Nylon has only been around for about 40 years. Did the bacteria just happen to evolve their eating habits during that period or is the story more complex? Is design a better explanation? You can comment on the story here at UD (though not at ENV). From Ann Gauger of the BioLogic Institute at Evolution News & Views: A significant problem for the neo-Darwinian story is the origin of new biological information. Clearly, information has increased over the course of life’s history — new life forms appeared, requiring new genes, proteins, and other functional information. The question is — how did it happen? This is the central question concerning the origin of living things. Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe have Read More ›

Over half a billion years earlier than dates usually given. From ScienceDaily: The researchers studied exceptionally well-preserved deposits which are approximately 3.5 billion years old in the ancient Dresser Formation in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia. They interpreted the deposits were formed on land, not in the ocean, by identifying the presence of geyserite – a mineral deposit formed from near boiling-temperature, silica-rich, fluids that is only found in a terrestrial hot spring environment. Previously, the oldest known geyserite had been identified from rocks about 400 million years old. Within the Pilbara hotspring deposits, the researchers also discovered stromatolites – layered rock structures created by communities of ancient microbes. And there were other signs of early life in the Read More ›

A reader offers an interesting quote from Denis Noble´s recent book on Karl Popper´s view of Darwinism ( Dance to the Tune of Life – Biological Relativity, page 199): It is not widely known that Popper gave an important lecture to the Royal Society in 1986 entitled “A new interpretation of Darwinism”. It was given on the presence of Nobel laureates Sir Peter Medawar, Max Perutz and other figures, and it must have shocked his audience. He proposed a completely radical interpretation of Neo-Darwinism, essentially rejecting the Modern Synthesis by proposing that organisms themselves are the source of the creative processes of evolution, not random mutations in DNA. He said that Darwinism (but I am sure he meant Neo-Darwinism) was Read More ›

Meet the unassuming armadillidiidae, more commonly known as the rolly pollie.  When it is not feeling threatened, a rolly pollie looks like this: But if it senses a threat, its defense mechanism is to roll up in a tight hard-shelled ball like this: Yesterday Larry Moran reminded me of the rolly pollie.  “Why is that Barry?” you might ask.  Good question.  You see, over at his blog Sandwalk, Moran often plays a version of smash mouth debate not just with us ID types (whom, like a second grader on the playground, he calls “IDiots”), but also with evolutionists with whom he disagrees.  Moran advocates neutral theory, and he will have no truck with inveterate adaptationists.  Richard Dawkins is an adaptationist, Read More ›

For the last year or so I have been accumulating quite a number of YouTube playlists. Recently I’ve been trying to get it a little more organised and cleaned up, so I thought I would point readers to it as a resource. At the moment I have just under 40 individual playlists. I have created playlists for the key individuals in the ID debate (pro and anti-ID) and also have playlists for different issues that come up (e.g. Irreducible complexity, methodological naturalism etc). There’s also one covering the Dover trial, and any lectures and debates on the subject. For any other videos that don’t readily fit into other categories, I have a playlist of miscellaneous videos: ID YouTube Playlists I’ll Read More ›

He writes, “Information is Physical (but not how Rolf Landauer meant)” and offers the documentary evidence supporting the embedded vid below here. Comments are disabled there, so you will have to comment here. See also: Information: New light on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox? Researchers: If we treat these two particles as described by a single quantum state, we learn that the original uncertainty principle ceases to apply, especially if these particles are entangled. and Book: Computer simulations yield very minor results for Darwinian evolution

From Phys.org: A group of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has shed new light on the famous paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen after 80 years. They created a multidimensional entangled state of a single photon and a trillion hot rubidium atoms, and stored this hybrid entanglement in the laboratory for several microseconds. The research has been published in Optica. In their famous Physical Review article, published in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen considered the decay of a particle into two products. In their thought experiment, two products of decay were projected in exactly opposite directions—or more scientifically speaking, their momenta were anti-correlated. Though not be a mystery within the framework of classical physics, Read More ›

From Denyse O`Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: This year’s March for Science offered some sobering revelations for the future of science as identity politics. One was figurehead Bill Nye. During the aftermath of the March, videos surfaced that won’t likely help his reputation: My Sex Junk and another one in which ice cream cones discover sex. Detractors wondered if he wasn’t now the ”Pee Wee Herman of popular science.” Meanwhile, Nye was also quoted as wanting to shrink science classrooms: “Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?” and also as being open to jailing skeptics of climate change. But the key complaint about Nye that made news during the pre-March publicity Read More ›

