At his blog: Recently I was interviewed by Matt Fradd for his Pints with Aquinas podcast. We talk a bit about Five Proofs of the Existence of God, but our main topic is Richard Dawkins’s critique of Aquinas’s Five Ways in The God Delusion. We work through each of the objections Dawkins raises and discuss where they go wrong. Matt is posting the interview in two parts, and the first part has now been posted. (podcast) If you think that anyone born after the invention of the Bomb must be smarter than the Angelic Doctor (Aquinas,1225–1274), fetch a mug and sit down and listen. Note: Aquinas points to ponder. See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down

From Ken Francis, journalism prof and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, via a road trip through the United States, New English Review: On the Reagan road trip, there are many fond memories beneath those soulful, Doo-wop skies over the vast desert plains off Route 66. Driving into the night, with the car window rolled down and the radio playing A Thousand Miles Away by the Heartbeats, the fragrance of the desert breeze was enough to induce slumber. What did a tiny spec of metal automobile, crawling slowly below on the desert floor, like a nocturnal lightning bug, look like from the night splendor of those starry constellations? A sky where the vastness of God’s Read More ›

Kirk Durston here: In a recent speech, former astronaut Julie Payette, now the Governor General of Canada, displayed her unquestioning belief that science alone is worthy of our total trust and mocked those who are “still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process!” … Contrary to her leap of faith that science has shown us how life began, real science has utterly failed to reproduce such an amazing feat. Maybe someday, highly intelligent scientists will figure out how to build a simple life form, which will underscore the need for intelligent design, but we have not reached that milestone yet, much less Read More ›

From Jeannie Kever at University of Houston: Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting. He acknowledges that language is required for some sophisticated forms of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. But bolstered by a review of previously published research, Buckner concludes that a wide variety of animals – elephants, chimpanzees, ravens and lions, among others – engage in rational decision-making. “These data suggest that not only do some animals have a subjective take on the suitability of Read More ›

Over at the The Skeptical Zone there’s a reference to a post from Larry Moran’s blogsite. The question of irreducible complexity is revisited, and, torn to shreds in the eyes of evolutionary thinkers. For them it seems sufficient to simply announce the “presence” of some needed ingredient of the putative IC system of proteins in order to debunk IC claims. For them, having identified certain portions of the needed complex somewhere else, and understanding this to be a part of the genetic tool box available to all because of common descent, is enough to make them feel they have satisfactorily undermined the latest attempt at identifying IC systems. That’s where the Ralph’s Supermarket comes in. Here’s what I mean: Let’s Read More ›

This isn’t an area where facts seem to matter much anyhow, at least not at universities. From geneticist Jenny Graves at Intellectual Takeout: In their new paper, the authors Gershoni and Pietrokovsk looked at how active the same genes are in men and women. They measured the RNA produced by 18,670 genes in 53 different tissues (45 common to both sexes) in 544 adult post mortem donors (357 men and 187 women). They found that about one third of these genes (more than 6,500) had very different activities in men and women. Some genes were active in men only or women only. Many genes were far more active in one sex or the other. A few of these genes showed Read More ›

From Rebekah Rubin at Smithsonian Magazine: In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that evolution made man “superior” to woman. For Darwin, that superiority largely played out in the intellectual and artistic realm. He wrote: “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music—comprising composition and performance, history science and philosophy … the two lists would not bear comparison.” Spencer echoed Darwin’s sentiments and went further, postulating that in order for the human race to flourish, women must devote their lives to reproduction. For the 44-year-old Blackwell, who had devoted her life to promoting women’s equality, Darwin and Spencer’s conclusions were unacceptable. By penning what would become the first published feminist critique Read More ›

Not in sub-Saharan Africa? Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species’ origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn’t evolve only in East Africa. … “Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a ‘Garden of Eden’ that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Now, “I would say the Garden of Eden in Africa is probably Africa — and it’s a big, big garden.” Hublin was one of the leaders of the decade-long excavation at the Moroccan site, called Jebel Irhoud. Ewen Callaway, Nature Read More ›

