From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon: — a) Classical information is local. It is like beans in a bag, one, say, for each bushel of wheat. They are not connected to each other, each is independent of the other. b) Quantum information is non-local. It depends on the orientation of the other beans. It is like beads on an abacus, or digits “in the 100’s column” that count differently than digits “in the one’s column”. The information in (a) is calculated by combinations. The information in (b) is calculated with permutations. If I have 3 identical beans, then the number of combinations is 0, 1, 2, 3, so it represents 2 “bits” of base-2 information. But if the positions Read More ›

Evolution is a Fact!  Depending on what one means by “evolution,” of course it is.  There are no living dinosaurs.  This leads to the indisputable conclusion that the earth’s biosphere has “evolved” from a place where dinosaurs were common to a place where dinosaurs exist not at all.  “Evolution” in this sense is an indisputable fact. Materialists shamelessly trade on an equivocation between the “fact” of evolution in this sense and the “fact” of a materialist account of evolution.  There are no dinosaurs.  Therefore, the competence of blind, unguided mechanical forces to transform the biosphere from a place where dinosaurs were common to a place where dinosaurs exist not at all is indisputably established.  Notice the linguistic flim flam employed Read More ›

From Paige Madison at Aeon: The assumption, then, was that death rituals were practised only by modern humans, or perhaps also by their very closest relatives. The possibility that primitive, small-brained Homo naledi could have engaged in the deliberate disposal of dead bodies not only challenges the timeline about when such behaviours appeared; it disrupts the whole conventional thinking about the distinction between modern humans and earlier species and, by extension, the distinction between us and the rest of nature. More. Actually, it does nothing of the kind. It suggests that the Naledi were able to think in an abstract way, but that fact casts doubt on the claimed importance of brain size as opposed to humanity. Death is a Read More ›

Further to “Why doesn’t anyone confront researchers about made-up claims about animal cognition?,” from Paul Rincon at BBC: Cambridge University researchers were able to train sheep to identify the faces of actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former US President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce. … After training, the sheep chose photos of familiar faces over unfamiliar ones significantly more often than not. It shows that sheep possess similar face recognition abilities to primates. More. How about this?: Sheep could learn to identify any human body part if they needed to. That doesn’t mean they understand what faces mean to humans. But much science writing about animal minds today seems to depend on maintaining just this type of Read More ›

Here’s the trailer for the new book, Theistic Evolution, with a foreword by sociologist Steve Fuller, who studies ID professionally. The Problem with Theistic Evolution from Crossway on Vimeo. Here’s the outline of chapters. Amazon is currently offering a 28% discount (November 30). Note: News posting will be light till this evening due to other deadlines. See also: Do claims about “front-loading” design make theistic evolution viable? An engineer offers some thoughts. and Physicist Lee Spetner weighs in on the Adam and Eve controversy Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. Keep your scorecard handy.

We wondered when Jerry Coyne, a longtime Darwin stalwart, would take time to diss J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, given that his disapproval is becoming a sort of imprimatur. We hope he can still do this sort of thing emeritus forever: Well, no, we don’t have a well-supported Darwinian explanation for the origin of life, but we do have Darwinian explanations that good people are working on (see Nick Lane, Addy Prosser, Gerald Joyce, Jack Szostak et al.), so the claim that there are “no Darwinian explanations for the origin of life (or of the gene)” are simply false. And our lack of understanding, which is due Read More ›

EugeneS made this simple request in the thread about Random Variation: I also have a couple of very concrete and probably very simple questions regarding the bioinformatics algorithms and software you are using. Could you write a post on the bioinformatics basics, the metrics and a little more detail about how you produced those graphs, for the benefit of the general audience? That’s a very reasonable request, and so I am trying here to address it. So, this OP is mainly intended as a reference, and not necessarily for discussion. However, I will be happy, of course, to answer any further requests for clarifications or details, or any criticism or debate. My first clarification is that I work on proteins Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Backreaction: I was elated when I saw that Gian Francesco Giudice announced the “Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era,” as the title of his recent paper promises. The craze in particle physics, I thought, might finally come to an end; data brought reason back to Earth after all. … I believe what is needed for progress in the foundations of physics is more mathematical rigor. Obsessing about ill-defined criteria like naturalness that don’t even make good working hypotheses isn’t helpful. And it would serve particle physicists well to identify their previous mistakes in order to avoid repeating them. I dearly hope they will not just replace one beauty-criterion by another. Giudice on the other hand Read More ›

Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. It was sparked by British geneticist Richard Buggs pointing out in a journal that, strictly speaking, one fertile human pair could survive a bottleneck (Adam and Eve more or less, fig leaves optional). At first, he didn’t get mail. Then he got mail. Yesterday, we reported that Buggs (the Yes guy) was asking geneticist Dennis Venema (the big No guy) to provide sources for some claims. Over to Venema. Meanwhile, physicist Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, writes to say that adaptability is built into organisms by transposable elements and thus assumptions Read More ›

From Robert Arvay at American Thinker: Many scientists no longer regard us as having any special place. We are no longer regarded as having a spiritual dimension, but only a physical one. We are seen to be products of a cold, uncaring universe, indeed, not even a product, but only a mere byproduct, an accident, an unlikely outcome of events that had no plan, no purpose, no meaning. Indeed. Nearly 50% Americans now think humans are not special. The inevitable extension of this purely physical view of humanity is technological barbarism. If we are mere atoms, biological machines, then by what right can we expect to be treated as anything more than that? Indeed, there would be no rights at all, Read More ›

From Phys.org: Female swallowtail butterflies do something a lot of butterflies do to survive: they mimic wing patterns, shapes and colors of other species that are toxic to predators. Some – but not all – swallowtail species have evolved several different forms of this trait. But what kind of genetic changes led to these various disguises, and why would some species maintain an undisguised form when mimicry provides an obvious evolutionary advantage? In a new study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists from the University of Chicago analyze genetic data from a group of swallowtail species to find out when and how mimicry first evolved, and what has been driving those changes since then. It’s a story that started around Read More ›

The last round was Adam, Eve, Richard Buggs, and Dennis Venema: Could Adam and Eve have existed?, where Dennis Venema (no) replied to Richard Buggs (yes). Now, Richard Buggs replies, Now to look in more detail at the points you raise about allelic diversity. This is where I think your argument is strongest, so I would like to examine it in some detail. To do this full justice, I want to start with what you say about this in your book chapter. One of your most explicit statements about this in your book chapter is as follows: …scientists have many other methods at their disposal to measure just how large our population has been over time. One simple way is Read More ›

Closing our scheduled religion coverage for the week, we note, re Reason to Hope: We regret to advise that the 2018 Global Atheist Convention, Reason to Hope , has been cancelled. If you are a ticket holder, you are entitled to a refund (including fees) and we will be in touch with you directly. More. Apparently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali pulled out. Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie were expected, as were other atheist luminaries. The cited reason was poor ticket sales. Poor ticket sales don’t just happen. Is it possible that the public is losing interest in “bad boy” atheism, whether it is represented by profane Darwinian bloggers or high class hatemongers (religion as a “virus of the mind,” etc.)? Apart from professional obligations, Read More ›

Here is a piece I (O’Leary for News) wrote for the first edition of Salvo (2006). Interesting to see how it has held up after more than a decade has past. – 0 – About three years ago, I predicted that the intelligent design controversy would explode in a few years, with every instapundit punding away furiously — some thoughtful, some foolish, some merely malign. The latter mood was expressed beautifully by a board member of Kansas Citizens for [promoting materialism in] Science, who summarized her public relations strategy against intelligent design advocates in February 2005 as follows: She advised her troops to portray them “’in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled Read More ›

From Philip Ball at New Scientist: The idea that we create reality seems absurd. But an audacious new take on quantum theory suggests the fundamental laws of nature emerge from our own experiences That woo-woo has been around forever, or at least since the last remnants of the Stone Age. It was one of the things people had to fight, to get science off the ground. Now some are contemplating a mind-boggling alternative: that a coherent description of reality, with all its quantum quirks, can arise from nothing more than random subjective experiences. It looks like the “perspective of a madman”, says the author of this bold new theory, because it compels us to abandon any notion of fundamental physical Read More ›