And guess why? From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard astronomer Howard Smith forcefully blunts Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” Of course, it’s not only Dr. Hawking who says as much — denying human exceptionalism is close […]
Month: November 2016
Fixing a Confusion
I have often noticed something of a confusion on one of the major points of the Intelligent Design movement – whether or not the design inference is primarily based on the failure of Darwinism and/or mechanism.
Epigenetics: Retiring hoary Darwinian certainties
Whether anyone admits it or not. From Jef Akst at The Scientist on the recent appearance of many papers on epigenetics: Last week (November 17), the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) published 41 papers in Cell Press journals and other high-impact publications. IHEC aims to provide researchers with a comprehensive epigenomic analysis of healthy and […]
Poisonous amphibians face higher extinction risk?
From ScienceDaily: Amphibians which have a toxic defense against predators — such as the iconic poison dart frogs — have a much higher risk of extinction than species which use other types of defense mechanisms, research shows. The key finding of this study is that poisonous species are 60% more likely to be threatened than […]
SciAm bloggers: Should we colonize Saturn’s moon Titan?
Science writer Charles Wohlforth and planetary scientist Amanda R. Hendrix argue at Scientific American that it’s pretty much the only place off Earth that humans could live. The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain […]
Speciation: Genome analysis shows Hen Harrier to be two separate species
From ScienceDaily: Deemed as one species spread across different continents, scientists confirm that the Eurasian Hen Harrier and the American Northern Harrier are in fact two distinct species. … “Before the advent of sequencing technology, species were categorised by shared and divergent morphological features. However, new technology allows us to quantify the amount of genetic […]
Robin Collins on cosmological fine tuning
As a part of basic reminders, it is worth the effort to read and watch how Robin Collins put the case in summary, in a classic essay on The Fine-tuning Design Argument (1998): Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for […]
Aeon writer asks: Has dogma derailed the search for dark matter?
Probably, but let’s let him tell it: From Pavel Kroupa at Aeon: The issues at stake are huge. Acceptance of dark matter has influenced scientific thinking about the birth of the Universe, the evolution of galaxies and black holes, and the fundamental laws of physics. Yet even within academic circles, there is a lot of […]
Ideological Turing Test
To all of our friends who subscribe to materialist accounts of evolution: Here is an interesting little test. The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries. The partisan is invited to answer questions or […]
Crick on DNA as text
His March 19, 1953 letter to his son Michael: Well worth pondering. END
Husband of new US education secretary once promo’d ID in schools?
First: So? From Rebecca Klein at Huffington Post: While running for governor of Michigan in 2006, Dick DeVos ― whose wife, Betsy, is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. secretary of education ― said that schools should have the option of teaching intelligent design alongside evolution. … To be sure, DeVos’ comments were made 10 […]
Oxford conference to examine questions around fine-tuning of universe, Physics of Fine-Tuning, Crete, June 19-22 2017
Here. Our goal is to consolidate the idea of fine-tuning across disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Fine-tuning is often deemed a fact and used to reach grandiose metaphysical conclusions by philosophers, theologians, and even physicists, without a proper understanding of the underlying assumptions entailed by these arguments. As a consequence the physical and […]
Doug Axe vs Keith Fox: Is design in nature undeniable?
Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, debates theistic evolutionist and biochemist Keith Fox debate the question at Unbelievable (radio). Fox is Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge. The comments are fascinating insofar as they reveal the obvious superiority of fully naturalist atheism to “theistic evolution.” If we can see no intelligence behind or […]
Forever frozen: What happens when people stop believing in the existence of the soul
Or the mind, or the immateriality or consciousness or the resurrection of the dead… From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: “WE’RE taking people to the future!” says architect Stephen Valentine, as we drive through two gigantic gates into a massive plot of land in the middle of the sleepy, unassuming town that is Comfort, Texas. […]
Oldest alphabet from 4 millennia ago might be somewhat like Hebrew?
That would make it and other very ancient documents possibly decipherable. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at […]