From writer and filmmaker Paul Ratner at BigThink: Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes. Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein’s pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he Read More ›

Reviewing Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, at Gospel Coalition: The book is well-written, informative, engaging, and relentlessly provocative. Despite these strengths, however, the book failed to convince me. It exemplifies what many Christians on the sidelines find concerning as they watch these science-theology debates unfolding. And once again—to borrow a Mark Twain misquote—rumors of Adam’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. We shouldn’t miss the deep irony. One of the authors’ main motivations for writing this book is to remove a stumbling block for young people. McKnight goes on to tell us, repeatedly and insistently, that most lay believers consider the “historical” Adam central to the faith. As we’ve seen, his main thesis is that there is Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, on Denis Noble’s new book, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity, Here is a new book from Oxford University biologist Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity. He is one of the Third Way of Evolution folks, and no advocate of intelligent design. In the book, published by Cambridge U Press, he argues for a “fundamental revision” of neo-Darwinian theory. Noble was among the organizers and participants at the Royal Society meeting in London that we’ve talked so much about here. Evolutionary biology is in a state of ferment verging, in some quarters, on open rebellion. Don’t let Darwin apologists tell you otherwise. More. Darwin apologists can probably Read More ›

From George Johnson at Undark: In November, Judge María Alejandra Mauricio of the Third Court of Guarantees in Mendoza decreed that Cecilia is a “nonhuman person” — one that was being denied “the fundamental right” of all sentient beings “to be born, to live, grow, and die in the proper environment for their species.” Agreeing to a petition by animal rights lawyers in Argentina for a writ of habeas corpus — a demand that a court rule on whether a prisoner or inmate is being legally detained — the judge ordered that the chimpanzee be freed from the zoo and transferred to a great ape sanctuary in Brazil. In an earlier case, an appeals court in Buenos Aires upheld a Read More ›

In an interview with Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post. Mazur explains, Plug certain information into SUPERFAMILY and it can analyze a vast assortment of genomes and assist you in building a Tree of Life using superfamilies — i.e., domains with an evolutionary relationship — and the conserved part of thousands and thousands of protein structures called protein domains. … Suzan Mazur: Do protein Superfamilies represent the current limits of our ability to identify common ancestry? Julian Gough: Yes. That is exactly what their definition is. So if you want to group two protein structural domains into the same Superfamily, the question that you ask is whether there is structural sequence and functional evidence for common evolutionary ancestry. So they’re classified Read More ›

In debate after debate I’m sure we’ve all noticed that some people continually recycle the same statements over and over as if those statements represent something more than emotion-laden rhetoric that hasn’t already been factually and logically refuted or otherwise sufficiently responded to.  While this is hardly surprising, what has piqued my interest are discussions involving the election of Donald J. Trump and abortion, I suppose because those subjects carry a great deal of emotional weight for many people. I think the reaction to these subjects reveals something extremely interesting and dangerous to society. I’m not just talking about atheists/materialists here, but people in general. In every single discussion I had with anyone not supporting Trump, their reaction to Trump Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A subset of protein complexes whose role has long been thought to consist only of chemically degrading and discarding of proteins no longer needed by cells appears to also play a role in sending messages from one nerve cell to another, researchers report. … Paper. (paywall) Together, the researchers say, these findings suggest that the neuronal membrane-bound proteasome is vitally important for cell signaling. Their experiments bring up a host of new questions about what specific proteins this complex is degrading, what compounds it’s expelling and what happens when this system breaks down, Ramachandran says. He and Margolis, he says, are already discovering links between glitches in this system and neurological disease, such as neurodegeneration. “Realistically, understanding the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History have found fossils of 1.6 billion-year-old probable red algae. The spectacular finds, publishing on 14 March in the open access journal PLOS Biology, indicate that advanced multicellular life evolved much earlier than previously thought. … Discoveries of early multicellular eukaryotes have been sporadic and difficult to interpret, challenging scientists trying to reconstruct and date the tree of life. The oldest known red algae before the present discovery are 1.2 billion years old. The Indian fossils, 400 million years older and by far the oldest plant-like fossils ever found, suggest that the early branches of the tree of life need to be recalibrated. “The ‘time of visible life’ seems to have Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Animals with high cognitive ability also have relatively large brains, but the factors that drive evolution of big brains remain unclear. Scientists have hypothesized that ecological, social, and cultural factors could each play a role. Most of these hypotheses have not been formalized mathematically, but doing so would allow scientists to refine their tests. To address the issue, Mauricio González-Forero of University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues developed a mathematical model that predicts how large the human brain should be at different stages of an individual’s life, depending on different possible evolutionary scenarios. The model relies on the assumption that the brain expends some energy on cognitive skills that allow an individual to extract energy from the environment Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Nautilus: The hypothesis of a fifth force is, then, anything but exhausted. In fact it’s fair to say that any observations in fundamental physics or cosmology that can’t be explained by our current theories—by the Standard Model of particle physics or by general relativity—are apt to get physicists talking about new forces or new types of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. That’s simply the way physics has always worked: When all else fails, you place a new piece on the board and see how it moves. Sure, we haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence for a fifth force, but neither have we seen a direct sign of dark matter or supersymmetry or extra Read More ›

Well, how about this: Would another hundred and fifty articles offering brand new theories of consciousness, each newer than the last, cause you to consider that possibility? Or will you just say, a decade from now, “That’s how science progresses!” From neuroscientist Henrik Jörntell at the Conversation: Understanding the human brain is arguably the greatest challenge of modern science. The leading approach for most of the past 200 years has been to link its functions to different brain regions or even individual neurons (brain cells). But recent research increasingly suggests that we may be taking completely the wrong path if we are to ever understand the human mind. … But what if we instead considered the possibility that all brain Read More ›

Readers may remember the Darwinian icon of the Galapagos finches that were supposed to be turning into new species but then just drifted back and forth. One would think the finches didn’t give a hoot about Science. From Evolution News & Views: In a new Perspective piece in Science Magazine, “Watching Speciation in Action,” they show that they are not the only ones who have witnessed the origin of species. Beginning with the Darwin quote about “grandeur in this view of life” that evolves, they describe a number of studies like theirs that illustrate organisms that have varied and diversified from parent stock. Let’s begin by listing the examples and what is known about them, both genetically and phenotypically. These Read More ›

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel: God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a Read More ›

From Mark Anderson at New Scientist: Fresh suspicions have reopened the case against dark matter, forcing a fundamental rethink of the familiar force that keeps our feet on the ground … But what if we never really knew gravity at all? What if out there, beyond where we can easily keep our eye on it, the universal force doesn’t stick to the rules? (paywall) More. It’s hard to know what to make of the question. Whatever gravity does is the rules. See also: A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, at Shadow of Oz: Swamidass surprises us with a very counter-intuitive statement: “Did you know that information = entropy? This means the 2nd law of thermodynamics guarantees that information content will increase with time, unless we do something to stop it.” … Of course, he is arguing much more than just the observation that entropy = information. He’s arguing that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics guarantees an increase in information. This seems very sloppy to me. Yes, if we consider time as a variable, then the universe will develop pockets of increased information (complexity?), while still experiencing a global loss of information and complexity. The universe Read More ›