a media ever more blatantly driven by spin in service to various agendas.) END PS: Nor, should we overlook the relevance of the Benghazi attacks on Sept 11, 2012 [cf article Read More ›

From Chris Woolston at Nature: Researchers previously split giraffes into several subspecies on the basis of their coat patterns and where they lived. Closer inspection of their genes, however, reveals that giraffes should actually be divided into four distinct lineages that don’t interbreed in the wild, researchers report on 8 September in Current Biology1. Previous genetic studies2 have suggested that there were discrete giraffe populations that rarely intermingled, but this is the first to detect species-level differences, says Axel Janke, a geneticist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the study’s senior author. “It was an amazing finding,” he says. He notes that giraffes are highly mobile, wide-ranging animals that would have many chances to interbreed in the wild if Read More ›

Hello, base, do we have a connection? The human brain is said by many to be the most sophisticated known item in the universe. Never mind, from ScienceDaily: Inhibitory connections between neurons act as the brain’s brakes, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought inhibitory connections were less sophisticated than their excitatory counterparts because relatively few proteins were known to exist at these structures. But a new study overturns that assumption, uncovering 140 proteins that have never been mapped to inhibitory synapses. Some of the proteins have already been implicated in autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, suggesting new treatment avenues. – Akiyoshi Uezu, Daniel J. Kanak, Tyler W.A. Bradshaw, Erik J. Soderblom, Christina M. Catavero, Alain C. Burette, Richard J. Read More ›

Okay, dead leaves: See also: A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at a pile of bird dropping. It should be harder to be a Darwinist than our culture makes it. Follow UD News at Twitter!