That’s structuralism, in part. Further to Evelyn Fox Keller’s comment that the landscape of biological thought is being “radically reconfigured,” a cancer geneticist writes to say that a tumor’s physical environment fuels its growth and causes treatment resistance: The forces of cancer In vitro experiments showing that cancer cells actively migrate in response to fluid flow have supported the hypothesis that fluid escaping from the boundary of a tumor may guide the invasive migration of cancer cells toward lymphatic or blood vessels, potentially encouraging metastasis. There remains controversy over how the fluid forces induce the migration; the cells may respond to chemical gradients created by the cells and distorted by the flowing fluid,8 or the fluid may activate cell mechanosensors. Read More ›

Dennis Venema replies to Buggs, insisting that Adam and Eve could not likely exist. Geneticist Richard Buggs thinks that they could have. Dennis VenemaFrom Venema at BioLogos: The key here is that one individual can only have at most two alleles of any gene. A population reduction to one breeding pair would mean that at most, four alleles of a given gene could pass through the bottleneck – in the case where both individuals are heterozygous, and heterozygous for different alleles. The population would then have to wait for new mutation events to produce new alleles of this gene – a process that will take a significant amount of time. Since this would happen to all genes in the genome at Read More ›

But she may have undermined the Liberal political party she obviously sympathizes with. Sorry for all the news from Canada but sometimes a smaller place can be a bellwether. Re “Canadian astronaut turned governor-general trashes all Canadians who doubt that life is a “random process,” Mark Bonokoski at The Toronto Sun: “Imagine if [former Prime Minister] Harper had appointed Julie Payette as Governor General, and she had spouted off the same speech in which she mocked religion and ridiculed the faith of believers?” Actually, Harper was never quite arrogant enough to do that. It’s a new development. And Payette is not just a feckless office-seeker spouting off and learning the hard way. She speaks in the name of the Queen. Read More ›

Good chance. While science boffins obsess about “creationism in the schools,” your local teachers’ union could be selling out to no-standards post-modernism. From Conrad Black at The National Post: In response to falling test results, teachers’ federation proposes ending testing The obfuscation of the teachers’ union publication continued: “Soon, a perceived crisis in Ontario education began to emerge when our students began scoring lower on mathematics standardized tests … First politicians placed the blame for these low test scores on educators.” What an outrageous act of scapegoating that was — what would deteriorating academic performance have to do with the quality and competence of teaching? “Money was poured into boosting the math proficiency of teachers … but the curriculum remained Read More ›

By way of bypassing the Big Bang, from Anu Padmanabhan at Nautilus: The key new ingredient we have introduced, which helps to bypass this technical difficulty, is the concept of cosmic information. The idea that information should play a key role in the description of physics has gained considerable support in recent times. This notion arises in several contexts when one attempts to combine the principles of quantum theory and gravity like, for example, in the study of quantum black holes. There is also the intriguing notion of holography in some of these models, which suggests that the information content in a bulk region can be related to the information content on its boundary. But, unfortunately, the mathematical description of Read More ›

Suzan Mazur reports in HuffPost: on Evelyn Fox Keller’s talk on genetics, factual and fictional, at the recent D’Arcy Thompson festival. From her transcript: Today we are in a new century, one in which the landscape of biological thought is once again being radically reconfigured. With the maturation of molecular biology, the genome has been transformed from the executive director of biological development or as Schrödinger put it—-an architect’s plan and builder’s plan—-to the immensely complex physical-chemical structures that seem to need no new laws of physics only a Herculean effort of sifting through the jungle of physical and chemical interactions responsible for what it can and cannot do. This explanation is itself largely the result of a turn from Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists theorized that they could manipulate a protein one mutation at a time and predict its evolution. They sought to prove it. And failed. They do think, however, that they’ve found a fundamental truth underlying unpredictability in a biological system. Basic physical limitations make uncertainty the norm, they reported in a paper published online Oct. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “While we got a surprising negative result, we were able to say why,” said Michael J. Harms, a professor in the UO Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and scientist in the Institute of Molecular Biology. “That is a positive. Our simple study provides confirmation of what many people in the field have observed Read More ›