The spider’s leg accidentally caught and broke while he was being placed in the jar. Luckily, the big guy has just the fix. See also: Spider brains are amazing, say Cornell researchers and Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Digg
Video: Blurb at the Amazon page for the book: >>Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a gaping hole Read More ›
At Aeon: I consider humans the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species. But we do have something evidence for something: the summer silly season. See, for example: Orangutan copies human speech? Must be BBC. Must be summer. The fascinating thing about today’s naturalist science is the way so many key claims are either unfalsifiable (multiverse) or obvious hype (orangutan, above)—or they assume, without any particular basis, a path of history (apes are entering the Stone Age) or geography (galaxies out there teem with life). I (O’Leary for news) volunteer as a writing instructor. “Might be true” is a standard for fiction. An important standard. It distinguishes Read More ›
Responding to Turtles: Shells evolved for digging, not protection?, turtle-knowledgeable reader Paul D. Cook kindly writes to say: – I’m not an expert on turtles. My degrees are in fields of engineering that are unrelated to this subject. But we have had turtles as pets for over 20 years. (Cute & affectionate critters. And while not as smart as a cat or dog, God has still packed more into their pea sized brain, than one would expect.) As soon as I read the article, I wondered about some obvious datapoint that might seem to be outliers for this idea. What about turtles such as the snapping turtles, which have far less protection on their undersides than on their backs. And Read More ›
At PLOSOne, What Is Speciation? Abstract: Concepts and definitions of species have been debated by generations of biologists and remain controversial. Microbes pose a particular challenge because of their genetic diversity, asexual reproduction, and often promiscuous horizontal gene transfer (HGT). However, microbes also present an opportunity to study and understand speciation because of their rapid evolution, both in nature and in the lab, and small, easily sequenced genomes. Here, we review how microbial population genomics has enabled us to catch speciation “in the act” and how the results have challenged and enriched our concepts of species, with implications for all domains of life. We describe how recombination (including HGT and introgression) has shaped the genomes of nascent microbial, animal, and Read More ›
In the current VJT thread on 31 scientists who did not follow methodological naturalism, it has been noteworthy that objectors have studiously avoided addressing the basic warrant for the design inference. Since this is absolutely pivotal but seems to be widely misunderstood or even dismissed without good reason, it seems useful to summarise this for consideration. This having been done at comment 170 in the thread, it seems further useful to headline it and invite discussion: _________________ >>F/N: It seems advisable to again go back to basics, here, inductive reasoning and why it has significance in scientific work; which then has implications for the design inference. A good point to begin is IEP in its article on induction and deduction Read More ›
From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life. Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed. Half alive? One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP. That fits in beautifully Read More ›
From neuroscientist Simon Gandevia at The Conversation: Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine. A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science. … One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made. This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are Read More ›
From Ed Yong at Atlantic: Tyler Lyson from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has devised a fascinating new idea about turtle origins. He thinks that their iconic shells evolved not for defense, but for digging. They anchored the powerful arm strokes needed to shift soil and sand. Before turtles became impregnable walking fortresses, they were professional burrowers. For almost a century, biologists argued about how turtles got their shells—a debate almost as slow and plodding as the creatures themselves. Paleontologists mostly argued that the shells evolved from bony scales called osteoderms, which are also responsible for the armor of crocodiles, armadillos, and many dinosaurs. These scales simply expanded to fuse with the ribs and backbone, creating a solid Read More ›
Closing our religion coverage for the day, from UTEP mathematician Granville Sewell’s Christianity for Doubters: The idea that a decomposed, dead body could be replaced by a new body someday, somewhere, seems impossible. But to me it seems equally impossible that an ugly caterpillar could enter a tomb and be resurrected as a beautiful new butterfly, and yet a butterfly with many entirely new organs is constructed out of the dissolved and recycled parts of a caterpillar every day in a chrysalis, as the film (p. 47) Metamorphosis documents so magnificently. This film includes photography (through magnetic resonance imaging) of the transformation as it happens within the chrysalis. If you find it impossible to believe in the miracle of resurrection, Read More ›
Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, notes this podcast he did: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God (July 22, 2016) More. Stand to Reason trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith and to make an even-handed, incisive, yet gracious defense for classical Christianity and classical Christian values in the public square. See also: Wayne Rossiter on teaching Darwin’s unquestionable truths Follow UD News at Twitter!
From Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: It is my opinion that the reality of the Creator, or the existence of God, is a truth that is quite accessible. Although the ideas that I will present may require careful analysis and contemplation, they are not particularly complicated or difficult. Most can be understood by an intelligent and inquisitive high school senior. This is not necessarily a reflection of an individual’s native intelligence; proper analysis of an abstract or philosophical concept is a skill he or she may never have acquired. Regarding this, I hope I have presented my ideas in a clear enough fashion that newcomers will be able to follow. There is a second Read More ›
From Joanna Masel at Big Questions Online: With the error rate in this example, that could be enough for natural selection to take notice. To see how, imagine you have a permanent, germline mutation that doesn’t affect how well your protein works in normal cases, when it’s transcribed and translated correctly. But the mutation does change the fraction of error-containing variants that work properly, say from 40 percent to 42 percent. That means slightly less work for your cells’ garbage-disposal system and more fitness for you — making you healthier and more likely to survive and reproduce. In other words, this mutation benefits you, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection doesn’t just judge how well a gene works when its proteins are Read More ›
So he tells the Guardian: Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share. If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world Read More ›
The claim that British moths “evolved” because of industrial pollution (microevolution) in recent centuries became an unquestionable truth of Darwin lobby textbooks in recent decades. But there are serious problems with that example (the peppered myth). From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, a note: Note that I do not deny that there are examples of microevolution in action (in fact, I affirm the existence of such examples). I simply point out that this “prized horse” in the evolutionist’s stable—an example that ranks with Darwin’s finches—has serious shortcomings that go unmentioned in the public or in the classroom. In [Darwin defender] JB’s attempt to rescue the sacred cow, he/she completely misses the Read More ›