According to Sharon Woodhill, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University (Nova Scotia, Canada) at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer 2016) The Sexual Politics of Intelligent Design Abstract: Intelligent design is creationism for the twenty-first century. It is the view that the natural world is best explained as the product of an intentional intelligent agent rather than undirected natural forces. Although there has been much ado about its scientific status, beyond the scientific face of intelligent design is a dense discourse that brings a compelling aspect into full relief. Intelligent design is a political movement that embodies aggressive and regressive sexual politics. This article suggests that, motivated by the belief that evolutionary thought has Read More ›

From Jennifer Frazer at Scientific American: Gemmata obscuriglobis excels at breaking rules. Like the platypus, to whom these bacteria have been compared, they possess a baffling arsenal of oddities. Although it has been controversial, they seem to contain membrane-bound compartments. One of those compartments surrounds their DNA. That would make it, apparently, a nucleus. But bacteria are thought to be devoid of nuclei – hence the terms prokaryote (“pre-kernel”) for bacteria and archaea, and eukaryote (“true kernel”) for all nucleated life (which includes all multicellular organisms). The eye-popping apparent commonalities don’t end there. … If that is the case, it means one of two equally astounding things must be true: either this humble bacterium, isolated from freshwater near the Maroon Read More ›

Read and decide. Recently, Paul Ratner asked at BigThink if Albert Einstein was a pantheist or deist? A friend kindly forwards information from a 2009 web page that no longer exists, apparently originally composed in German, dated in 2009, http://nobelist.tripod.com/id1.html The author appears to have done homework. If anyone finds out whose vanished page this is, please let us know in the combox. 1. ALBERT EINSTEIN – NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS Nobel Prize: Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to Quantum Theory and for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is one of the founders of modern physics; he is the author of the Theory of Relativity. According Read More ›

In response to: Math prof: Be careful what we do with infinity. Weird things can happen: “Some weird things are like 1 = 0, not just weird, but undesirable. So we try to build our mathematical ideas to avoid those. But other weird things don’t contradict logic, they just contradict normal life,” a reader writes, Indeed, when you introduce ‘infinity’ into your equation, one of the (far worse than “weird” or “undesirable”) results you get is that 1=0 , which is a logical contradiction/impossibility (which is to say, utterly impossible). Or, to put this another way, you can “prove” anything with a false premise. And, this “result” that 1=0 is one more way we can know that the age of Read More ›

This month’s quote is by Cornelius Hunter, followed by a few brief thoughts on falsifiability in science. Let me know what you think: Quote of the Month: Cornelius Hunter on the Unfalsifiability of Evolution

The first video release from the AM-Nat Biology conference is now available! In this video, Salvador Cordova talks about the possibility that many things that are commonly considered errors in biology actually have identifiable purposes. Cordova confronts what is both a theological and a scientific critique of design, and shows its limitations. As Sal points out at the beginning of this video, this talk was a special request of mine. Sal has posted on these topics here on UD, but I thought they got less attention than they should, as I think they are really important concepts. If you are interested in the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism series, you should pick up our book, Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Read More ›

From Eugenia Cheng at ScienceFriday: What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be. This is a journey that took mathematicians thousands of years, involving some of the most important developments of mathematics: set theory and calculus, just for starters. The moral of that story is that although the idea of infinity is quite easy to come up with, Read More ›

A literary essay from David Randall at First Things: Yet three notable works of science fiction do address themselves to the power of that old promise against the secular infinitudes of time and space: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964), John Morressy’s The Mansions of Space (1983), and R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968). These novels share a Christian preoccupation—a theological preoccupation—with the survival of faith threatened sometimes by oblivion, sometimes by annihilation, and sometimes indeed by the gates of hell. The three fables vary on an important particular. The survival of faith may or may not be identical with the survival of the Church—and the difference between broadly Christian and specifically Catholic science fiction may be Read More ›

