2016

Geek Psychologist wonders: At a time when more research studies are being published than ever before and vast quantities of information are available on the internet to be mined, synthesized, and analyzed, we need to implement changes to popular science communication – changes that emphasize a data-driven approach to communicating research and that make it easier for members of the general public to synthesize a large volume of research findings. After all, most people understand that no scientific study is without limitations, and that each individual finding must be taken with a grain of salt. Therefore, focusing exclusively on new individual research findings likely does little to change minds, aid decision-making, and support scientific literacy in the general public. If Read More ›

Teleology in biology is unavoidable.  Dawkins was surely correct when he wrote that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”  He even characterized that appearance as “overwhelming.”  Of course, Dawkins does not believe living things were designed, and his entire project has been to convince his readers that the overwhelming appearance of design is an illusion. The problem with the “it is all a grand illusion” position is that as science has progressed – even in the relatively short time since Dawkins wrote those words in 1987 – it has become increasingly more difficult to believe.  Advances in our understanding of genetics have revealed a semiotic code of staggering Read More ›

Yeah, the dumpster, not the Thrift. Oh, and ID is wrong. From key proponent of junk DNA, University of Houston’s (human genome is mostly junk) Dan Graur, RUBBISH DNA: THE FUNCTIONLESS FRACTION OF THE HUMAN GENOME Abstract: Because genomes are products of natural processes rather than “intelligent design,” all genomes contain functional and nonfunctional parts. The fraction of the genome that has no biological function is called “rubbish DNA.” Rubbish DNA consists of “junk DNA,” i.e., the fraction of the genome on which selection does not operate, and “garbage DNA,” i.e., sequences that lower the fitness of the organism, but exist in the genome because purifying selection is neither omnipotent nor instantaneous. In this chapter, I (1) review the concepts of Read More ›

Responding to the “Buzz from the planet beyond Neptune,” (planet detected by instruments other than sighting), director of xtrnal affairs at the Science Museum, Roger Highfield tells us, In today’s science, we no longer have to see to believe Last week I met the distinguished Harvard particle physicist Lisa Randall, who has linked a mysterious cosmic source of gravity called dark matter to the most famous terrestrial cataclysm of all, the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. She has even written a book about it — Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. We only know dark matter exists by inferring that it is real. Analyse the movements of stars and you can work Read More ›

Further to “Is universe, complex as human brain, conscious?” (You know something’s up when people who discuss science at Forbes are even having this conversation), Pos-Darwinista writes to ask, re a recent astrobiology article: “Case for Gaian bottleneck?,” “Is this a case for removing the label ‘science’ from some efforts at astrobiology?” From Astrobiology: The Case for a Gaian Bottleneck: The Biology of Habitability Abstract: The prerequisites and ingredients for life seem to be abundantly available in the Universe. However, the Universe does not seem to be teeming with life. The most common explanation for this is a low probability for the emergence of life (an emergence bottleneck), notionally due to the intricacies of the molecular recipe. Here, we present Read More ›

Rob Sheldon Yesterday Rob Sheldon wrote to us on the “epicycles” of today’s cosmology. (Copernicus used about 27 epicycles 14 centuries after Ptolemy. Since the half-life of an epicycle solution is decreasing rapidly, we may reach 27 within 10 yrs.) That reminded me (O’Leary for News) about something I’d been meaning to get around to asking him. Some Christian ministries see Big Bang theory as a threat and others use it in their apologetics. Is either approach a sound idea? Science is an ever-changing, many-splendored thing. What helps or hurts a given argument could change over time, but what if the message is supposed to be for all time? Over to Sheldon: I along with Stanley Jaki stand somewhere between Read More ›

Readers may remember Ethan Siegel, science columnist at Forbes, who went on record in December saying that string theory is not science: Although there was an entire conference on it earlier this month, spurred by a controversial opinion piece written a year ago by George Ellis and Joe Silk, the answer is very clear: no, string theory is not science. The way people are trying to turn it into science is — as Sabine Hossenfelder and Davide Castelvecchi report — by redefining what “science” is. That’s daring at a time when so many people need string theory to be science. Now he asks, also at Forbes, Is The Universe Itself Alive? … You’ve seen the analogies before: how atoms are Read More ›

From the Christian Scientific Society, a new article by physicist David Snoke, “Thinking about the problem of evil,” based on presentations at the Agora Forum: … Natural evil and moral evil … To address this, I must first take a few paragraphs to make a distinction between two types of evil: natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is something that is physically unpleasant, possibly extremely and excruciatingly so. This could include pain and disease, hurricanes, floods, famines, parasites, etc. All these types of things can happen to us independent of any moral choices that humans make. We might make them worse by bad moral choices, but they would exist anyway. Moral evil involves a decision by a being with Read More ›

Skinny via Yahoo: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – The solar system may host a ninth planet that is about 10 times bigger than Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune, according to research published on Wednesday. Computer simulations show that the mystery planet, if it exists, would orbit between about 200 and 1,000 times farther from the sun than Earth, astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said. So far, the planet has not been observed directly. Not observed directly, hmmm. But wait, there’s this: The computer model also predicted the location of other objects beyond Neptune, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt, and those were found in archived surveys as well. More. From Science: The claim Read More ›

Here. January 23, 2016, 7:30 pm EST: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,015 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Evolution #16 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology #174 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution Book to be released January 26. More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. He argues that there remains “an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze shares with us a passage from Robert J. Spitzer on the impossibility of infinite past time. He explains, If often happens that infinity is marshaled to prop up the notion that evolution can work via random mutations, no matter how heavily the odds are stacked against that possibility. If the finiteness of our universe limits the effectiveness of randomness in producing wonders, then infinity is offered as the handy solution. Our universe was preceded by an infinite number of other universes which rolled the dice an infinite number of times until finally our own time-bound universe happened to get it “just right.” An infinite number of universes of course entails infinite time, a concept tossed Read More ›

Millennia ago,epicycles were introduced to astronomy to account for differences between theory and observation, thus saving the theory. Rob Sheldon writes to comment on a recent finding: New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter. First, here’s the finding: Physicists suggest a smaller secondary inflationary period in the moments after the Big Bang could account for the abundance of the mysterious matter Standard cosmology — that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation — is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ blog on new media Tweet!: Canadian cleared of harassment charges Many people today have a self-image of victimhood that is both impervious to and unrelated to shared facts. Print media are now officially a coffee table item Old media rarely die out altogether. They survive as period pieces and collectors’ items. Could Google sway an election? If so, how? American psychologist Robert Epstein explains how search engine rankings can be manipulated. Killed in Mexico’s drug wars: Honest reporting When media are afraid to report the news, there’s another casualty: Informed decision-making and voting. New media may help in the long run for a structural reason: They feature no “gatekeeper” role such as held by the veteran journalist Read More ›

BA77 often posts clips of citations and links here at UD. After a recent noticeable break (we missed you), he has just [–> correction: he posted in a thread some time ago which just got a comment from TJG . . . ]  posted a link to a video on objections to prof Dawkins’ claims that FOXP 2 (let me be exact) etc trees give the same structure: Key clips include a transcript: Plus, several family trees, such as FOXP1, showing: With FOXP2: FOXP3: The three trees seem to be quite divergent, one putting chimps with squirrels and the like, another putting gorillas on a different branch, and only one putting the three on neighbouring twigs. This seems to be Read More ›

From Pub Med: Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise. Follow UD News at Twitter! In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of ‘natural selection’ and the survival of the fittest’. ‘Saltatory ontogeny’ and ‘epigenesis’ are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, Read More ›