From ScienceDaily: The ability to generate oxygen through photosynthesis — that helpful service performed by plants and algae, making life possible for humans and animals on Earth — evolved just once, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, in certain types of cyanobacteria. This planet-changing biological invention has never been duplicated, as far as anyone can tell. Instead, according to endosymbiotic theory, all the “green” oxygen-producing organisms (plants and algae) simply subsumed cyanobacteria as organelles in their cells at some point during their evolution. Endosymbiotic theory (life forms acquire useful units the way corporations acquire businesses) is a favourite in the coffee room around here but it is not up there with gravity. Still, do say on: Fischer and his colleagues found Read More ›

Further to David Deming’s observation that is often misused, Laszlo Bencze offers this thought: reminds us that he reflected a while back on the whole business of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. As to Carl Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,“ well, my goodness, there’s a flaw here. The person making the demand is always the one to judge the sufficiency of how “extraordinary” is extraordinary enough. The extraordinary evidence demanded may be a mite too extraordinary. By these standards, we might still be stuck with ancient animistic notions of how the world works because no evidence extraordinary enough could ever be found to dislodge them. But what’s wrong with “ordinary” evidence such as we usually get in the world Read More ›

From David Snokes at Christian Scientific Society: Kevin Birdwell gave a general overview of the issue of global warming and humans’ contribution to it. On the scientific side, one of his main points was that carbon dioxide is not the whole story; there are many other considerations, possibly the greatest of which is the warming due to urban “hot spots”—people’s experience of heat rises in recent years may be much more related to the effects of city density (which can raise local temperatures by 10 degrees or more) than to overall global warming (which has been about 1 degree in the last century). He held out hope that new technology could solve some of these issues of urbanization. His talk Read More ›

Sev muses: The problem for creationists is that positing an intelligence that is able to create life out of inanimate materials is to claim that life can be created out of non-living materials. The question then becomes, if it’s possible at the hands of a creator then why not through natural causation? Hmmm.  The space station exists.  Just why couldn’t it have been built by blind purposeless natural causes?  I suppose the analogy is not really fair, because the nano-technology displayed in even the most simple life makes the space station look like a tinker toy.

A Boltzmann brain is a disembodied space brain that should exist, if naturalist theories are all correct, but we have never seen one. From Rochester astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: Although it’s an interesting paradox, most astrophysicists don’t think Boltzmann brains are a real possibility. … But it turns out that, since the universe is expanding, these apparent fluctuations might not be coming from the vacuum. Instead, as the universe expands, the edge of the observable universe causes thermal fluctuations to appear, much like the event horizon of a black hole gives rise to Hawking radiation. This gives the appearance of vacuum fluctuations, from our point of view. The true vacuum of space and time isn’t fluctuating, so it cannot Read More ›

Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch conveniently sums up the problem at Nautilus: Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like Read More ›

Aimed, one guesses, at people who already have a religion or don’t think they need one. From a group of instructors at Wake Forest University: BioBook Basic Edition and its linked resources are available free to everyone. Click on the Table of Contents tab to browse topics. Registered users must log in here or in the upper right corner of the screen to access their instructor’s customized edition and course tools. You will find them listed in the main menu. More. A 40-part video lecture that accompanies the book will soon be available. Some are already available at YouTube. and Chapter 2. We better not tell the “Pants in Knot for Darwin” folk. They may end up wearing their pants Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz offers a response to Casper Hesp’s concern that we not take fine-tuning of our universe to be evidence for God: It’s odd to review a review, but a few things came up in Casper Hesp’s review of Signposts to God (by physicist Peter Bussey), and I felt they needed to be pointed out. First let me say that it is apparent that Hesp’s views are not that representative of BioLogos in general (which begs the question, why is he writing for them?). Namely, if his views are correct then both Francis Collins and Robin Collins, and a good many other BioLogians, are wrong. In fact, most Christians are wrong, because most of us Read More ›

