2016

In comments to my last post HeKS absolutely lays waste to two materialists who are trying to punch way above their weight.  First, Pindi spews out the million-times-rebutted claim that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God. Pindi: And its not that I don’t want to believe in something that is god-like and personal. I just don’t see any evidence for it. HeKS responds (not placed in quote box; all that follows is his unless noted otherwise): Oh God, it’s the “there just isn’t any evidence” canard again. I don’t know how atheists can even make this claim with a straight face anymore. Here is a sampling of a few lines of evidence strongly pointing to God’s existence: – Read More ›

From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies … Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics are extremely well-tested theories, and yet they refuse to combine. The clash reveals something much more fundamental than a seemingly exotic quirk about black holes: the information paradox makes it aptly clear that physicists still do not understand the fundamental laws of nature. But Gia Dvali, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, believes he’s Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

From Donald S. Kornfeld & Sandra L. Titus at Nature: Only 10–12 individuals are found guilty by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) each year. That number, which the NIH used to dismiss the role of research misconduct1, is misleadingly low, as numerous studies show. For instance, a review2 of 2,047 life-science papers retracted from 1973 to 2012 found that around 43% were attributed to fraud or suspected fraud. A compilation of anonymous surveys3 suggests that 2% of scientists and trainees admit that they have fabricated, falsified or modified data. And a 1996 study4 of more than 1,000 postdocs found that more than one-quarter would select or omit data to improve their chances of receiving grant funding. … Nonetheless, Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at Evolution News & Views : Much of my book is devoted to developing an argument around everyday experience and common sense, a combination I refer to as common science. It seems to me that Darwin’s thinking is quite vulnerable to refutation by common science. After all, selection doesn’t really make anything. It merely chooses among things that have already been made. That’s what the word means. The only kind of selection that gives you clams or snails is the kind you do while ordering dinner at a French restaurant. [Critic] Sharma dismisses such thoughts as childish “pre-theoretical” thinking. One of my book’s themes is that we adults shy away from common-science deductions like Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs’ brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain. Of course. Otherwise, how would they distinguish between Bad dog, bad! And Good dog, good! Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain. Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances. Thought experiment: If we whispered Read More ›

This exchange between Phinehas and HeKS brings it out as succinctly as anything I’ve ever seen: Phinehas says: The thing that fascinates me is how atheists are shown to have prodigious faith in something eternal with god-like creative powers [i.e., the multiverse]. It’s almost like they have no issues whatsoever believing in a god, just so long as it doesn’t bear that particular label. HeKS replies: I tend to think that it’s because they don’t want that eternal thing with god-like creative powers to also be personal and have the ability to ground and impose moral values and duties on humans. As the multiverse has demonstrated, atheists have no problem at all with faith in something that is unseen, intangible, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as “junk” DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease. A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. … “What we found in this study is probably the tip of the iceberg,” Sullivan said. “There could be all sorts of functional consequences to having variation within Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Noel Rude (native American specialist) kindly writes to say, re Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: — But maybe we should pause a moment and ask just what the beef is between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky [addressed by Wolfe in detail. – ed.] –as seen by actual linguists. I can tell you what it isn’t. Hardly any linguist would now challenge the fact that language is creative and that there is at present no materialist theory whatsoever to explain this–though of course this fact is seldom mentioned. Language, you see, divides between the physical medium (sound, symbols, words, grammar) and the nonphysical message. The big beef is not about the latter but the former. Chomsky Read More ›

From Reuters: If confirmed as fossilized communities of bacteria known as stromatolites – rather than a freak natural formation – the lumps would pre-date fossils found in Australia as the earliest evidence of life on Earth by 220 million years. “This indicates the Earth was no longer some sort of hell 3.7 billion years ago,” lead author Allen Nutman, of the University of Wollongong, told Reuters of the findings that were published in the journal Nature. More. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, “This potentially pushes back our understanding of the antiquity of life on Earth, which is really quite astounding,” Abigail Allwood, a research scientist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Mashable. If it is true that Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Dwight Garner at New York Times on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists. … Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms Read More ›

In a current thread that is nominally on the latest allegedly earth-like exoplanet, predictably that is where distractors will come up on things like: >>[RVB8, 21:] “800 million (unusual figure) unborn aborted fetuses. Perhaps this is true, it’s certainly true abortions have occured, and probably happen at a faster rate now becuse of the ‘day after’ pill.”>> Of course, equally predictably, this sort of talking point did not crop up in the many threads where I have repeatedly outlined exactly how this estimate was put together. (Such are the now all too predictable patterns of objections and dismissals we see at UD and in the penumbra of attack sites. More on that in the PS.) I answered in a following Read More ›

Responding to Barry Arrington’s comment that if The Atlantic thinks the multiverse is reaching its sell by date, surely the food waste dumpster looms, physicist Rob Sheldon comments, — That was a pretty ambiguous article, ending with a question. Because if the multiverse is a philosophy that is rotting culture, then we must dig down to its root, and ask “where did it come from?” I think, and we could probably ask 3 philosophers and get 4 opinions, that this multiverse concept is exactly what you expect from materialism. That is, the alternative to multiverse is NOT a determined, deterministic, Newtonian-Laplacian world. Nor is it a QM world of shadowy probabilities becoming realized by observation. Rather, the alternative to multiverse Read More ›

Dennis Venema writes at BioLogos: The fact that several amino acids do in fact bind their codons or anticodons is strong evidence that at least part of the code was formed through chemical interactions My grandchildren have a set of magnetic letters and a magnetic whiteboard to stick them to.  Suppose I stuck several letters on the whiteboard in the following configuration: MY DOG WAGGED HIS TAIL AND JUMPED IN THE CAR This is code just like the genetic code.  The word “dog” is not a dog.  The word “car” is not a car.  Those words signify dog and car.  That is the essence of a code, one thing arbitrarily signifying another. Now, the letters that make up the code Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to say, I came across this rather strange report: Abstract The European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA) guidelines for health economic evaluations represent a consolidated view of non-binding recommendations for assessments of the relative effectiveness of pharmaceuticals or other health technologies. EUnetHTA views itself as the scientific and technological backbone of the development of health technology assessment in the European Union and among its member states and other partners. Unfortunately, the standards for health technology assessment proposed by EUnetHTA do not meet the standards of normal science. They do not support credible claims for the clinical and comparative cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. In rejecting thestandards of normal science the guidelines put to one side the opportunity not only to Read More ›