Further to Consciousness? No hard problem! Your brain only tells itself it is conscious, and that is why you believe it. There, that’s settled: From Charite: Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point – the ‘point of no return’. The results of this study have been published in the journal PNAS*. … “The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that Read More ›

Well, depending on your religious convictions, they did it once … From Zaria Gorvett at BBC: The last man on Earth is a common trope in fiction – but what if it actually happened? How many people would it take to save our species? … So how much variety do you need? It’s a debate that goes right back to the 80s, says Stephens, when an Australian scientist proposed a universal rule of thumb. “Basically you need 50 breeding individuals to avoid inbreeding depression and 500 in order to adapt,” he says. It’s a rule still used today – though it’s been upped to 500-5,000 to account for random losses when genes are passed from one generation to the next – Read More ›

Over at his blog at coldcasechristianity.com, homicide detective, ex-atheist and Christian apologist Jim Warner Wallace has written an interesting post (July 30, 2015) in which he identifies no less than eight attributes of an object which point to its being a product of intelligent design: I believe there are eight attributes of design we employ when reasonably inferring the existence of a Designer. To make them easier to remember, I’ve assembled them in an acronym (DESIGNED): D- Dubious Probability (Given Chance) Is random chance an insufficient explanation for the formation and assembly of the object we are examining?E -Echoes of Familiarity Does the object resemble other structures we know (with certainty) were designed by intelligent designers? S- Sophistication and Intricacy Read More ›

From Financial Express: Evolution is a touchy subject. Unveil a new discovery pointing towards what triggered life on Earth and a whole contingent of evolutionists, the proponents of Intelligent design (ID) and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), spiritualists and those who believe in one “Supreme Being” will rush to reinforce that what they say is true. Yes, and hundreds of them will die, trampled by naturalists, converging on a single straw that supports them… But one thing becomes clear if examined from a purely scientific point of view: we are close yet still far from knowing when a single-cell organism stopped behaving like a single-cell entity and decided to explode into a multi-cellular being and – millions and millions of Read More ›

  April 16, 2016 online From Blyth Institute: We are pleased to announce the 2016 Conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism, which aims to explore new methodologies that can be employed in a variety of disciplines that are not based on methodological naturalism. E-mail proposed abstracts to info@blythinstitute.org (200-500 words) More. E-conference is available. Blyth previously hosted the Engineering and Metaphysics conference, with proceedings. From News: Methodological naturalism is Darwin’s sucker punch: Science is coterminous with naturalism. The purpose of science, therefore, is to come up with theories that are in line with and support naturalist (nature is all there is) explanations. If those explanations seem weak (cf crackpot cosmology and evolutionary psychology) , we must wait for better naturalist explanations. No other Read More ›

From scientist and novelist Michael Grazziano at the Atlantic: It’s just the brain describing itself—to itself. but … Wait … Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. Well, that one’s been tried before. As here, it involves speculations about human evolution based on one or two slender skeins of evidence. The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, Read More ›

HeKS raises a sobering point: >>Darwinists . . . don’t seem to understand that people are capable of, for example, making ‘statements against interest’, or simply acknowledging facts and data that generally are inconsistent with evolutionary expectations, or with the popular notions of evolutionary theory, or with popular misconceptions regarding the evidence supporting the theory (or theories). Instead, they think – quite ridiculously – that it is inappropriate to quote anyone in support of a premise used in an anti-evolutionary argument unless the person being quoted agrees with a conclusion along the lines of “evolutionary theory is nonsense”. This creates a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ scenario, because if an ID proponent quotes an evolutionary biologist (or any other Read More ›

Let the door hit both of you on the way out? Well, how else to understand this, from a review of new book, The Society of Genes (Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Harvard U Press)? From New Scientist: FORTY years ago, Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene popularised the notion that the gene, rather than the individual, was the true unit of evolution. That view has dominated evolutionary genetics ever since. But in The Society of Genes, biologists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher say that it’s time to replace the selfish-gene metaphor with a new one that focuses on relationships. “We are not the simple sum of our genes,” they write. “The members of the society of genes do not Read More ›

Darn right. The simpler emotions, anyway. And what would we make of a study that claimed they didn’t? Well, anyway, … from ScienceDaily: Dogs can recognize emotions in humans by combining information from different senses — an ability that has never previously been observed outside of humans, a new study published today reveals. … The researchers advance a claim that the dogs are forming abstract representations of mental states in order to do that. It’s not clear why they would need to. “Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPo, offering the “unofficial list” for the the meeting scheduled for the public November 7-9 meet, co-sponsored by the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences: Prime movers of the event are: Oxford physiologist and Royal Society Fellow, Denis Noble — who has already made his case on this page for replacing the modern synthesis; Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 for his service to biology and currently serves as president of the Zoological Society of London; Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, a University of Durham/University of California-San Diego philosopher of science and Fellow of the British Academy; John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter whose Read More ›

I used to make a joke here that quote mining, to a Darwinist, was any time an IDist or Creationist quoted a mainstream evolutionary biologist.  A recent thread at TSZ  has sadly revealed that my joke wasn’t a joke. That’s what they actually think. After looking over the site petrushka (the author of the thread) referred to, I realized that the people at that site presented no evidence for quote-mining, and one of the site authors attempting to characterize why a quote was “quote-mined” said this: So we see that Gould et al. don’t reject evolution, but claim that phyletic evolution takes a second seat to speciation. Did anyone actually try to paint Gould as “rejecting evolution”? That hardly seems Read More ›

After spending the last few years pretending to be an ID proponent, all the while bashing every other ID proponent and disparaging most ID ideas, Salvador Cordova has finally come clean and formally withdrawn from the ID movement.  Here.  He did it over at The Skeptical Zone, of course, where he has found a home with more like-minded folks.

Please see the note and apology at the end of this post. —– Over on a recent thread Alicia Cartelli responded to my request that if she had “an idea how abiogenesis works” I would post it as a head post for discussion. I have not yet had time to parse through all this, other than to note that most of what Alicia discusses below was already granted for discussion purposes in my Abiogenesis Challenge. Thus, even if we were to grant the very questionable and optimistic claims, it still does not address the central issues needed for the origin of life, including the issue of information content. That said, I appreciate Alicia taking time to put together the below Read More ›

What our dogs and cats feel like when we don’t understand them. From Evolution News & Views: … Continuities can be merely apparent, not actual. Consider, for example, the laptop computer vs. the typewriter. Both feature the QWERTYUIOP keyboard. That might suggest a physical continuity between the two machines. The story would run thus: Computer developers added more and more parts to the typewriter, and subtracted some, until they had transformed the typewrter into a laptop. But of course, they didn’t. They adapted a widely recognized keyboard layout to an entirely new type of machine. Continuities are created by history, not laws. If we don’t know the history, we don’t know whether a similarity reflects continuity or not. Bolhuis and Read More ›

Has recently retired from being “vestige of evolution” … From Jordan Rosenfeld at Mental Floss: While the appendix is not required for digestive functions in humans, Belz tells mental_floss, “It does house symbiotic bacteria proposed by Randal Bollinger and Bill Parker at Duke University to be important for overall gut health, but particularly when we get a gut infection resulting in diarrhea.” Infections of this kind clear the gut not only of fluids and nutrients but also good bacteria. Their research suggests that those ILCs [innate lymphoid cells] housed in the appendix may be there as a reserve to repopulate the gut with good bacteria after a gut infection. ILCs are hardier than other immune cells, and thus vital to Read More ›