From a review by Jonathan Rosen of two books about owls at the Wall Street Journal: As both books detail, the anthropomorphic effect of the facial disc [of the owl] is an accident of evolution that has sculpted owl faces into satellite dishes that direct sound waves to their ears. (paywall) Our philosopher friend Laszlo Bencze writes to say, Let’s see: accidents have sculpted. Really? Somehow I thought that sculpting—as opposed to eroding—require a sculptor. Furthermore the result of the accidents is “satellite dishes that direct sound waves to their ears.” My my. None of the accidents in my life have ever resulted in anything half so marvelous. I just get smashed bumpers and broken crockery. Just once I’d like Read More ›

In “BioLogos: One shouldn’t use fine-tuning as an argument for God’s existence, Wayne Rossiter was quoted as saying that he had predicted hat theistic evolutionists would go to war against fine-tuning. So, we naturally asked, where? Where’s your sealed, time-stamped, notarized envelope? Turns out, it’s in his book Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, and he helpfully provided us with some quotations: After unwrapping the anthropic argument from ‘fine-tuning,’[Bruce] Glass [a theistic evolutionist] crosses the finish line with, ‘It should not go unnoted that there are plausible alternatives to the idea that our universe was specifically designed for the purpose of producing life. None of these alternatives, however, do anything to exclude the possibility of God as Read More ›

From Casper Hesp at BioLogos: I believe it is unwise to turn fine-tuning into an argument based on the gaps in our understanding, because the properties of the universe could become more amenable to scientific explanation in the future. Watchful readers will have noticed that the pitfalls discussed here have almost one-on-one equivalents in common arguments of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. ID proponents have used arguments from probability, entropy, and gaps in our current understanding of nature to make inferences about the existence of a “designer.” More. Has the author any reason to expect that more discoveries will lead to fewer perceptions of fine-tuning? Has that been the pattern so far? If not, what is his basis for thinking it Read More ›

From Luciano Floridi at New Atlantis: Information is, in a way, the Cinderella in the history of philosophy. Any philosophy of knowledge, no matter whether ordinary (epistemology) or scientific (philosophy of science) requires an understanding of information — for instance in discussions of sensory perception and knowledge acquisition. There is no ethics without choices, responsibilities, and moral evaluations, all of which need a lot of relevant and reliable information and quite a good management of it. Logic was first a matter of the study of arguments, and then of mathematical proofs, but today it is also if not mainly a question of information extraction, transmission, and dynamics, and some branches of logic are really branches of information theory. Ontology, the Read More ›

A friend draws attention to an old paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics vs. Evolution” (The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 Number 2 February 1980) by R. W. Hamming: If you recall that modern science is only about 400 years old, and that there have been from 3 to 5 generations per century, then there have been at most 20 generations since Newton and Galileo. If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of Read More ›

Early human cannibalism is definitely in the news these days. It’s becoming clear that Stone Age people were not just animals and that even cannibalism was probably mostly about concepts like power and love and so forth. W are still looking for the mere brute in human form. From Malcolm Ritter at Yahoo: Neanderthals and prehistoric members of our own species occasionally practiced cannibalism and explaining that is a scientific challenge. Generally, it has been attributed to factors like starvation, violence between groups or ceremonial practices following a death. Now a new study suggests they were probably not hunting each other just for food. That’s because “we are not very nutritious, on a calorie level,” compared to large game animals, Read More ›

From Diana Kwon at The Scientist: While analyzing genetic material found in a wastewater treatment plant, scientists uncovered the genomes of four new species of related giant viruses. These newly discovered specimens, dubbed Klosneuviruses, challenge the notion that giant viruses evolved from a fourth domain of life, researchers wrote in a study published today (April 6) in Science. … Some scientists believe that rather than having a common ancestor, these giant viruses began as small viruses and gradually accumulated host genes over time. Analysis of the Klosneuvirus genome reveals evidence supporting the latter theory, according to the authors of the present study. More. These viruses have up to 1.57 million base pairs, with many genes encoded for components of translation Read More ›