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 Read More…
Month: June 2017
Does chaos make a multiverse unnecessary?
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, Read More…
Human memory for sequence stimulus unique?
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 Read More…
Researchers: Thousands of genes influence disease
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 Read More…
Is the search for a perfect physics theory a waste of time?
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 Read More…
Yes, classification of bacteria IS a mess
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 Read More…
But is origin of life research, in its present state, a science?
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 Read More…
Another Bad Day for Darwinism
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 Read More…
Cats prove the reality of the human mind
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 Read More…
Rob Sheldon: The skinny on those ten new exoplanets
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 Read More…
DNA replication film undermines textbooks
From BEC Crew at ScienceAlert: Here’s proof of how far we’ve come in science – in a world-first, researchers have recorded up-close footage of a single DNA molecule replicating itself, and it’s raising questions about how we assumed the process played out. The real-time footage has revealed that this fundamental part of life incorporates an Read More…
Haldane’s Dilemma is still really a dilemma
Despite decades of public relations. From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: Haldane, one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of mathematical population genetics, was the first to quantify such a limit on the speed of adaptive evolution. He concluded that the cost of selection “defines one of the factors, perhaps the Read More…
Accredited Times offers the scoop on Jon Wells and zombie science
Start your day with fun and the rest will be easier. From possible joke site, regarding Jonathan Wells and his new book Zombie Science, this item: We hope this makes it clear that there is no room in objective reality science for nutjobs, like Jonathan Wells, who refuse to March for Science. Bill Nye is Read More…
New model backs “controversial” evolution idea
From Andrew Masterson at Cosmos: In 1972 the eminent palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge proposed an idea about the way evolution worked and, in so doing, sparked a fight of almighty proportions. No, it was not really an “almighty” row. It was a vulgar, vicious row between tenured Darwinists and an Read More…
Solving Engineering Problems Using Theology
I thought that some of you might be interested in a talk I gave for a local software developer meetup on how theology can aid in building successful software products.