Monthly Archives: June 2017
Breaking, breaking NASA has not found ET
| June 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
From Mike Wall at Space.com: NASA is not preparing to drop an alien-life bombshell, despite what you may have heard. Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube suggesting that the space agency is about to announce the discovery of life beyond Earth. The video has made a big splash online — […]
The universe may be “conscious?”
| June 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Mind |
From Philip Perry at BigThink: What consciousness is and where it emanates from has stymied great minds in societies across the globe since the dawn of speculation. In today’s world, it’s a realm tackled more and more by physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. There are a few prevailing theories. The first is materialism. This is […]
Yes, teach evolution—but cut out the nonsense
| June 26, 2017 | Posted by News under science education |
From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Color us just a bit skeptical about news reports that Turkey will eliminate evolution from its official 9th grade curriculum. If true, though, it is of course a terrible idea. … News like this filtered through the Western media can’t necessarily be taken at face value. That […]
Fish invaded land suddenly, not slowly
| June 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution |
From ScienceDaily: Their findings have just been published in the research journal Nature. “It forces a radical rethink of what evolution was capable of among the first tetrapods,” said project lead Jason Anderson, a paleontologist and Professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM). Before this study, ancient tetrapods — the ancestors […]
Richard Dawkins: Religious ed is a key school subject
| June 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Education, Intelligent Design, Religion |
Bad news for Separation of Church and State lawyers. From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Despite his criticism of intelligent design and creationism, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told people at a science festival this past the weekend that he believes religious education is a key subject for schoolchildren. Dawkins, who is open about his atheism, said […]
Why are so many Americans young Earth creationists?
| June 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Religion, You're a Nazi/fascist/racist/fundy/creationist etc |
Asks BioLogos’s Jim Stump at at Christian Today, sneering: But after this initial good news, what strikes many people in the UK and elsewhere in the world is that there are still almost 40 per cent of Americans who are young earth creationists, holding beliefs that are contradicted by the overwhelming majority of scientists (in a […]
Aw, come out of the closet, prof
| June 25, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
ID is not absurd, unless, of course, thinking is absurd From Raymond Bergner at Academia: Let me say from the outset that this is not an essay arguing for intelligent design. Rather, it is a protest against a certain attitude. Everywhere I turn today, I hear voices, with varying degrees of smugness and contempt, telling […]
Do giant viruses obviate many claims about genetics?
| June 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics |
From ScienceDaily: as their name suggests, giant viruses are larger than many bacterial and eukaryotic cells. They were first discovered in 2003, and the true breadth of their diversity remains unknown. In a study led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science user facility, […]
Forrest Mims: Skepticism now gone from science
| June 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Climate change, Intelligent Design, Science |
At at Watt’s Up with That: Traditional science required a skeptical view of one’s own findings until they could be replicated, especially by others. Unfortunately, skepticism has been deleted from the latest edition of “On Being a Scientist,” a widely-read booklet published by the National Academies of Science. When I asked the NAS about this […]
Will the most mysterious amphibian force a rethink?
| June 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Researchers have determined that the fossils of an extinct species from the Triassic Period are the long-missing link that connects Kermit the Frog’s amphibian brethren to wormlike creatures with a backbone and two rows of sharp teeth. Named Chinlestegophis jenkinsi, the newfound fossil is the oldest relative of the most mysterious group of […]
The alleged story of music
| June 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Music must first be defined and distinguished from speech, and from animal and bird cries. We discuss the stages of hominid anatomy that permit music to be perceived and created, with the likelihood of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens both being capable. The earlier hominid ability to emit sounds of variable pitch […]
Does chaos make a multiverse unnecessary?
| June 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
From Noson F. Yanofsky at Nautilus: The universe is so structured and orderly that we compare it to the most complicated and exact contraptions of the age. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the universe was compared to a perfectly working clock or watch. Philosophers then discussed the Watchmaker. In the 20th and 21st centuries, […]
Human memory for sequence stimulus unique?
| June 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Human evolution, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Humans possess many cognitive abilities not seen in other animals, such as a full-blown language capacity as well as reasoning and planning abilities. Despite these differences, however, it has been difficult to identify specific mental capacities that distinguish humans from other animals. Researchers have now discovered that humans have a much better memory […]
Researchers: Thousands of genes influence disease
| June 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A core assumption in the study of disease-causing genes has been that they are clustered in molecular pathways directly connected to the disease. But work by a group of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests otherwise. The gene activity of cells is so broadly networked that virtually any gene can […]
Is the search for a perfect physics theory a waste of time?
| June 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
Peter Woit discusses the question at Physics World (May 2017), considering a new book by Frank Close, Theories of Everything: Ideas in Profile: The great success of the Standard Model has left particle physicists in a difficult position; with not just the Higgs, but all other results from the LHC and other particle-physics experiments so […]
Yes, classification of bacteria IS a mess
| June 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, speciation |
A sponsored and funded mess, due to the Darwinian obsession with speciation. From ScienceDaily: New research from Dartmouth College raises questions over how scientists should interpret observed groupings of bacteria. The study advises caution with the assumption that bacterial clusters are always a result of ecological and genetic forces. The research, appearing in the Proceedings […]
But is origin of life research, in its present state, a science?
| June 22, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: Nearly all researchers recognize that the first cell could not have come about by chance. They instead believe that some physical processes helped to beat the odds. As an analogy, one could never role one thousand sixes in a row with fair dice. However, if the dice […]
Another Bad Day for Darwinism
| June 21, 2017 | Posted by PaV under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
One mutation at a time. No need for simultaneous mutations (since the mathematics verges on impossibility). But, maybe, by gosh, we do need those “simultaneous mutations.” Here’s the abstract from Nature of an article where MCT (micro-computed tomography) reveals the ‘innards’ of a primary fossil. Just read it, and you’ll get the notion of how […]
Cats prove the reality of the human mind
| June 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic: Sometime around the invention of agriculture, the cats came crawling. It was mice and rats, probably, that attracted the wild felines. The rats came because of stores of grain, made possible by human agriculture. And so cats and humans began their millennia-long coexistence. This relationship has been good for […]
Rob Sheldon: The skinny on those ten new exoplanets
| June 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
As in: NASA said Monday it has found new evidence of 219 planets outside our Solar System. Ten of those exoplanets appear to be similar to the size of the Earth and orbit their stars in the habitable zone. From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon The Kepler telescope had a glitch in 2013 that […]
