Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Rob Sheldon on the battle underlying “junk DNA”

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on junk DNA, the claim that most of the human genome does nothing (often an argument for explicitly Darwinian evolution): a) Chance is the truly unfalsifiable hypothesis, because all it gives you is a number. 1:10, 1:10^500 are all the same as far as the Darwinist is concerned. Even Dembski’s “1:10^150” possibility bound is not a limit to them. So everything I say about designers has to be seen against that light. Of course, in the Darwinist’s defense, they don’t really get probability and logarithms. b) A designer is recognized by a pattern. Writing experts can isolate a piece of scribal work to within 50 years by looking at the style. Read More ›

Flawed method may lead to mistakes in archaeology, forensics

How do we think we know that a skeleton is the remains of a woman who has given birth? From ScienceDaily: The presence of parturition scars — marks often found on female pelvis bones — have commonly been used as an indicator of child birth. This technique is used in police investigations to narrow down the identity of human remains. … Ms McFadden also said that use of the method in archaeology could lead to historical inaccuracies. Despite the practise being in common use, particularly in the US, since first being proposed in the 1910s, a number of studies into parturition scars have resulted in conflicting findings. Ms McFadden reanalysed data used for those studies and found the scarring was Read More ›

Science as activism, also known as bad science: Herbicide division

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0, on how a garden product got labeled, evidence-free, as a cancer risk (carcinogens): When I give talks in front of audiences about science, I often joke about conspiracy beliefs promoted by anti-science groups like Center for Biological Diversity about the science and health community. In reality, we are not helping each other, much less conspiring with each other for the benefit of industry, we are instead a loose confederation of pro-science anarchists. The really organized long game is played by environmental groups; they truly help each other. And they ask to be rewarded by getting jobs as government insiders. Count the employees from Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups who got jobs in Read More ›

Evergreen biology prof Bret Weinstein’s shocking testimony at You Tube:

Here is his report. If his testimony is accurate (and we expect it is), American taxpayers are funding the equivalent of a prison riot: No wonder Weinstein is suing. So where are the science organizations that should be supporting him? Communing with their shoes? Added: Note: Crash course for sci nerds: How political correctness morphed into a monster. Don’t look at me. Look at yourselves. You let this happen. Take note that the new approach to intellectual freedom does not permit anyone to just mind their own business. Even silence can be violence. Bari Weiss quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the Wall Street Journal: “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or Read More ›

Could the brain’s “time travel” have led to speech?

From Alun Anderson at New Scientist, reviewing The Truth about Language: The Truth about Language What it Is and Where it Came from: During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years. In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such “miraculist” explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated. … When Read More ›

Alan Sokal, buy yourself a latte: “Star Wars” biology paper accepted

Physicist Sokal perpetrated the first hoax paper over two decades ago, to prove a point. From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: Mitochondria: totally real cell organelles that convert sugars, fats and oxygen into usable energy for cells. Midi-chlorians: completely made-up and widely derided microscopic life-forms that give Jedi warriors their ability to use the Force in the “Star Wars” movies. See the difference? A handful of “peer reviewers” apparently didn’t, as a paper that subbed in “midi-chlorians” for “mitochondria” got accepted into four journals this week. The paper mashed up lightly altered text from Wikipedia on mitochondria with Star Wars-related rambling, including the infamous monologue on the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise from “Revenge of the Sith.” The paper was Read More ›

Prebiotic metabolic pathways, another naturalistic hypothesis of the origin of life

Guest post by Evgeny Selensky: An interesting summary of an abiogenetic hypothesis of prebiotic metabolic networks can be found here. The bottom line is, it is interesting but it raises many serious questions. The hypothesis is based on the observed similarity of the core structure of metabolic networks across all organisms. It is then hypothesised that the core must have had an early evolutionary origin. As is expected of a naturalistic hypothesis, it relies on extremely favourable starting conditions (the lucky concentrations of all necessary reagents in an Archean ocean, the right temperature, etc.) and other physico-chemical constraints, which, according to its proponents, helped form a prebiotic metabolic complex. The summary makes a correct distinction between thermodynamically controlled reactions and Read More ›

Free excerpt from Austin Ruse’s Fake Science

From Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data: There is no scare quite like a good food scare; no scam quite like a food scam. People are downright obsessional about what they put in their mouths. California now requires the labeling of more than six hundred chemicals that you might meet in your food. The creation of true miracle foods by genuine scientists has been met with leftist hysteria, scientific fraud, threats, and lawsuits. For example, as we’ll see, a new strain of rice that could save hundreds of thousands of children from blindness has never gone to market. We look at this disaster in chapter seven. More. The war on evidence that Ruse addresses is widespread, Read More ›