No, we hadn’t heard of it either. At Cerebral Faith, Christian apologist Evan Minton explains, Recently, William Lane Craig debated atheist Michael Nugent in Ireland on the existence of God. One of the arguments that Dr. Craig employed was The Fine Tuning Argument for design. I’m going to assume that readers of this article already have some familiarity with the fine tuning, so in case you’re new to the God debate, or this website, or apologetics in general, I discuss The Fine Tuning Argument in this blog post here. In response to the Fine Tuning Argument, Nugent said the following: “Theists believe that this God fine tuned the physical constants of the universe to allow life. But while these constants Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Former NBA player Shaquille O’Neal can likely see that a basketball is round, but the newly proclaimed “flat-Earther” can’t seem to say the same for the planet. In a podcast that aired Feb. 27, the basketball legend announced that the Earth is flat, saying that when he drives from Florida to California, “it’s flat to me.” But there are countless ways that show the Earth isn’t flat, but round. (To be specific, it’s an “irregularly shaped ellipsoid,” according to the National Ocean Service.) Before we dive into the science, here is what O’Neal said, as sports reporter Ben Rohrbach first reported. … More. Box office? Okay, now we see: It feels flat to him. But Read More ›

From Laura Gegel at LiveScience: Human cannibals likely took a big bite out of their fellow humans about 10,000 years ago, according to a study that examined prehistoric bones with scratch and bite marks on them. The bones, discovered in the Santa Maria Caves (Coves de Santa Maria) in Alicante, Spain, may be the first instance of cannibalism in the western European Mediterranean region dating to the Mesolithic period, the researchers said. (The Mesolithic period last from about 10,200 to 8,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula. “Mesolithic” means middle stone, and it’s between the Paleolithic, or old stone, and Neolithic, or new stone, periods.) … However, it’s unclear if this cannibalism was performed because of hunger or rather some Read More ›

From Linda Geddes at New Scientist: Metabolism may be older than life itself and start spontaneously However, the enzyme-free Krebs cycle that Ralser observed isn’t the complete biochemical cycle as it operates in modern cells. That may have come later, after enzymes evolved. Furthermore, the sulphate-driven cycle has so far only been shown to run in one direction (the oxidative one). In some species, the Krebs cycle can also run in reverse and help to incorporate CO2 into the building of new carbohydrates. Some think it may therefore have been involved in early carbon fixation, in which case you’d expect to see the cycle spontaneously turning in this direction too. Until researchers can demonstrate both these things, they cannot claim Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall)Our genome is made up of 6,000 million pieces of DNA that combine four “flavors”: A, C, G and T (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine). It is our Alphabet. But to this base we must add some regulation, just like the spelling and grammar of that alphabet: this is what we call Epigenetics. “In epigenetics, there there are “accents,” called DNA methylation, which means having a C or a methyl-C. The first one usually means that a gene is expressed and active, while the second one implies that a gene is silent and inactive. Our DNA “speaks” when it produces another molecule called RNA (Ribonucleic Acid). Until very recently, it was believed that this molecule was only Read More ›

Much useful information/links/sources from Jonathan Latham at CounterPunch: As early as the death of Charles Darwin (1882) it was said that his thought (which for the most part meant Huxley’s interpretations) could be found “under a hundred disguises in works on law and history, in political speeches and religious discourses…if we try to think ourselves away from it we must think ourselves entirely away from our age” (John Morley, 1882, cited in Desmond 1998) Thus the belief system that humans are controlled by an internal master molecule has become woven into myriad areas of social thought. It is far beyond the scope of this article to describe the consequences of genetic determinism at either the personal or the societal level Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have described the 3D structure of the genome in the extremely small bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae. They discovered previously unknown arrangements of DNA within this tiny bacteria, which are also found in larger cells. Their findings suggest that this type of organization is a universal feature of living cells. DNA contains the instructions for life, encoded within genes. Within all cells, DNA is organised into very long lengths known as chromosomes. In animal and plant cells these are double-ended, like pieces of string or shoelaces, but in bacteria they are circular. Whether stringy or circular, these long chromosomes must be organised and packaged inside a cell so that the genes can be switched on or off when they Read More ›