2016

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos must be lovin’ every minute. Recently physicist Lee Spetner has been back-and-forthing with David Levin over Spetner’s book, The Evolution Revolution. Well, it’s become quite the discussion now because, as Spetner explains here at Evolution News & Views: David E. Levin, who teaches in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine, wrote an emotional negative review of my latest book, The Evolution Revolution, for the online journal Reports of the National Center for Science Education. He also posted it on my book’s Amazon page. Spetner replied (See Lee Spetner defends non-random evolution from Darwin lobby) Then Levin replied on the pages of the venerable journal Amazon, dialoguing with commenter Read More ›

  Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016) placed at #5 in both Biology and Evolution, 1:00 EST Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,753 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Evolution #49 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution   Oh, and here’s Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,039 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Paleontology #4 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks Read More ›

From Scientific American: Understanding how brains work is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our times, but despite the impression sometimes given in the popular press, researchers are still a long way from some basic levels of understanding. A project recently funded by the Obama administration’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative is one of several approaches promising to deliver novel insights by developing new tools that involves a marriage of nanotechnology and optics. … We also lack knowledge regarding the “code” large numbers of cells use to communicate and interact. This is crucial, because mental phenomena likely emerge from the simultaneous activity of many thousands, or millions, of interacting neurons. In other words, neuroscientists have yet Read More ›

Aw, maybe it keeps social scientists off the streets. From Protein Wisdom: Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Like Chagnon, Perkins is a social scientist whose research findings pose a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology. Over the past five years, he has accumulated a mass of evidence about the personalities of welfare claimants and concluded that individuals with aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social tendencies — what he calls the ‘employment–resistant personality profile’ — are over-represented among benefit recipients. He also found that their children are likely to share those traits, which helps explain why poverty has a tendency to Read More ›

It’s scarce, and they’re not making any more of it. From Bruce Dorminey at Forbes: As Robert Wittenmyer, an astronomer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and the paper’s lead author told me, NASA ’s Kepler space telescope has shown us that small planets appear to be ubiquitous. But he says very few observers are looking at what he terms the other half of the question, the long-period gas giants. The findings are important because conventional theories of planet formation have usually dictated that gas giants like Jupiter parked in a stable, rather distant, orbit from its parent star were thought to be key to the onset of life on closer-in Earth-like planets. … “You could certainly Read More ›

From Jena University: The human brain works with division of labour. Although our thinking organ excels in displaying amazing flexibility and plasticity, typically different areas of the brain take over different tasks. While words and language are mainly being processed in the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is responsible for numerical reasoning. According to previous findings, this division of labour originates from the fact that the first steps in the processing of letters and numbers are also located individually in the different hemispheres. But this is not the case, at least not when it comes to the visual processing of numbers. Neuroscientists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and of the Jena University Hospital discovered that the visual processing of Read More ›

If so, big problem for starter physicists From Nature: The site – where physicists, mathematicians and other researchers routinely post their articles before peer review — has previously been accused of bias for filtering out some of the wilder ideas it receives. But in a December blogpost that is now provoking debate, Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that arXiv moderators wrongly blacklisted two of his students from posting their work. Gisin notes that being unable to post to arXiv has a detrimental effect on young researchers’ careers, because it is so influential — the preprint server holds more than 1.1 million papers and receives well over 9,000 submissions each month. He is concerned Read More ›