Dawkins haunted by the ghost of (ulp!) Ben Stein

Oh, look, everybody’s got a haunt, right? But they are not equally damning. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: On the story about evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins getting disinvited as an event speaker by a progressive Berkeley radio station (see here and here), Discovery Institute chairman of the board Bruce Chapman points out the best irony. While Dawkins protests his “de-platforming” over past comments on Islam, in 2009 he helped get Ben Stein de-platformed as a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont over — you guessed it — Stein’s take on evolution and his role in the film Expelled. More. Of course. Dawkins thought he would be eaten last on the progressive menu but he was really Read More ›

Lee Spetner on evolution and information

From Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution at True Origin: Many years ago I published a paper that pointed out that the evolutionary process can be characterized as a transmission of information from the environment to the genome (Spetner 1964). Somewhat later I wrote that there is no known random mutation that adds information to the genome (Spetner 1997). This statement in one form or another has found its way into the debate on evolution versus creation. Evolutionists have distorted the statement to attack it, as in Claim CB102, where Isaak has written his target for attack as, ‘Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.’ Perhaps something like this statement Read More ›

How plant architectures mimic subway networks

From ScienceDaily: Using 3D laser scans of growing plants, Salk scientists found that the same universal design principles that humans use to engineer networks like subways also guide the shapes of plant branching architectures. The work, which appears in the July 26, 2017, issue of Cell Systems, could help direct strategies to increase crop yields or breed plants better adapted to climate change. Well, that sure beats doomsaying, fascism, and war. Engineered transportation networks, whether for moving people or power, need to balance the cost of construction with providing efficient transport. Think of a subway system: If the main objective when designing it is to get people from the suburbs to downtown as quickly as possible, each suburb will have Read More ›

Does promiscuity speed evolution? Not for birds, says researcher

From Stuart Rigby at The Conversation, commenting on a recent study: Measuring sexual selection… So, does this then mean that sexual selection does not in fact drive speciation? Not necessarily. In general, sexual selection is stronger when some individuals in a species are better than others at attracting mates and having lots of offspring. To measure this directly, you need to know how many mates and offspring everyone has, which – as you might imagine – is not easy data to gather, especially in the wild. Studies such as this new one use proxy measures, such as the degree of promiscuity, while other use male testes size, or sex differences in body size, to infer differences in the strength of Read More ›

Academic freedom: Evergreen biologist files suit

From Nikita Vladimirov at Campus Reform: Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen State College [biology] professor who was driven from campus by a mob of students earlier this year, is preparing to file a $3.8 million claim against the public institution. The claim accuses Evergreen State of “fostering a racially hostile work and retaliatory environment” by encouraging the student protests that forced Weinstein to flee campus for his own safety. The students were upset with Weinstein for objecting to a “Day of Absence” event that called for white students and faculty to leave campus for a day of diversity programming.More. Good for him! No more Mr. Nice Scientist. One can’t teach and run for cover at the same time. If campuses really Read More ›

Shock!: Children imitate in different ways from bonobos

From ScienceDaily: In the study, the researchers showed children and bonobos a small wooden box with a reward inside. Before opening the box, an experimenter performed some nonsensical actions over the box, such as waving a hand or tracing an imaginary line over it. Each participant was then given a box without any instructions. Most of the children spontaneously imitated the actions; in contrast, none of the bonobos made any attempt to copy any of the actions. “The fact that the bonobos failed to imitate demonstrates that even enhanced social orientation may not be enough to trigger human-like cultural learning behaviors,” notes Claudio Tennie, research group leader at the University of Tubingen, who coauthored the study when he was at Read More ›

An Earth sciences outsider, not a recognized expert, put Pangaea together

The critical problem is that rejection of competing ideas is not necessarily based on the correctness of the mainstream idea. Often, it is based on control of money, status, and power, rampant egos, and endless politics. This animated short tells the story of Alfred Wegener, a German astronomer and atmospheric scientist, who came up with the idea that continents once formed a single landmass and had drifted apart. Continental drift explained why continents’ shapes fit together like pieces of a puzzle and why distant continents had the same fossils . During Wegener’s time, the idea was met with hostility but after his death a large body of evidence showed that continents do indeed move. Today the theory of plate tectonics Read More ›