From psychology prof Tania Lombrozo at NPR: Skepticism is supposed to reflect a willingness to question and doubt — a key characteristic of scientific thinking. Skepticism encourages us to look at the evidence critically; it allows for the possibility that we are wrong. It seems like a win, then, to learn that courses in skepticism can decrease belief in the paranormal or — as reported in an article forthcoming in Science & Education — that teaching students to think critically about history can decrease belief in pseudoscience and other unwarranted claims. But taken too far, skepticism misses its mark. It’s important to avoid the error of believing something we ought not to believe, but it’s also important to avoid the Read More ›

Yesterday UD News reported on Kevin Laland’s comments about the controversies currently roiling in the materialist evolutionist community.  See The Royal Society Meeting: Keeping the lid on for now.  Larry Moran, prominent professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto and inveterate defender of materialist evolution, dropped by and commented: The problem with Kevin Laland and his colleagues is not that there’s no debate … it’s that there IS a furious debate and they’ve missed it entirely. The real ongoing debate is between adaptationists and those pluralists who accept Neutral Theory and the importance of random genetic drift. Dr. Moran is certainly correct.  There is a furious debate between old-school “adaptationists” and those, like Moran, who reject the “gene-centric neo-darwinist Read More ›

From evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum at the New York Times: Are These Birds Too Sexy to Survive? Natural selection can’t explain this. Wow. Careers have been wrecked over such departures from dogma. Most biologists believe that these mechanisms always work in concert — that sex appeal is the sign of an objectively better mate, one with better genes or in better condition. But the wing songs of the club-winged manakin provide new insights that contradict this conventional wisdom. Instead of ensuring that organisms are on an inexorable path to self-improvement, mate choice can drive a species into what I call maladaptive decadence — a decline in survival and fecundity of the entire species. It may even lead to extinction. Read More ›

But admitting that the pot is boiling. From Kevin Laland in Trends in Ecology & Evolution: November 7–9, 2016 witnessed a joint discussion meeting of the Royal Society and the British Academy (the UK national academies for the sciences and social sciences, respectively) entitled ‘New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives’. The meeting, anticipated with a mix of feverish enthusiasm and dread, sold out months in advance, the eager audience perhaps expecting radical and traditional evolutionists to go toe to toe, rather than the constructive dialogue among biologists, social scientists, and researchers in the humanities that the academies advertised. One issue under discussion was whether or not the explanatory core of evolutionary biology requires updating in Read More ›

From an interview by Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, with archaeologist Ian Hodder, at HuffPost: Suzan Mazur: Templeton is known for its pairing of religion and science, inserting the divine in science. … I’m asking this because Templeton has come under fire for putting its fingers all over science from the investigation of the origin and evolution of life to space science. It’s perceived that the foundation is compromising the work of scientists and retarding science. Maurice Bloch, one of your own Çatal book authors has said pursuing a religion angle at Çatal is “a misleading wild goose chase” because humans only thought up religion 5,000 years ago at the earliest. Bloch says humans largely live in their reflective Read More ›

Open access here: … we have constrained the depositional age of Homo naledi to a period between 236 ka and 335 ka. A friend offers: “This means is that predictions of a 2-3 million year old age for Homo naledi were just plain wrong. They wanted it to be that age for evolutionary reasons, but the true age of the fossil is about 10 times younger.” (Face facts. Mother nature is a bitch.) From Mpho Raborife News24: “After the description of the new species in 2015, experts had predicted that the fossils should be around the age of these other primitive species. Instead, the fossils… are barely more than one-tenth that age,” Berger said. … Researchers and scientists had previously Read More ›

In my last post I pointed to Walter Meyers’ destruction of Barbara Forest’s three-step argument from (1) the success of science to (2) the superiority of methodological naturalism as a way of knowing about the physical world to (3) the superiority of metaphysical naturalism generally. To which Bob O’H responded: Weird. I find Myers’ argument really weak – it’s simply an argument from ignorance. What makes it weird is that Forrest’s argument is inductive, so there are better ways of constructing a counter-argument. Even weirder, Forrest’s argument for why methodological naturalism isn’t compatible with supernaturalism seems really weak: essentially she suggests that one would need more than one methodology and epistemology, and these should be compatible with each other. I Read More ›