In recent posts, I have been discussing some important points about the reasonable meaning of homologies and differences in the proteome in the course of natural history. For the following discussion, just to be clear, I will accept a scenario of Common Descent (as explained in many recent posts) in the context of an ID approach. I will also accept the very reasonable concept that neutral or quasi-neutral random variation happens in time, and that negative (purifying) selection is the main principle which limits random variation in functional sequences. My main points are the following: I do believe that both 2a and 2b happen and have an important role in shaping the proteome. 2b, in particular, is often underestimated. It is also, in many Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the weekend (now that the weekend is leftover cold burnt toast), here’s a leftist attack on new atheism – and like we said of a previous instance (2014), “If they’ve lost The Nation, they’ve lost everyone.” In a roundup review of various books on the subject by David Hoelscher at Counterpunch: New Atheism, Worse Than You Think there is a frank discussion of the authoritarian scientism it embodies: What is not in doubt is that the New Atheists are, as the philosopher Michael Ruse has lamented “a bloody disaster.” As the scholar Jeffrey Nall asserts “Thinkers such as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens create a religion that amounts to a monstrous straw-man which they then Read More ›

Before I put the issue with the United Methodist Church and Discovery Institute to rest, I want to make one last comment on the UMC’s Statement on Science and Technology, which I wrote about the other day. One of the most significant assertions in the statement is “We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues.” If that sounds vaguely familiar to readers here at Uncommon Descent, it should. It is little more than a restatement of the late Stephen J. Gould’s principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (or NOMA). In essence, NOMA is the idea that Science and Religion occupy different spheres of knowledge and influence and as such are subject Read More ›

Religion news running a bit late this “weekend,” but better late than never: From biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, (not a fanmag for Christian Darwinism], an account of his dealings with BioLogos (reclaiming the Christian world for Darwin) here: Recently, a higher-up in the BioLogos organization contacted me via email, in an attempt to open up private dialogue (rather than public conversation). I replied in like fashion, dealing with several of the objections. Now clearly, I did not expect the BioLogos crowd to be happy about my book. If it had not registered on their Richter scale, I would’ve been disappointed. But, one might have anticipated a response of some sort to my reply. Apparently, Read More ›

It’s come down to this, apparently, among the no-design crowd. From Raw Story: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for why biological organisms seem so well designed to live on our planet. This process is typically described as “unintelligent” – based on random variations with no direction. But despite its success, some oppose this theory because they don’t believe living things can evolve in increments. Something as complex as the eye of an animal, they argue, must be the product of an intelligent creator. I don’t think invoking a supernatural creator can ever be a scientifically useful explanation. But what about intelligence that isn’t supernatural? Our new results, based on computer modelling, link evolutionary processes to the principles Read More ›

A product of carefully balanced chaos?  According to the last whiz that blew through here, There is no “I” anyway. From Science: Instead, consciousness might emerge from a careful balancing that causes the brain to “explore” the maximum number of unique pathways to generate meaning, he says. The researchers call this balance point “a critical point.”“[It’s] like cars exploring the streets of the city,” Tagliazucchi says. “If the cars move always in the same restrictive manner, if they move from point A to point B and back, at the end of the day you don’t really understand the city. But if the cars are thorough explorers and go through all possible parts of the city, you get a map that’s Read More ›

In recent days, the issue of an infinite temporal past as a step by step causal succession has come up at UD. For, it seems the evolutionary materialist faces the unwelcome choice of a cosmos from a true nothing — non-being or else an actually completed infinite past succession of finite causal steps. Durston: >>To  avoid  the  theological  and  philosophical  implications  of  a  beginning  for the  universe,  some  naturalists  such  as  Sean  Carroll  suggest  that  all  we  need  to  do  is  build  a  successful  mathematical  model  of  the  universe  where  time  t runs  from  minus  infinity  to  positive  infinity. Although  there  is  no  problem  in  having  t run  from  minus  infinity  to  plus  infinity with  a  mathematical  model,  the real Read More ›

From Nature: Some welcome his latest report as a fresh way to solve a black-hole conundrum; others are unsure of its merits. … In a paper published in 1976, Hawking pointed out that the outflowing particles — now known as Hawking radiation — would have completely random properties. As a result, once the black hole was gone, the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. But this result clashes with laws of physics that say that information, like energy, is conserved, creating the paradox. “That paper was responsible for more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history,” Strominger said during his talk. The mistake, Strominger explained, was Read More ›