Think Aristotelianism went out with Galileo? Think again—teleological language is rampant in the evolution literature because that is how evolutionists think. A new paper in Nature Communications on dietary influences on bird evolution states that … Read more
From Evolution News & Views: There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure. Some linguists reject an innate neurological organ devoted specifically to language. Conceiving that it is only the brain’s general abilities that are “pre-organized,” they envisage language as a learned skill based on a “functional language system” and design constraints, distributed across numerous cortical and subcortical structures. Yet however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they Read More ›
From ScienceDaily: Current prevailing hypotheses of how human ancestors became fire-dependent depict fire as an accident — a byproduct of another event rather than a standalone occurrence. One hypothesis, for example, explains fire as a result of rock pounding that created a spark and spread to a nearby bush. “The problem we’re trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t taken advantage of by our ancestors,” said Kristen Hawkes, distinguished professor of anthropology at the U and the paper’s senior author. “Everything is modified by fire; just take a look around at the books and furniture in this room. We’re surrounded by fire’s byproducts,” added Read More ›
I have a hard time getting some materialists to admit that two plus two is infallibly four. Here, a 5’9″ white guy has a hard time getting college students to admit that he is infallibly not a seven year old, 6’5″ Chinese woman.
From Nature News: Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction. A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers. Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers. More. One possible solution would be to make all serious public science research Read More ›
From Todd Wood: Beyond that, it was incredibly refreshing to hear the talks in this symposium. Hybridization has been a passing interest of mine for a long time (thanks to Frank Marsh), and long ago, I came to the conclusion that hybridization was not remotely rare (like I had been taught) and that the biological species concept didn’t really explain what we were seeing in the real world of hybridizing species. Sure enough, Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town said that the Biological Species Concept is basically dead. That was in the first talk of the day. In the second, Mike Arnold of the University of Georgia said that introgressive hybridization is the rule in eukaryotes, plants and Read More ›
From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: “This is humbling,” says Jonathan Eisen from the University of California, Davis, “because holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life.”More. Which makes the dogmatism of the Darwinians all the more curious. And who would ever have thought of calling it a tree anyway, but for past beliefs? See also: Tree of life morphs into … leaf? and Kirk Durston on the new tree of life Classic Darwinian fundamentalism: Follow UD News at Twitter!
From Heather Zeiger at GoodReads, a review of Richard Weikart’s The Death of Humanity: The second chapter considers man as an animal, which includes Darwin’s influence. Weikart does not demonize Darwin, but instead introduces the reader to several characters who used Darwin’s theory to justify their own agendas, including those that wanted to call people of other races “less evolved” and people with certain neurological and mental disabilities “atavistic.” This leads into the third chapter which addresses how biological determinism contributes to dehumanization and our culture of death. Importantly, the characters in this chapter assume that man lacks free will and is really a product of his genes. In making this assumption, they again reduce man to chemistry. Out of Read More ›
Readers will remember the “science guy”: From Reason: As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen… So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this….That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good. Via Washington Times More. That sort of thing is big in Big Government now. For example, Breitbart London notes the lawfare approach: Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step Read More ›
Further to Scientists, data, and diet, from ScienceDaily: Butter might not be a health food, but researchers unearthed more evidence that replacing it with vegetable oils does not decrease risk of heart disease … A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be Read More ›
From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Mae-Wan Ho, the Hong Kong-born evolution scientist and one of neo-Darwinism’s most effective critics, has died at age 74, I learned today. Ho was co-founder with her husband, physicist Peter Saunders, of the Institute of Science in Society, the UK organization focused on reclaiming science for the public good. She was also the author or co-author of a dozen books, one of her favorites, The Rainbow and the Worm. … Ho thought the Modern Synthesis did need to be completely replaced, however, “so that the universe of learning, of finding out about nature” could “open up properly.” She applauded the current work of Oxford University physiologist Denis Noble, principal organizer of the upcoming Royal Society Read More ›
When someone asks “Do you believe in evolution?” they probably want a short answer, and don’t have the patience to listen to a 15-minute lecture on the different meanings of “evolution” and how you stand on each. So how do you answer this trick question? Here’s a very short answer that works for me: Yes, I believe in the evolution of life, and I believe in the evolution of automobiles. Optionally, to make sure they get the point, you could add “but I don’t believe either could have happened without design.” It is actually a pretty good analogy, see my April 2,2015 post at ENV, In Biology as in Technology, Similarities Do Not Prove Absence of Intelligent Design
Erik Larson at the Atlantic (May 2015): Questioning the Hype About Artificial Intelligence … Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has openly speculated that humans could be reduced to “pets” by the coming superintelligent machines. Musk has donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, in a self-described bid to help stave off the development of “killer robots.” At Berkeley, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is dedicated to addressing what Bostrom and many others describe as an “existential threat” to humanity, eclipsing previous (and ongoing) concerns about the climate, a nuclear holocaust, and other major denizens of our modern life. Luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have also commented on the scariness of artificial intelligence. Read More ›
From ScienceDaily: … dinosaurs and their close relatives had much more variation in growth patterns then ever expected, and this variation does not appear to be related to differences between males and females. Given how little we really know about dinosaurs and their ilk, it’s surprising we expect anything. Asilisaurus lived during the Triassic Period, roughly 240 million years ago in present-day Africa. With four legs and a long tail, the animal was about the size of a Labrador retriever, and likely maxed at 65 pounds, according to previous studies of the animal. Its exterior skin appearance remains unknown. Fossils of Asilisaurus kongwe — a combination of Swahili and Greek works meaning “ancient ancestor reptile” — are vital because a Read More ›
From Neuroskeptic at the Daily Dot: Why is there so much neurobullshit around today? I think the answer is that neuroscience really has made great advances in the past few decades, and these advances have been very visible. Methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), introduced in 1990, have made it possible to measure and picture brain activity in real time. FMRI really is an amazing technology that has revolutionized neuroscience; it has also made neuroscience more accessible to the public. The trouble is that the colorful images produced by fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques are immensely compelling but often misinterpreted. Such images have led to the impression that now, for the first time, we can understand the brain, Read More ›